Joanne Jacobs has a post today on another bullying incident in Oakland. This one sounds horrible, as did the Billy Wolfe story (see my earlier post The NYT Bully). Just because the Billy Wolfe story is more complicated than the NYT reported, doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a bullying problem in his case and shouldn’t cause us to doubt each new story any more than normal skepticism requires.
Clearly there is a problem out there with violence between students in schools. Whether that problem has become more common or more severe over time, I don’t know. Anyone who knows of reliable statistics on this, please pass that along. The plural of anecdote is not data, so we need more than these compelling stories to get a sense of how widespread and severe this problem is.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 