Josh Kaplowitz joined Teach for America to help others and was assigned to a D.C. public school where he had trouble controlling a class of second graders. One of them was especially rambunctious and demanded to go to the bathroom repeatedly. What happened next is not clear. The child said the teacher pushed him out of the room and to the floor; the teacher said he guided him out of the room. Kaplowitz was accused of assault. He was arrested, taken to a police station, detained overnight, fired, and sued for $20 million. The district eventually settled with the mother for $90,000. It was a nightmare for all involved.
A decade later, after he had gone to law school, married, had children, and was working for a law firm in D.C., Kaplowitz got a message on Facebook from the student who had accused him of assault. He was in college, playing football, and doing well. He wanted to meet Kaplowitz. Kaplowitz had to make a decision: to meet or not to meet?
What happens next is a fascinating story.
Truly, not a “feel good” story. Nice Kaplowitz can forgive the kid cuz he was, after all, a kid. Nice that the kid could turn his life around (no thanks to TFA). The mother is a turd. That’s plain. Now the angle is Kaplowitz and Ware can write a book. Daw. I won’t be reading.
I just love ‘good stories. I got one for you that follows in this comment, an fit is about a child who lied about a teacher!
So, let me be clear about what teachers are up against RIGHT NOW’.Here i show it is done in LA, and below it is what happened to me 16 years ago, when they perfected this process in NYC
http://citywatchla.com/8box-left/6666-lausd-and-utla-complicity-kills-collective-bargaining-and-civil-rights-for-la-s-teachers
“By merely ADDING A GRATUITOUS MORALS CHARGE under California Education Code (44939.odt), a teacher can even be stripped of their Collective Bargaining rights to grievance and arbitration. This war against teachers started in 2006 when present chief LAUSD attorney David Holmquist was director of the LAUSD Office of Risk Management and Insurance Services. With 2006 Retiree Health Actuarial info.pdf, it became open season on older high-seniority and better paid teachers who either suffer from good teaching or honesty in the face of endemic LAUSD/UTLA corruption.
“In the case of thousands of media-made-invisible LAUSD teachers who have been removed from their livelihood without honest cause, they are put through a series of pro forma meetings, where the results are predetermined and those representing LAUSD will admit that they have never even read the responses to the knowingly false charges being brought against you, since LAUSD’s sole motives are to get rid of teachers at the top of the salary, about to vest in lifetime health, or who are disabled.
“Furthermore, there will have been NO INVESTIGATION OTHER THAN TALKING TO THE PRINCIPAL who was encouraged by their superiors at LAUSD to bring the charges against you in the first place. The truth of charges is really never at issue, since your responses are never read and the finds of your “due process hearing” is written prior to the hearing.
“After an ersatz Skelly hearing that in no way respects the rights that the Skelly case is supposed to insure, your name is submitted to the LAUSD Board for termination as a teacher WITHOUT ANY PROOOF BEING OFFERED of the bogus and self-contradictory “evidence” being offered against you or even a minimal according of fundamental notions of due process of law.
“Richard J. Schwab, esq. of Trygstad, Schwab, and Trygstad put it best:
‘You have no civil rights, you’re chattel to LAUSD. ‘ ”
Now, how this process affected me, ( go to my author’s page and see what a celebrated educator I was at the time)
http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
Here is a GOOD’ STORY!
In 1998, a student said I cursed at her in front of the whole calls.
It was a lie, easily disproved by talking to the other kids, but the way the system was set up, they removed me from the classroom so they could trash my practice and my reputation. They gave away 1000 book library which I had purchased, threw out my data based research as a cohort for the Pew national standards research, and trashed all my curricula materials gathered during the 8 years since I wrote the entire curricula for th seventh grade, which brought Harvard to our school.
There was no investigation and finally, six months later, at a meeting, the superintendent incorrectly interpreting verbal abuse, wrote a letter, which said, that (according to her) I was ” found guilty of corporal punishment”.
MY attorney, corrected this impression by filing a 4 million dollar lawsuit, and quoting NY state education law about the physical nature of the law,, but her vendetta continued despite a warning to her and the DOE not to publish a word o the lies.. I would have waited 3 years for a hearing, while the child disappeared into high school. I let Randi arbitrate me into retirement, so I retained my meager pension and my health benefits… which they would have stripped me of.
I often think of this child and her powerful PTA president mother who was frightened that I would blow the whistle on her 13 year old daughter , who was the girl friend of the 8th grader who had been arrested for providing drugs to our kids.
