by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
Seattle's own Linda Thomas points to a bill in the Washington State legislature adding "cyberbullying" to the list of things for which schools must discipline their students. While obviously a more serious issue than, say, banning tag or even getting Fluff out of cafeterias, I'm unclear why this issue requires state-level intervention. The point of raising the profile of bullying, more than to punish the wrongdoers, is to get the bad behavior to stop or prevent it in the first place—punishment, as Mark Kleiman likes to say, is a cost, not a benefit. The time spent thinking specifically about discipline policies related cyberbullying might be much better spent having teachers discuss bullying & social norms with kids directly, either formally or by bringing it up casually during regular school business.
Now, if there's an awareness problem, where a number of school administrators don't know about this Internet thing and how it can be used both for good and evil, then, that's a different question methinks. The benefit in formalizing this sort of discipline strikes me as very, very, low.
