One of the many privileges of
having kids in the Los Angeles Unified School District is the
accelerated education they get in official corruption, the
stupidity of grownups, union strong-arming and many other topics –
any topics other than reading, writing and arithmetic, that
is. 

The
recent sex-abuse arrests of two teachers at Miramonte
Elementary have become a feature of playground scuttlebutt and
official conniptions. The school my children attend (separated from
Miramonte by more than 15 miles, though both schools score in the
“Least
Effective” category in the L.A. Times’ value-added
assessment) is no exception. 

Yesterday my daughters brought home copies of a flyer containing
the principal’s thoughts on the scandal. I guess this page of
skylarking was intended to reassure us or something. I wouldn’t
take note of it at all except that one paragraph illustrates the
pathology of public employees with stunning clarity: 

As I reflect on the disturbing occurrences at Miramonte, I am
more confused over the fact that the children did not report. How
is it that the children did not believe that what the teacher was
doing to them was wrong? How could being blindfolded, placed in a
closet, and having cockroaches placed on them not be wrong? I
believe that the teachers involved in these heinous acts preyed on
the most vulnerable of the children; children of poverty, children
of abuse, children with uninvolved parents, and children of
undocumented parents. 

The principal’s insistence on repeating lurid details from the
newspapers is between her and her god. This person is a martinet
with a habit of logorrhea that expresses itself in nightly
robocalls and long assemblies during which parents are upbraided
for such crimes as parking on the street while delivering and
picking up students, cutting into the school’s funding by keeping
kids home from classes, not contributing during fundraisers, and so
on. 

But look again at that paragraph. There is no way around the
logic: She is arguing that it was the kids’ fault for not reporting
the incident. And since public school is a tyranny sincerely
exercised for the good of its victims, the children are also
described as victims who have suffered from the depredations of
poverty and abuse, of “uninvolved” and undocumented parents. Her
focus on the kids’ purported failure to speak up may be intended as
an “if you see something say something” advisory, but the focus
itself is what is revealing. The inadequacy of the students and
their parents, not the negligence of the school or the district, is
to blame. 

As it happens, my kids’ principal is wrong on the facts: Mark
Berndt, the more prominent of the two accused teachers at
Miramonte, was the subject of complaints on at least two occasions:
in 1994 and 2008. Administrators at the school and the district
failed to take action either time. 

Another thing that the principal fails to note: Berndt has been
accused, not convicted. For criminal purposes he is presumed
innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and that would be
true even if he were not represented by a public-sector union. The
difference between a schoolteacher and, for example, an employee of
Disneyland or Burger King, is that Berndt couldn’t be fired when
the suspicions first came up. That’s not an idle comparison. Here’s
what happened to a Burger King employee, his co-workers, and his
manager, when he was caught doing something a lot less
objectionable than what Berndt is accused of: 

I generally dislike this principal’s jawboning (and I’m
particularly bothered that her campaign of petty discipline has
coincided with a nose dive in the school’s Academic Performance
Index score). But in this case I appreciate her candor. That both
teachers and administrators view parents and students as the enemy
is an open secret. But it’s rare that you see it expressed so
baldly. 

L.A. teachers doing what comes naturally — telling
lies: