You are getting it wrong (disclosure - I do not live in the US).
Everything you read in the news is outlier in a sort. With 30 million kids in tens of thousands of schools you are guaranteed to get a few cases of something "stupid and abusive from the administrators" daily. After all - a normal school day with no events hardly makes a headline. And with the power of the internet some local news get much more national visibility than decades prior.
Same is with TSA - you will hear of something bad daily, but a lot of people pass checks without problems.
You have to aggregate the news about school authorities, police and federal behavior over a very long time to try and find some meaningful trends (there seem to be some, and not comforting at least)
>Everything you read in the news is outlier in a sort.
Indeed. Otherwise it wouldn't be news. Anything you see in the news is automatically not worth being afraid of. Your life will be ruined by something mundane, car accidents, cancer etc.
A good example of this irrational fear of what's in the news is the recent studies showing that many people in the US think the crime and/or murder rate is up when in fact it's down.
Too many times I see people from other countries, and the US too come to think of it, assume that every street corner in the US is a scene from a wild west movie with everyone shooting it out because someone said the wrong thing. Well, maybe parts of Chicago.
I guess they get this from what they hear on the news from the US and their own countries. Seems to me that today is likely the safest I have ever been in my lifetime in the US.
As you say, my biggest fear for myself and my family is a car accident.
"Anything you see in the news is automatically not worth being afraid of."
That's true on average, but, for example, if your child happens to live in one of the school districts that's run by irrational, power-hungry administrators, then you do have something to be afraid of.
Everything you read in the news is outlier in a sort. With 30 million kids in tens of thousands of schools you are guaranteed to get a few cases of something "stupid and abusive from the administrators" daily. After all - a normal school day with no events hardly makes a headline. And with the power of the internet some local news get much more national visibility than decades prior.
Same is with TSA - you will hear of something bad daily, but a lot of people pass checks without problems.
You have to aggregate the news about school authorities, police and federal behavior over a very long time to try and find some meaningful trends (there seem to be some, and not comforting at least)