News this morning of a California elementary school teacher who was busted for taking exceptionally lewd and lurid photographs of children between the ages of 6 and 10.
People like this disgust me, and all the torments of Hades are hardly sufficient to deal with their ghastly crimes. I'd say we should kill them just as soon as they're discovered, but some douchebag from the ACLU would challenge me on it with some nonsense about due process of law, and then we'd have to kill someone extra.
Mark Berndt, a third-grade teacher from Los Angeles apparently has a convoluted fetish involving little children, tape, cockroaches, semen and a camera. I don't even know where to begin on this one; there's got to be at least 50 twisted pathologies right there, and I'm almost certain that any psychiatrist with half a brain just might beat Berndt to death with his bare hands 15 minutes into the initial examination.
Apparently, Mr. Berndt was caught because an alert (Jesus, how alert do you need to be to spot this kind of shit?) film processor reported Berndt to the police. Which begs a few questions:
1. What sort of brazen pedophile must Berndt be if he's still sending film off to be processed in an age of digital photography and home photo printing arrangements? Either Berndt is technologically challenged (in which case, he's too stupid to teach), or he just never thought he'd get caught. Perhaps he's been daring someone to stop him all along (that sometimes happens). Either way, he's a dangerous fuck who needs to be hung. On TV.
2. One wonders how many other photos may have gotten past the un-alert photo processors. In this case, police say they have gathered 399 photos, although it's not clear if they're all from the same batch.
It's also made clear in the article that while Berndt may have been fired immediately after his arrest, that school administrators did nothing to warn parents of his dalliances, even though they apparently knew about this demented bastard for a year!
Of course, stupid and dangerous shit going on within a Public School is not the private domain of California pedophiles. Oh, no. We've got some real winners right here in New York City. I had intended to blog about this particular douche last week, but didn't get around to it. Now seems a pretty good time.
Disgraced Teacher, Worth $10 Million, Makes $100,000 a Year, Does Nothing and Refuses to Leave.
Thanks to absolutely Byzantine union rules designed to keep the worst teachers in the world from getting fired, New York City taxpayers get to continue paying for this complete scumbag, who seems to enjoy sticking his thumb in everyone's eye.
And naturally, the asshole just had to be a lawyer, to boot.
We're continually being told by the media and our government that American school children are performing at a lower level with every passing year, and that the solution to this economic time bomb is "more money for education". However, it's become quite clear that the problem is not that we don't spend enough -- it is, in part, because we're spending it on people like this. More like wasting it on people like this. Not just the bad teachers, but the bad administrators, too, who can't seen to do a damned thing about the bad teachers, and who are apparently cool with that.
And in both cases you see a mindless bureaucracy which must exist solely for its own sake -- never mind it's core responsibility to educate children -- protect the wrongdoer. One pedophile has his activities kept secret from the general public for a year, the other collects a hundred g's to Xerox something every so often and run his own law and real estate firms from inside a city-owned-and-operated office, rent free.
This is either the bureaucracy protecting itself, or an indication that no one knows what the hell happens anywhere at any given time. This bureaucracy can't admit that it hires pedophiles when it does, and can't admit that it doesn't even screen for them in the hiring process. Heck, it doesn't even report their existence to the school-going public when they're identified within the school system! It's all CYA. If the bureaucracy itself isn't screwed up (mostly because it's full of civil servants who managed to score a 60 on a 3rd-grade-reading-level test) we see how the bureaucracy is tied up in red tape by the teacher's unions that make it damned-near impossible to fire anyone, for any reason whatsoever.
The stock, ineffectual-bureaucratic response to "Why is that asshole still here?" is summed up nicely by the defender of Mr. Rosenfeld:
“If these people are actually dangerous, it’s better to waste the money than to put them back with kids.”
Yeah, never mind putting them in fucking jail, right?
And why shouldn't this be the administrator's/union's attitude? It's not their money, is it? Besides, when the bureaucracy does run out of money to waste as a "precautionary" measure, or because the teacher's unions have bled the system white, they just go hat-in-hand to the politicians who find some other way to make our lives more expensive and aggravating.
American kids score low marks in international ratings in math, sciences, and reading, and according to President Obama (and her husband, too) there's an "epidemic" of child obesity that must be remedied with a state-approved dietary plan (another expensive boondoggle), as if this were Nazi Germany, or something.
Perhaps if the kids weren't being taught by pedophiles, the school systems hired only the best-qualified individuals, the unions didn't get to dictate the conditions of their contracts, and we started taking all the super-expensive Heather Has Two Mommies bullshit out of the curriculum and replaced them with more traditional and useful subjects -- more math, phonics, music, civics, real history, hard sciences, perhaps a fucking gym class once or twice a week -- they'd do a lot better.
But to hire the best-qualified individuals you need to be able to fire the worst ones, first. To run a school system efficiently and effectively, you need to have people who are dedicated to the needs of their customers -- the kids -- and not to the unions. In order to have the best damned school system on the planet you need to have a bureaucracy that has the ability to make easy judgement calls, like Do we inform the public that we have a pedophile with a cockroach fetish teaching pre-teens as soon as we discover him? or Shouldn't we fire this piece of shit who doesn't work and steals city resources by running his own business out of our offices?
Apparently, these questions aren't being asked, or even addressed, by at least two school systems in America. I should think this is pretty much par for the course in every state, county and municipality in the nation.
As long as the education establishment is run by a monopoly consisting of unions and political hacks, we will never see the sort of achievement that justifies the huge expense. Americans have paid hundreds of billions of tax dollars into the public school boondoggle, and what they get for it is lackluster performance, protected and tenured pedophiles, union dues going to influence the political process, bureaucrats paralyzed by stupidity and regulations that can't protect or educate anyone.
If I ever hear another person say "education is underfunded", I just might shoot them on the spot.
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