Meanwhile, the conversation amongst the staff at the public school my wife works at came to a different conclusion. They seem to be a better representation of society in general.

So I guess it all works out!

That's the saddest thing I've read this morning, assuming it is accurate. For every great staff member at school, I've met at least one other than was barely able to function in adult society. I don't know which direction the causal effect is going, but there's a correlation between working all day with young children and being able to relate to other adults.

My son's elementary school is more like a prison now, after a huge transformation in the last two years, and I can't wait for him to move up to the middle school. Which thankfully isn't quite so authoritarian. Yet. I'm right on the edge of pulling both kids out of school and going online with it, and probably would have except my daughter really didn't fare well during the pandemic version of online school. My son would be quite happy though. Make it self-paced and he'd have his high school diploma at 12.

maybe i'm confused. are you saying it's sad that staff members at an elementary school aren't for punishing false reports to cps? i don't know what's sad about that. if reports are anonymous, how could you punish a false reporter? and how could you prove the report was intentionally false? seems like you'd catch a tiny portion of malicious reporters that for whatever reson left undeniable evidence of that intention to falsely report, and to do that the reporting would have to no longer be anonymous, which would stop a lot of people from reporting.

In our case the County Superintendent is supposed to monitor the local districts, but ours refuses to. He is just window dressing. Local superintendents know this and have carte blache.

We ended up pulling our kids and sent them 40 minutes away to private schools. When we pulled them both had B averages, but scored in the 20th percentile on State tests. Entering private school both had horrible first semesters as the learning deficit became clear. Luckily they are both smart (just ignorant, thanks to the prior school) and are catching up.

Here's what she/I meant (she's also super annoyed that I'm bothering her with "nerds fighting about nonsense on the internet"):

The gist of her argument and paraphrased: "The problem is that CPS is by necessity anonymous. It's not that people aren't being punished for reporting false claims, it's that if you really wanted to catch everyone who was reporting false claims then you would have to make them present some form of identification. What if this is about a legitimate case of abuse from a scary motherfucker? Someone might not report because they don't want to realistically be murdered by said scary motherfucker. Also, the communities that have the most problems with child abuse also have a higher number of people who do not want to interact with law enforcement for a number of reasons. There is a trade-off with any situation that requires anonymous reporting."

Jesus, jail time! I can tell you right off the bat that that would absolutely disincentivise me from reporting anything - some process I'm not privy to decides it was a 'false' report and I get jail? That makes for a very high bar for me not to wind my neck back in - and if that's what you want, only something that's too heinous to ignore gets reported, fine. But it's certainly not an insane suggestion that there's a link there.

I'm not arguing that people who are wrong in good faith be punished, just that we punish people who we can prove lied in order to retaliate against people they don't like.

The difference is the police won't go after false reporting often, probably because they are worried it will have a chilling effect on people talking to them.

If 10% of murder convictions are mistaken it would stand to reason that the false accusation conviction error rate would be equally high or higher.

It's fun to say, punish everyone that does crime X. But you have to accept a false positive rate.

Why in the world would you be sure of that?

> Why in the world would you be sure of that?

A democracy

(Whether it's worth that deterrent is a question that I am not going to attempt to grapple with on a technology message board.)

I feel that what you are saying is true, but I know that this would result in a system where the wealthy and connected would then run amok while their honest accusers sat in prison.

How about if we instead simply make the investigation process less threatening and terrifying, particularly at initial stages? For example, in the linked article, it's insane that the investigator required that the mother return to therapy because she'd been to therapy in the past for a bout of depression.

But in instances where someone has incontrovertibly made a false report because they wanted to ruin someone's day (or life), that should follow them around. There is a large blurry area between reporting someone because their kid has a black eye every couple months and reporting someone because their kid is better at baseball than yours where you can't prove bad faith, and in that instance it doesn't make sense to ruin anyone's life.

That seems extremely difficult to prove.

1. There's a case to be made for anonymous reports which the current system allows and your system wouldn't allow. Abusive parents can also be violent parents, it's understandable that in some cases teachers or people who know about the abuse going on wouldn't want to report that abuse.

2. This also reverses the current issue with CPS where a report leads to an investigation that's traumatising for the family and the children that CPS is supposed to protect. If you investigate any report to prove that the report was made in bad faith, then anyone reporting will potentially have to go through a process that's traumatising even if they are not guilty.

I think instead snozolli's solution of making CPS' investigations less threatening and more humane with an expedited process when there was clearly a misunderstanding and creating laws that make it clear that certain behaviors are not negligence would go a long way toward solving all this.

The actual problem, with the responsibility being laundered by placing it on random busybodies. Maybe have a system where anonymous denunciation doesn't lead to trauma and misery.