Two weeks ago, I stood before the Santa Barbara Unified school board and spoke for three minutes about bullying in a room full of technology. The process running on all that hardware is 300 years old. Citizens line up to speak. A clock runs. Opinions voiced and filed. I was the second of two. When my time was up I asked to hand out 10 printed copies of my full comment and was told to leave them with the secretary. I did. Three minutes after I sat down, the board approved its response to the Grand Jury’s report on school bullying. The evidence I brought and the decision it concerned passed in the same room without ever touching. Only one board member found this weird. Performative democracy.
The 2025-2026 Grand Jury studied bullying in our county’s schools. Of 16,307 students surveyed over two years, nearly a thousand felt unsafe at school. A student at one of our junior highs was recently beaten unconscious. The price of governing by opinion is paid first by children, then by taxpayers. The report’s remedies: more staff watching, more cameras, more notification, more outreach. It concedes that cameras are not a sufficient solution. Then it recommends them anyway. Why? Because the Grand Jury is 19 volunteers with subpoena power and no evidence machinery. They interviewed administrators. Administrators mentioned cameras. The process is not based on knowledge. It is based on opinions.
Here is what international research says. Bullying is not human nature. It is dominance behavior, and its rates track institutional design. Change school structure to model reverse dominance, the whole group standing above the would-be dominator, and bullying plummets. Finland tested a whole-school program, KiVa, in a randomized trial across 78 schools; children in schools without it were roughly one-and-a-half times more likely to be bullied within nine months. In the national rollout across nearly 900 schools, children outside the program had 22 percent higher odds of victimization. Norway cut bullying roughly in half with a national program built after three bullied children took their own lives. A randomized trial in 15 American middle schools found that cooperative learning, where students must succeed together, reduces bullying and gives isolated children friends.
So why do our institutions want cameras? Because our institutions cannot tell knowledge from opinion. We are trying to run a modern nation state on 18th-century software. A lay board, elected in contests few voters attend, holding every terminal power. A civil grand jury descended from colonial common law, empaneled without domain expertise. A performative public comment ritual descended from the petition to the crown: three minutes, a microphone, a filing. The ballot was the best accountability technology of its age; the petition was how you addressed power when no other channel existed. A randomized trial across 78 schools and a feeling both get three minutes. Nor is it schools alone: Our local governments approve housing plans resting on assumptions at odds with established financial theory, because no seat in these rooms is charged with knowing.
The camera is the emblem of the failure to evolve. A camera watches behavior; it does not change it. Worse, surveillance teaches the wrong lesson: human beings watched by power. The programs that work teach the opposite. They train the peer group to stop rewarding cruelty, so behavior is governed from within. The Grand Jury’s report notes that suspensions are effectively useless. Watching from above and punishing from above are the same tool. It is the tool that built the problem.
And no camera reaches the parents where it all starts. At a high school drop-off, my wife watched a line of cars inch forward as students stepped out. A Tesla pulled from the queue, squeezed past walking children, and cut to the front. A teenager emerged, smiling. The driver was her mother. The lesson took eight seconds: being a bully works, and parents teach it.
What would evidence-based governance look like? Three things.
• Measure: The state already surveys our students yearly through CalSCHLS; publish the numbers in public session and let the community see the trend.
• Evaluate: Before doing anything, ask what the strongest evidence supports and test it locally; UCSB’s school of education sits minutes from the district office!
• Follow Through: Grand Jury responses are written commitments, and next year’s jury can ask what became of them. So can we. Our district’s freshly approved response answers the bullying report’s seven recommendations with “has been implemented” six times and “will not be implemented” once. Not one item is marked for further analysis! Accountability is a loop: commit in writing, measure in public, let findings decide what continues.
I grew up in Scandinavia, and I know the objection: This is not Sweden. True. But Scandinavia is not Scandinavia either. My ancestors were Vikings. Whatever peace we have today was built purposefully at national scale, by hard coding evidence into decisions. In 2023 Sweden halted its school digitalization strategy when researchers found it lacked scientific support and put the money into printed books. Sweden’s system erred and adapted. Ours, as built, is maladaptive. Policies are adopted based on opinions and the damage just compounds until a crisis forces another cycle of evidence free public policy.
Santa Barbara and our nation need evidence-based policies, honest evaluation, public reading of the numbers, and accountability! Our children are not failing to learn our values. They are learning what we model. Let us model cooperation and kindness. Build the reverse dominance structure.