While I was in the rubber room , this girl told everyone ( at the school that I had put on the map) that I had called her a f—ing, ‘slutty, dyslexic whore.” I know this only because every kid in the school had my email, and they ( and their parents) told me what she was saying… while I sat unaware and unable to defend myself. At the meeting, I was never told what the girl alleged, and when I asked, in shock, the Manhattan Bureay rep of my union told me to be quiet an do to ‘sit down!
That’s the process in the nation for teachers, so get used to it.
Allegations that can remove a teacher DO SO!, The sixth amendment process for a speedy justice which includes the right to see in evidence, and offering proof of innocence, does not exist…because this IS THE provenance of the union, which has abandoned its duty to fulfill the contract and collective bargaining which demands the grievance procedure!
I love feel good stories, BUT I AM A BIGGER fan OF TRUTH, AND THE TRUTH IS THAT IN LA, using THIS PROCESS they accused 10,000 teachers just sat hey were about to vest in health and pension, and POOF..they were all fired.
and read this which Robert Rendo sent me
This is what is happening, and if you do not see the writing on the wall…. look at this judicial decision.
R U LISTENING????/
The district eventually settled with the mother for $90,000. It was a nightmare for all involved.
Did TFA pay the fine? Out of Wendy Kopp’s (nearly) half million dollar salary?
Fat chance.
Perhaps (just perhaps) this is one reason why five weeks of “TFA summer camp” does not compare to traditional teacher training.
In the latter (especially during student teaching) you learn what is acceptable and what is unacceptable (and legal) behavior for a teacher as well as ways to deal with “unruly” kids and to avoid potentially volatile situations where you might be at risk from accusations (true or otherwise).
The whole idea that one can “prepare” a teacher in just five weeks is just absurd and I am quite frankly amazed that anyone with a brain would buy into it.
and what amazes me most are the people who buy into the crackpot studies that purport to “show” that TFA teachers are as prepared as traditional teachers for the classroom.
That was definitely a situation for a veteran teacher with experience with that particular type of student population and with strong disciplining skills.
Not for a beginning teacher – TFA or not.
There are a lot of situations similar to this in the Buffalo Public Schools – we also have a lot of new idealistic teachers deciding that teaching is not for them – after one day, one week, one month. Some even last one year (my daughter, who did not look back). It’s literally survival of the fittest. Only now, it’s not just the students that teachers have to deal with – it’s administrators and the government peaking over their shoulders (and pushing them out the door).
Raise your hand if you are eager to step up to this challenge?
Ellen T Klock
I don’t disagree with what you say, but I think a teacher who has had courses in child psychology, psychology of teaching and learning and classroom management — and a semester of student teaching is in a much better position to handle potentially volatile situations.
That’s not to say they are as likely to be as good as a veteran teacher, but I can’t imagine that 5 weeks could ever prepare a teacher the same way that a more traditional certification program would (which was over a year beyond the bachelors, including a full semester of student teaching with a veteran teacher in my case)
TFA is just an absurd idea from start to finish. It does not surprise me that it came out of the mind of a Dinning Krugerite (Wendy Kopp) who never taught and knew nothing at all about teaching when she wrote her Princeton senior thesis on TFA. It’s just goofy.
I agree, SomeDAM Poet.
Too bad there was so much faulty thinking (if they bothered to think at all) – The whole TFA idea would have been a godsend if the graduates were hired as teacher assistants to help the trained teachers in situations such as the above. The expectation that they should be tossed into difficult classrooms, like those in DC, borders on sadism.
In fact, even the Marquis De Sade would have cringed at this whole mess.
Ellen
make that “Dunning Krugerite”
Apologies
He should not have met with this student. I don’t blame TFA, though I disagree with everything it stands for. This is just another family seeing an opportunity to get money. It’s a shame. It’s not a happy story. Not something to celebrate. If the young man doesn’t take back his accusation, why contact the teacher? The whole thing is problematic. No no no.
I urge all viewers of this blog to click on the link provided in the posting. It’s a long article but worth careful reading.
One sentence—and I literally mean one sentence—jumped out at me:
“For a time, Teach for America used Kaplowitz’s story in their training program as an example of how a teacher can go wrong.”
This example of rheephorm word salad and cognitive dissonance rubs me the wrong way.
