Izzy Kalman is a Nationally Certified School Psychologist, author of Bullies to Buddies: How to turn your enemies into friends, and creator/author of the website, www.Bullies2Buddies.com.

Over the past five years, he has taught his methods to over 30,000 mental health professionals and educators throughout the US at his seminars, Anger Control Made Easy, and Turning Bullies into Buddies. Izzy has produced a program for schools, Bullied to Buddies: Victim-Proof Your School, that is currently being researched by Cleveland State University, and has been adopted for use by PSI Solutions, an agency that provides psychological services to schools in five states. A DVD version of his program for use by schools will be available for purchase in January, 2008. You can email Izzy at mailto:izzy@bullies2buddies.com.

1) Recently, at a school in Tampa, Florida, a jury ordered a school to pay FOUR MILLION dollars to a family whose child was bullied and suffered a broken arm. This article, written by Colleen Jenskins of www.tampabay.com brought home (at least to me) that schools need to take the issue of bullying seriously. What is YOUR perspective on bullying?

"Schools need to take the issue of bullying seriously"?! In the same vein, isn't it about time that our country took the issue of drug abuse seriously? Oh, it has? And it's become a bigger problem? Oops.

How about taking racial segregation seriously? Perhaps we can have the whole country embark on a "Celebrate Diversity" campaign so people will become eager to live in integrated neighborhoods. Oh, we already doing it? And our neighborhoods continue to be segregated? Ooops.

How about taking academic decline seriously? Perhaps we can pass a law holding schools responsible for making our children catch up academically to the rest of the world. We can call it something catchy, like "No Child Left Behind"! Oh, we already did that? And it's not working? Ooops.

Just because you decide to take a problem seriously doesn't mean that you know how to solve the problem. If you are doing interventions that don't work, doing those same interventions more intensively is only going to make the problem worse.

For the past ten years, Japan has made bullying a national issue, tackling it with even greater determination than the U.S. has. And you know the results? Bullying has become a more serious problem in Japan. It turned out that school administrators were fudging their schools' bullying statistics so it would look like bullying decreased. It's the same thing school administrators in this country have been doing to comply with No Child Left Behind: fudge the statistics so they won't get in trouble for failing to comply with governmental mandates.

It always irks me when the media proclaim, "Schools aren't taking bullying seriously!" Frankly, I'm amazed that I haven't heard even one educator anywhere protest, "How dare you accuse the schools for not taking bullying seriously! Schools have always taken bullying seriously." Where have the people making this absurd accusation against our schools been for the past eight years since Columbine? I have been in the United States and have seen our country pumping billions of dollars and countless hours into anti-bullying initiatives, with every school trying to tackle the problem. (The results have been dismal, but not for lack of effort.)

And it hasn't just been since Columbine. That's only when the insulting term "bullying" came into vogue. I get the impression that no has ever heard the terms "discipline problems," "aggression" and "violence." Schools have forever been dealing with these issues. Why do you think peer mediation and conflict resolution programs came into being? Why have schools kept guidance counselors on the payroll?

Schools have always been taking bullying seriously, but now they have to take it even more seriously because anti-bullying laws make it much easier for parents to sue them.

It really bugs me that organizations that are supposed to care about schools are all in favor of anti-bullying laws. They are unwittingly supporting the demise of schools. I can't imagine how anyone who fully comprehends the implications of school anti-bullying laws would even consider becoming a school principal or administrator. I certainly wouldn't want it said about me that I was responsible for my school being fined millions of dollars because I failed to stop a child from being bullied.

And it is the height of cynicism for psychologists to demand that schools be held legally responsible for stopping bullying, for a quick perusal of the psychological research reveals the less-than-stellar results of anti-bullying programs.A metanalysis of the scientific research on whole-school anti-bullying programs published in the School Psychology Review in Dec. 2004 revealed that the great majority of whole-school anti-bullying programs either have no benefit or make the problem worse. But did the authors recommend that we stop wasting time and money on these ineffective or harmful programs? No! They recommended that schools continue using them!

Why don't researchers have the guts to accept the implications of their own research?Why even bother doing research if you are going to reject your own findings? Even the most incredibly intensive programs, such as the so-called"gold standard" Olweus program, which turns the school into a Big-Brother-type institution, can only claim to approach a 50% reduction in incidents of bullying (and no one even bothers to examine the negative effects of the program). So even schools using the most "serious" program will still experience a fair amount of bullying and can be sued for failing to make it stop. How dare anyone demand that schools be held legally responsible for accomplishing something even the most revered anti-bullying experts don't know how to do!

