Bad barrels

more cat pictures

After reading more articles about the teacher who had classmates vote on whether or not 5-year-old Alex should be allowed to return to class, I've amended my thinking on the teacher's potential "worst person in the world" status. She was, of course, absolutely wrong to subject a special needs child--or any child--to this type of public humiliation. But the system failed Alex and his family in a big way. And it may even have failed his teacher by failing to provide her with the resources and training she needed. I recommend this post for some thoughts on the bigger picture.

And I think we do need to get away from scapegoating. Firing this teacher could be a quick fix that would let people believe that "justice has been served", but it wouldn't give me much confidence that Morningside Elementary School would be any better prepared to address the needs of future students on the autistic spectrum. Maybe Ms. Portillo does need to lose her job over this. I don't know. But what I do know is that exclusive focus on "bad apples" can keep us from examining the root issue of "bad barrels". From psychologist Philip Zimbardo:

When you put that set of horrendous work conditions and external factors together, it creates an evil barrel. You could put virtually anybody in it and you're going to get this kind of evil behavior. The Pentagon and the military say that the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of a few bad apples in an otherwise good barrel. That's the dispositional analysis. The social psychologist in me, and the consensus among many of my colleagues in experimental social psychology, says that's the wrong analysis. It's not the bad apples, it's the bad barrels that corrupt good people.

No, this isn't Abu Ghraib we're talking about here. But it is another example of a case where pointing fingers without addressing underlying systemic problems would be unwise.

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