In the interests of facts, logic and simple decency, let me reword as:
[start] Those advocating for a “better education for all” can accurately and fairly use Kaplowitz’s story as a way to explain how the woefully inadequate training programs of Teach For America can go wrong and how Teach For America shirks its responsibilities for the consequences of its own failures as an organization by publicly shaming and blaming those they have improperly prepared. [end]
As per the ‘Rules of the Road’ on this blog, I am being very restrained in my choice of words.
Why not use an actual TFA celebrity like Michelle Rhee to shame, blame and avoid? For example, she frequently claimed to have taken “her” [forget that pesky co-teacher!] students from the 13th to the 90th percentile until she finally dropped the whole matter since this TFA-data driven decision maker couldn’t come up with the, er, hard data points to prove she wasn’t just making it up—even when she claimed it was her principal that told her, the principal has never ever confirmed that! And the fact that she was gleefully touting the educational equivalent of walking on water is a testament to a profound lack of good sense and mature judgment. [I leave out other examples of Rhee’s brief stint in the classroom for lack of space; easy to google.]
Beat up on Kaplowitz? Not use a much much better example like Rhee?
Now what is the ₵ent¢ in that for a top-heavy organization dedicated to providing temporary jobs for young adults on their way to their “real” careers?
Rheeally! One must approach these matters in the most Johnsonally sort of ways, or one will soon come to the realization that all is not well in TFA Land.
Because otherwise the push to make teaching a McJob might not look so appealing.
Really!
Just my dos centavitos worth…
😎
and much appreciated. I have been watching the bullpoop of disseminators of 16 years, and have seen the end of our profession. But nothing has affected me , like the things I am reading now in that city watch article, about the treatment of teachers like ’emplyees at will” with no rights o due process or fair treatment.
Why would anyone want to teach?
Krazy TA, not to dismiss your legitimate points about TFA’s signature hypocrisy, but this is as much a story about the level of behavior challenges that so many school in low income, underfunded districts, deal with. The article points out that Kaplowits was not the only teacher at the school overwhelmed by student behavior. While TFA serves mostly to dilute and undermine the teaching profession, no professional should have to navigate the degree of social and emotional challenges that manifest in classrooms, co-opting the academic agenda.
Sad to say:
Re: conditions referred to above
Been there, done that
Never want to do it again.
Ellen
Also, that behavior is created from the top. We had really difficult students when we had two out of sight, very scared principals. Then we got a strong, dedicated principal who clearly voiced his expectations, and who visited classes to see that the students were behaved and discipline problems went way down.
Parents like that scare me. I honestly advocate for cameras in the classroom and all areas of the school but the bathroom stalls. Film me please!
Titleonetexasteacher – I’ve worked in schools with cameras – they are also watching the teachers along with the students.
Jonathan: agreed.
I was simply pointing to what, more than anything else, jumped out at me.
Perhaps I am too jaded, although I think this thread is covering many important points. In any case, my focus came both from my own experiences in public schools and what I learned very early on about how most people deal with such issues as violence and bullying.
For example, from my teens and early 20s I well remember several young white teachers (male and female) that I knew who sought out assignments in some of the predominantly black high schools in Detroit. It’s not just students that had to worry about being attacked—I remember one of those teachers, a guy in his early 20s, who was full front on assaulted by a large male students in the school he worked in, during school hours, in front of everyone. Luckily, he was physically able enough to ward off the worst punches and kicks.
Understand: teachers being assaulted was a justified concern [based on experience] of ALL the teachers in the school, black or white, male or female. The response by school administrators and parents and others—too often it was…
Need I go on? The more things change, the more they stay the same. *Hint for you CCSS-closet readers: it has to do with hiding one’s head in the sand and pretending that nothing happened.*
And just to clear up any misunderstandings, real or feigned—once the immediate danger was past, what bothered these teachers I knew the most? That nothing was done to rectify the conditions that facilitated and encouraged such self-destructive violence. They felt especially bad that the very students that assaulted them were simply written off as, well, let’s just say at the time people didn’t describe them as Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s “uneducables” and Michael J. Petrilli’s “non-strivers.”
Yep, those ‘lazy LIFO unionized teachers’ were tremendously bothered—that their assailants were just being thrown out and cast aside, ensuring that in the not-too-distant future they would make their way to their own prison cell or, if they messed with the wrong people, much worse.
And when I refer to rectifying conditions, that includes being transparent and direct about addressing violence against staff and students.
In any case, this comment has gone on a bit too long, but I want to make clear—
Thank you very much for your comment.