2) In my mind, schools have some duty and responsibility for supervision of all students on school grounds. Am I off base on this?

Of course schools have some responsibility for the safety of children, and the truth is that schools, in general do a very good job. Regardless of the hype about school violence, school is still the safest place for a child to be. Only one in a hundred child homicides occurs on school grounds. A child is thirty times more likely to be killed by a parent than by someone in school. My own survey of several thousand mental health professionals and educators reveals that their own children are four times more likely to have a sibling hitting them every day at home than to have another student hitting them in school. Their children are about 50% more likely to be sent to the hospital from a fight with a sibling than from a fight in school. So the experts in child behavior are doing a worse job of keeping their own kids safe at home than the schools do, yet we want to sue the schools for failing to get rid of every last vestige of hostility. There's a word for this: Hypocrisy.

If a woman is raped, does the police station get put on trial for failing to prevent the rape? Of course not. It's the rapist who is prosecuted. No one expects the legal justice system to make all crime disappear. We only expect the law enforcement system to do its best to apprehend criminals and bring them to justice. Nothing more can be logically and morally expected from the schools. Adults are present in the school to supervise students, but it is impossible for them to prevent children from ever being mean. A student who commits a transgression should be disciplined. But it is simply insane to hold the school legally responsible for the transgression having happened in the first place.

And if schools can be sued for failing to prevent all bullying between students, shouldn't they be allowed to administer intensive psychological testing to every child prior to admission so they can refuse to accept any child who has the potential of engaging in bullying? The problem is, if they do this the schools may end up devoid of students.

Shouldn't we first figure out how to get kids to be nice to each other at home? After all, there is much more bullying going on in the home, and this is among kids who are blood relatives and should love and care about each other. Let's first figure out how parents can get their own couple of children to stop bullying each other. Then we can start experimenting with the same miraculous strategies on a class of thirty students. Parents are hollering for schools to be held responsible for stopping bullying. The day parents are willing to be sued for failing to stop their own children from bullying each other is the day I will agree that schools should be sued for failing to stop students from bullying each other.

3) It seems to me that any student who is violent enough to break another student's arm presents a threat to other children. As a school psychologist, what steps should be taken in terms of such children?

Anyone is capable of being violent enough to break another student's arm. It happens quite often in sports. My survey shows that children are about twenty times more likely to go to the hospital from of a sports injury than from a fight in school.

In the Tampa case, the child's arm was broken during a sports activity. Yes, the so-called "bully" apparently intended to push the boy, for the hostility between them had been going on for a while, and the so-called "bully" was probably angry at the boy for trying to get him in trouble. (I don't have all the details, but this is what I surmise from the sparse details presented in the news). Did the so-called "bully" intend to break the kid's arm? There is no indication of that. But when kids are engaged in sports and they push each other, they can fall and break bones. This is a common phenomenon. Do we sue schools when kids are injured in sports? Schools would have abandoned sports a long time ago! If we are truly concerned with preventing injuries, we should stop wasting our time trying to outlaw bullying and start lobbying to get rid of sports.

As for your question, "What steps should be taken in terms of such children?" The samesteps that have always been taken: punish them–and hopefully in a way that fits the crime (which is whole other issue in itself. A main reason for the high rate of violence in our society, including schools, is that the punishments usually have no relation to the crime). When a child is injured by another child, the parents of the victim always have the option to sue the attacker's parents. But it should be the attacker's parents who are sued, not the school. And if a child is a true danger to other students and can't be educated in a regular setting, there have always been special programs and schools for them. Are you old enough to remember the term, "reform school"?

4) Can very weak shy, introverted students be empowered to work with such violent, aggressive, assaultive students?

First, I would like to point out that you are portraying the aggressor as a violent sociopath, when all you know is the one-sided story that was presented in the news. Did you notice that the news report said absolutely nothing about the argument in defense of the so-called "bully"? That's because the media is in love with the bullying problem.

The media thrives on titillating stories, and what can be better than this phenomenon of evil children called "bullies" that infest our society and lead our virtuous children to emotional misery and physical harm? All it cares to do is portray a simplistic black-and-white portrait of evil bullies and virtuous victims.

Reporters have a duty to report both sides of a story, but when it comes to bullying, they completely neglect that duty and no one calls them on it. You'd be amazed at how many news editors refuse to present a different point of view on bullying! But without seeing reports from others who know the so-called "bully"-and I haven't succeeded in finding anything about him on the Internet–I wouldn't be in a rush to paint him so darkly.

