UCSD sends admission e-mails to wrong applicants

You have no doubt heard those "Reply to All" horror stories. Well, check this out: Oops! UCSD Sends Acceptance E-mail to Wrong List

You know - I have a "rubbernecker" fascination of how this is all going to be handled, and I will update you as more information comes out.

Hey, I'm back, and I brought Leonard Pitts with me

Sorry to have been away longer than expected, folks - but I'm back, and I'm bad. Well, not really - I'm just back.

Anyway, to hit the ground running, I'd like to bring up an issue that Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. brought up about public education in D.C. and whether Barack Obama is going to send his daughters there. Pitts feels - as I do - that Obama should send his kids to a private school. He feels that way, and yet he laments that it's necessary. At the end of his column, he states:

"Too many of us, I think, have made peace with the idea that public schools don't work, have come to regard it as normal that they crank out poorly educated kids, have come to accept that certain children in certain places are ineducable. But I saw the falsity of that with my own eyes while traveling the country for ''What Works,'' saw some of the nation's best students in some of its most dire places.

The failure here, then, is not the students', but ours, a failure of will and imagination. We need to reassess the things we take for granted. We need to decide that our children deserve better.

And we need to ask a simple question: If public schools are not good enough for the president's kids, what makes us think they are good enough for ours?"

I was also surprised to see actual criticism of teachers' unions in his column. I have been critical of teachers' unions for years, and they are one of the reasons that I advocate tuition vouchers. Pitts does not state his views on the matter, but it seems to me that public schools and teachers' unions are not going to be motivated to change unless they have competition to gain and retain students.

You know what? If Obama truly intends to bring change, this would be a good start. Obama, start by changing the Dept. of Education and the teachers' unions. Get them to realize that they're part of the problem instead of part of the solution. Get them to realize that their obsession with protecting themselves and their power has damaged generations of kids. Obama, you could REALLY institute change by advocating tuition vouchers. I don't buy that argument that tuition vouchers violate the church/state separation wall, because the gov't had already had a form of a tuition voucher with the GI Bill, and our school system didn't go to hell in a handbasket, did it? In fact, it helped a lot of students. Like we could do now.

If Obama can manage to get this ball rolling, then I'll start believing that he's a miracle worker.

School enforces strict no-touching rule

In a move that shouldn't be surprising nowadays in our politically-correct and lawsuit-happy society, a middle school in Virginia has established a strict no-touching policy. Not even high-fives. How Orwellian, eh?

While the reasoning may certainly be understandable - the school wants to discourage both public expressions of affection as well as fighting - the application of that reasoning is rather draconian. However, it's easy to understand why school administrators would be pushed to such extreme measures, given that our society is so quick to sue over just about anything. What else can they do to cover their respective buttocks other than to make and enforce such obviously ridiculous policies?

The thing that this story represents is NOT a problem so much as it is a symptom of a larger problem, and that problem is our current legalistic scare tactics that has everyone from schools to the medical industry intimidated to virtually the point of paralysis over the possibility that someone with an axe to grind can put them through possibly years of legal and financial hell, and sometimes for the most frivolous of things. So rather than go through such legal and financial stress, it's easier to just give in - even if the result of that is a bunch of ridiculous rules.

Fixing this larger problem won't be easy, because things got the way they are over a period of many years, and it will take probably as long to correct. In the meantime, we're going to have more such ridiculous rules until such time that reason rules instead of the Mike Nifongs of the world. Sadly, it's probably going to take more Mike Nifongs to make the news before any serious change will occur. All the more reason why we have to be selective in who we vote for, folks! Remember this in 2008!