😎
Violence in the public schools is definitely an issue. My, husband, while on hall duty in the morning, was picked up and thrown to the ground by a student who wanted to get past him and harass a girl in that Homeroom. Ultimately, the student was suspended for a while, then returned to the school.
Naughty, naughty. Mustn’t hurt the teachers willing to put up with your nonsense.
Ellen
What is your point? That a teacher who is feloniously assaulted by a student should have no recourse?
For the thirty years I was a public school teacher, I taught in a high school for 16 of those years and almost every year at least one gang banger would ask me what I’d do if I was jumped by one of the street gangs in my classroom or on campus—the high school where I taught was surrounded by a barrio with street gangs that went back generations. The poverty level in that community was probably about 80% or higher, and the street gang violence most of the children we worked with was brutal.
My answer was always the same: “I’d do my best to kill the one who reached me first before the others injured or killed me and I’d get as many of them as I could before I went down.”
The response was almost always the same, “You can’t do that to us.”
And I said, “Yes I can. That’s what the U.S. Marines trained me to do to any threat I faced, and if I lose my teaching job for killing one or more students who physically attacked me, at least I’d still be alive and they wouldn’t.”
Needless to say, no student ever tried.
Thank you for all your comments.
Schools were really not conceived or designed to deal with the kind of social and emotional issues that students from these poor districts are challenged with.
Real school reform would provide ideas and resources for meaningful solutions.
By contrast what Arnie Duncan, and his kind, have to offer is so utterly disconnected from the social, emotional and economic despair that actually exists… that….well…what can I say….ahhhhhh.
Jayden – my point is that violence against teachers happens all the time, especially in poor urban areas. And districts are limited in what they can (or are willing) to do to stop it, especially when the offending population is mainly minority (like in DC or Buffalo).
In my husband’s incident there was a formal hearing and the police were called, but the upshot was that the child was reprimanded, formally suspended, and then returned to the school. Not an uncommon occurrence.
His mother, (“I used to have to punch him in his chest when he was little because he was off the chain,” she says.)
I clicked on the link to the full story, and as I read it, fascinated, I thought that what happened to Kaplowitz could have happened to me, because during my first year of teaching in 1975-76, a simliar incident took place in the 5th grade class where I was a full-time intern on a day when my master teacher was out and a substitute was in the room.
But I didn’t usher the boy out of that 5th grade class as gently as Kaplowitz did, because the boy I was dealing with was screaming and tearing pages out of his textbook one at a time, and the boy refused to get out of his seat and leave when I attempted to help the substitute so order could be restored to the classroom.
Instead, when the boy refused to cooperate, I plucked him out of his seat, tossed him over my shoulder and carried him out of the classroom to the main office with him fighting me every step of the way as he pummeled me about the head and shoulders with his boney fists and even knocked my glasses off more than once.
That incident was the reason the principal would not recommend me to the district to be hired full time, and I ended up substitute teaching for my second and third year working in education.
In my second year, I ended up a teaching seven months as a long-term substitute in another fifth grade class with children who were a mirror image of the ones Kaplowitz struggled to teach. When half of those unruly students earned failing grades, the principal of that elementary school, in the same district, told me I couldn’t fail that many students and when I refused to change their grades because they didn’t do the work, that principal also didn’t recommend me to be hired full time leading to another year as a substitute teacher, because, as he wrote, I didn’t know how to cooperate with leadership.
It wasn’t until the 4th year that I landed a full time teaching job thanks to the best principal I worked with during the 30 years I was a teacher. Ralph Pagan believed in leadership from the bottom up with his support. Pagan, a Korean War Veteran, had been hired to turn around what was considered at the time the toughest and most dangerous middle school in the San Gabriel Valley south of Los Angeles, and it was obvious that Pagan wanted tough, no-nonsense teachers who wouldn’t put up with the type of behavior I was expected to ignore during my first two years in the classroom.
Lloyd – a good principal can make all the difference with both the student body and the faculty.
Whenever Buffalo hired one of those superb individuals, the suburban districts would lure them away with promises of better pay, nicer schools, and students who came to class to learn.
Ellen T Klock
In the district where I taught for thirty years, those supportive principals and even VPs didn’t last long. They either lost their jobs or left to find work in a district where the district administration wasn’t all top down in its management style as it was in that district.
After Ralph left, we discovered that he sheltered us from the top and battled them alone to maintain his teacher team management approach for the bottom up style of running that middle school. He had a stroke and the staff was later convinced it was the pressure from the top down that caused it. When he left the hospital, he also retired early and said he couldn’t take the pressure from the district office—it would kill him— and because he also refused to compromise his management style so the dictatorial top down administrators in the district office could have their way that wasn’t that much different from the reformers of today.