But anyway, the answer to your question is, "Most definitely." I have been teaching such kids to handle bullying for two decades, and most kids "get it" remarkably quickly. The same people who are your bullies can also be your buddies. It depends on how you respond when they are mean to you. The kids we call "bullies" aren't only bullies. To their friends they are buddies. They will support their friends and fight for them.

I heard an anecdote about the great comedian, Joey Bishop, who died a few weeks ago. When he was a kid, he was puny. A big kid in school challenged him to a fight. Joey Bishop said to him, "I'm warning you! If I hit you, I'm going down!" Of course the other kid laughed and there was no fight.

If you know how to treat people, they will be for you instead of against you. But most people don't know how to do it. They need to be taught.

5) What do you cover in your workshops? Are your workshops directed to teachers, principals, guidance counselors, parents or all of the above?

Answer: All of the above. I regularly present my seminar, Anger Control Made Easy, under the auspices of Cross Country Education, an institution that provides continuing education courses to mental health and other related professions. However, anyone from the general public can attend if they wish. Schools, hospitals, and other organizations can hire me to give presentations on anger control, bullying, sibling rivalry, parenting, marital/ relationship problems, and workplace problems.

Everything I teach is in simple language that the average layperson can understand. Most of the professionals who attend are seeking ways to help their clients or students. However, I make it clear that I am teaching them how to solve their own problems as well, because they tend to have the same kinds of problems as their clients.

What I am really doing is teaching people how to live by the Golden Rule. Everyone has heard of this rule, but few people truly understand it. Our nation's anti-bullying policies are, in fact, a violation of the Golden Rule, which is why they are so ineffective.

6) It seems that schools are going to have to either improve supervision, or restrict some kids who are called "bullies"? Are there other options?

Yes. Insurance companies have to start offering schools "bullying insurance policies" giving them several million dollars of coverage per incident. Without this insurance, schools won't be able to survive. The policies will have to be quite expensive, similar to medical malpractice insurance, and will, of course, raise our taxes. After all, somebody has to pay these multi-million-dollar judgments. And it's not going to be the school principals paying out of their own pockets. It's going to be you and me who have to foot the bill. (Are you still so eager to have bullying "taken seriously"?)

If schools want to successfully reduce bullying, the best option is for them to do what I do: teach kids the simple rules for not being victims. If kids need to depend upon society to get rid of bullies for them, they will be bullied throughout their lifetime. But when kids understand the simple rules for not being a victim, no one can bully them and their problem goes away right away. There's nothing new about this knowledge. It's called "wisdom."

7) Some kids who in the fourth or fifth grade may be bullies, but they may later end up to be diagnosed with psychiatric and psychological problems. Do the schools need to look at more intensive treatment? Or medication?

I first need to comment on the term "bully." Society, including the mental health organizations, is talking about "bully" like it is a diagnosis. But it isn't. It's an insult, just like "idiot" or "wimp" or "sucker" or "slut." Many researchers realize this and recommend that we talk about "bullying behavior" rather than "bullies." But they ignore their own suggestions and keep on referring to kids with the insulting term "bully."

If you examine the academic definition of bully, you will realize that the only people who don't fit the description are saints. I am not saying this facetiously nor am I exaggerating. And I don't know too many saints.

There is a massive campaign to convince people that there are these evil people in our midst called bullies–who are not like us, of course–and responsible for our misery. If we could just get rid of these demons we will all be happy and healthy. And one way the bullying experts do this is by claiming that such-and-such percent of people in prison or psychiatric hospitals were bullies in school.

But have you spoken to psychiatric patients? Do any of them sound like bullies? They all sound like victims. And the research on bullying shows that bullies (and I'm referring to true bullies, not the kids referred to as bully/victims) tend to be confident, popular and successful. It is the kids who feel like victims that are miserable. The most dangerous people–both to themselves and others–are not people who think like bullies. They are people who think like victims. They are consumed with anger, hatred and desire for revenge. Just look at all these recent horrific shootings: Virginia Tech, Cleveland, Omaha, Colorado. All committed by young men who felt victimized. No longer being able to tolerate the feeling of being victimized, they explode in a shooting rampage and feel completely justified. If we truly want to reduce violence and promote mental health, we need to stop focusing on teaching kids (and adults!) not to be bullies and teach them instead how to stop thinking like victims.

8) What question have I neglected to ask?

It is very thoughtful of you to ask. However, I have already given such long answers that I will decline to offer more questions. If you would like further interviews with me, I will be glad to oblige. But let's have compassion for the reader and leave it for another day.

Published December 26, 2007