Pagan didn’t want to be a policy puppet for the district office administrators.
A man with integrity! That seems to be a rarity nowadays.
Ellen
Pagan retired from his job in the k-12 public schools, but he didn’t retire from education.
He was hired by the University at Cal Poly Pomona to work in its teacher education program where I earned my teaching credential a few years earlier, and he became a mentor for teachers going through that program.
I think he’s gone now since he’d almsot have to be a 100 to still be around.
Lloyd Lofthouse: thank you for injecting, in the midst of all the Rheeality spun by the fawning MSM in support of faux “education reform”—
Reality.
And thank you for you did and are doing.
😎
Poor Kaplowitz. That’s what you get for joining TFA.
There were no innocent parties in this incident. Everyone shares the blame, including the administrators.
Ellen
Yes!
Anyone who works with the general public in a sometimes adversarial role – teachers, nurses, police, doctors, lawyers – knows that they are constant targets for the next unbalanced individual or sociopath looking to make a buck. The reform movement has demonized public workers – especially teachers – in a scorched-earth approach with an end game of privatization for profit. One consequence, unintended or not, is the open season on classroom teachers. Without due process, we are all walking around with signs taped to our backs saying “kick me”.
Unfortunately, these stories are becoming all too common. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of false accusations, you know it is no fun. The law often assumes guilty till proven innocent.
How did the mother and her lawyer quantify the damages at $20,000,000?
There were no bruises, cuts, marks… etc. left on the child… no trauma from any sexual molestation…
The teacher guided a student out of the room who was defiantly refusing to leave… the teacher pushed the child and/or grabbed his clothing, clutching the clothing in his fingers momentarily… in order to remove him from the room.
This is the same student mind you, that the same mother freely admitted was so totally out-of-control at home on a regular basis, that she had to “punch in the chest” to get him in line.
I don’t get it. How does that get to $20,000,000? Aren’t multi-million dollar judgments for actions that result in death, or permanent paralysis, blindness, etc.?
I do know how it works in LAUSD. If a child tells us… or the mother admits to us… that the mother “punched him in the chest,” we are mandatory reporters and have to report it to the police. If we hear such a thing, and we do not report it within 36 hours, we will have our credential permanently revoked, and banned from teaching for life.
Please do visit and follow my blog for stories, fiction, quotations and classical poems.
Do comment for suggestions.
To whom it may concern:
If general public EVER demand educational style in schools where children of the rich attend, I would suggest that educators should demand pupils who MUST BE well manner like those children of the rich.
I must admit that the poor black child and his mother are the con artists then and until now regardless how good life have they improved.
Also, the gullibility of teacher TFA represents the military strategy in American policy. Here is an article on today NY Times:
BREAKING NEWS Saturday, March 14, 2015 12:46 PM EDT
C.I.A. Funds Found Their Way Into Al Qaeda Coffers
In the spring of 2010, Afghan officials struck a deal to free an Afghan diplomat held hostage by Al Qaeda. But the price was steep — $5 million — and senior security officials were scrambling to come up with the money.
They first turned to a secret fund that the Central Intelligence Agency bankrolled with monthly cash deliveries to the presidential palace in Kabul, according to several Afghan officials involved in the episode. The Afghan government, they said, had already squirreled away about $1 million from that fund.
Within weeks, that money and $4 million more provided from other countries was handed over to Al Qaeda, replenishing its coffers after a relentless C.I.A. campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan had decimated the militant network’s upper ranks.
The C.I.A.’s contribution to Qaeda’s bottom line was just another in a long list of examples of how the United States, largely because of poor oversight and loose financial controls, has sometimes inadvertently financed the very militants it is fighting.
While refusing to pay ransoms for Americans kidnapped by Al Qaeda, the Taliban or, more recently, the Islamic State, the United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the last decade at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of which has been siphoned off to enemy fighters.
READ MORE »
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/world/asia/cia-funds-found-their-way-into-al-qaeda-coffers.html?emc=edit_na_20150314
It is absolutely speechless! There is ONLY ONE SENTENCE that can sum up this story: FREE TRADE AGREEMENT with a blind faith will definitely lead all parties in a trap of a false hope for profit and fame. Back2basic
m4 – Just because you are rich and white doesn’t mean you can’t be a discipline problem. And teachers who work at “upscale” schools can share horror stories about not only white privileged children, but their interfering parents. Entitlement is their middle name.
The problems encountered may be different, but both situations kept the teacher from doing their job properly.
Ellen T Klock
Over 30 years experience in all types of schools
“If general public EVER demand educational style in schools where children of the rich attend, I would suggest that educators should demand pupils who MUST BE well manner like those children of the rich.”
For three years of the 30 I was a teacher, I taught in one middle school that didn’t have many children who lived in poverty. That community wasn’t wealthy, was almost totally white, and it wasn’t poor. It was solid middle class, and some of those privileged white children behaved much worse—with horrid support from their parents—than the children of color that I worked with for the other 27 years in schools that had poverty rates of 70% or higher.
Because of that horrid and unacceptable behavior, I transferred back to the ghetto to teach the at risk children who mostly lived in poverty where violent teenage street gangs ruled the streets around the high school day and night—-and I stayed teaching in that HS until retirement. I miss teaching those children but I don’t miss working in the public education system in the U.S. where teachers are treated like trash because of people like Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the Walton family.
Salute Teacher of the poor and dangerous district, Mr. Lloyd lofthouse;
Here is the music as my cheer to your answer which I absolutely love.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zou2V-e0zo
Apache ‘All-Time Best Instrumental’ – Hank Marvin
When a constantly disruptive student in my community college classroom made slanderous allegations against me, no one asked me what happened. Instead, they put the student in a different class, didn’t require him to make up 3 weeks of missed work, and the academic dean told me that I “might want to think about what I say in the classroom” and “you know, the city (where the student was from) is different from” our rural area. He never asked what happened.
I lived in Boston for 30 years. I know what the city is like. I thought a lot and decided that I am not responsible for the delusions of a seriously-disturbed student who has learned that he can get what he wants by misbehaving and slandering the teachers who won’t put up with his disrupting class. The next time the dean talks to me about anything, I will have a lawyer with me.
I usually sign my name, but this time I won’t.
Judith -,In my experience, the louder they scream, the guiltier they tend to be.
You could see them throw a spitball, but they’ll argue so vehemently that it wasn’t them, that you start to doubt your own eyes.
Thank you flo56 and Mr. Lloyd Lofthouse:
It is my sincere appreciation for your verification of children from “the entitlement” parents.
This subtly implies that all ivy universities are very dangerous environment to all intelligent, well manner and honest children of middle class and poor class.
Also, your experiences with children of the entitlement parents can warn all of educators and all tax payers to be careful with their votes to the background of all candidates. Simply, there will be more bad candidates than GOOD candidates in any elections for all kinds of governmental leader in public administrative positions.
What kind of expectation should we agree on as the guiding principles in K-12 education? May
M4 – the point is that the situation is more complex. Children from all socio economic. groups misbehave – naughtiness is not limited to any one race or color.
Yet, there are differences. The wealthy might threaten you with your job, the parents of inner city kids might come swearing – possibly packing a knife or a gun.
I hate to generalize. School climate is influenced by multiple factors, which is why the CCSS and PARCC is so dangerous. Once a climate is established, it is very difficult to change and the direction we are going is extremely detrimental to all concerned.
flos56 – I have truly learned your warning since I was at very young age from my teacher mother by degree, not by profession due to her early marriage to family Doctor (=my Dad).
It would seem to be speculative for what I understand and acknowledge wisdom from my mother. However, if people take time to deeply think all POSSIBLE and IMPOSSIBLE aspects in life that are related to money, power, fame, beauty (= GREED, EGO, LUST), people will easily acknowledge that whoever DO NOT have HUMAN CONSCIENCE, they will cause CHAOS to society for their own GREED, EGO and LUST.
I always appreciate God who saves me in ocean twice. There is no trouble can be seriously heavy on my shoulder (=my heart and my mind) as compared to being alone on the darkest night of Oct 31st in freezing rain, water in high waves and in middle nowhere near to Pacific Ocean. Most of all, there is no frustration can be compared to a mild stroke patient whose body is deformed and paralyzed with a very sharp mind in the long term memory, but cannot speak clearly what he wants to express.
Yes, I imply to all educators and all unfortunate people (parents + students) who know what is clearly best for them, but the authority imposes on them all INCOHERENT, NOT-TRANSPARENT, and INVALID tests.
What can we do? OPT OUT in a CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE for CIVILITY in PUBLIC EDUCATION is the ONLY ANSWER. Back2basic