Okay, I don't know about the credibility of the claims in the OP link, but I am rather familiar with bullying on a first-hand basis.
First of all, there is a world of difference between the bullies who gang up on someone to say mean things and exclude, and the bullies who stalk, intimidate, and assault their targets. Perhaps not in psychological motivations, but definitely in how it affects the victim, and what tactics are likely to work.
For instance, the advice I nearly always heard first from counselors, teachers, and psychologists was to simply ignore them. For a number of bullies, this worked great. They went up to me, saying things, trying to provoke me, and when they saw I was nonplussed throughout the whole recess period, they hardly bothered me again.
Then, there were bullies who, if they failed to provoke you, would continually try, getting increasingly vicious and increasingly physical. They would not leave you alone until you reacted, and they won. But, if your reaction was to show them up, they left you alone, knowing you weren't to be messed with, that you weren't a weakling who would just take whatever they dished. The reaction they sought wasn't just that their words/actions were hurting you, but that they felt power just by the fact that you would let them walk all over you.
One bully when I was in third grade, my first interaction with him was when I was walking to a particular station in the classroom to get some supplies, and on my way there, I noticed this kid's pencil had fallen to the ground. I picked it up and gave it to him, and he growled at me, snatching it angrily from my hand. I didn't think much of it, that he probably felt I was threatening his independence/boyness by picking it up for him, or just having a bad day. Months pass, and I see he has one of my favorite cartoon characters on the folder he's using. I say, "Oh, that's cool, I like that show." He frowns at me.
A week later, he's messing around squishing bugs, and I say, "Why are you hurting the bugs? They aren't doing anything to you." He and his friend, predictably, find this funny and get bits of dirt in their hand and spit in it, to try to freak me out by showing me "bug guts" and by tricking me into reacting over nothing. I saw through this instantly and just kept dryly saying, "I know you're just spitting into your hand." "You're idiots if you think that's fooling anyone." I walked away from their shenanigans, and within a minute, he's jumped onto my back, hands around my throat, kicking at my back. I try to get him off me by poking at his eyes, when he bites my hand, and I pass out.
When I came to, the yard duties were starting to walk out, to yell at me (I often daydreamed during recess and failed to notice the bell going off, so there were times they had to come get me and tell me it was over.) I got up and started off toward them to tell what happened, but they thought I was making excuses. I started to tell my fellow classmates what he had done, lined up before the teacher got there (I stood outside of the line, so that I wouldn't have my back to them - his last name starts on a later letter than mine). He denied it in that phony, bad-liar way they always do, and when the teacher came to class, she started lecturing me for not being in line, and gave me a punishment for the day, her only comment on what I was saying that it was a he-said/she-said, and she would hear about it later.
When I tried to talk about it, nothing happened, so I went to the principal, who tried to appease me without doing anything and sending me on my merry way, but I saw through that and told my dad, and it was when he met with the principal, they agreed to give him a week to sit by the fence on the playground for a week. I thought that was a stupid punishment, since his other friends were all in that punishment, too (it was a frequent punishment, where a group of kids always were there, every other week or so), and they would mock me as I walked in and out of recess, as they were stationed right by the entrance. During that week and the next, my throat was hoarse, like I had a cold.
Sometimes, it is plainly that the bully has serious issues, whether it's a serious mental illness or abuse or something. But the answer then is to give them counseling, and notify authorities when there's evidence of abuse/neglect, instead of just counseling the victims about how to cope with it.
When I was 13, there was a situation where it was a very gradual escalation. I learned after ignoring them for several straight months and things escalating to violence, that my only way to manage the situation was to engage in the insulting banter, maintaining a demeanor of jovial ribbing, keeping the joking manner but sharping the insults to be more slicing, and to be witty enough to get them to think it over before realizing, but not so witty that it would go over their head.
The insults themselves did not affect me, particularly since I had no interest in interacting socially with such willful ignoramuses, caring only for my studies of calculus and physics, getting as close to ignoring the regular school work and my fellow students as I could, with a few exceptions. Mostly it was the girls who maintained the rumor machine, which I paid only the barest attention to, in order to alert me to when the attacks would come more harshly or more frequently, but I had removed myself from socializing with peers beyond the minimum required since the first grade, when I realized that few six-year-olds shared my interests in plane geometry, education reform, science fiction of the 60s and 70s, progressive rock, and arachnology, and I had little to no interest in the things they liked, apart from cartoons. They liked cars, but just to play with them, not to talk about the engines and models and stuff.
So it has been pretty easy for me to ignore most of the verbal bullying. But getting attacked is not only something that is difficult to ignore, but it is something no one ought to ignore. When things go beyond getting splashed with water, having your desk shaken, getting tripped, shouted in your ear, assignments stolen, locker broken into, assignments sabotaged - that stuff is like stage II bullying, or something. This is more like stage IV or V. But it was treated more like stage I - more like the typical taunts and stuff that most people have to go through at some time or another.
I certainly made a fairly good target, in this way. Not only did I stand out physically and mentally (I was tall and slightly overweight, and spoke using the full extent of my vocabulary up until I was around 12 1/2 and got used to speaking with the more casual vernacular), but when I was younger I would cry if only a little bit hurt. But insults from peers I didn't respect (AKA most) meant nothing to me, nor did praise from the same. Whereas I would become deeply sad if someone I respected, like my dad, said I had done something wrong.
The move had been a big deal, since I am autistic and hated the change - when I was in kindergarten I had climbed the hierarchy of a big group of boys who were in a project to dig to the bottom of the sandbox by convincing the others to try my way, which worked since I had an intuitive grasp of the physics involved and was one of a few kindergarteners in a first grade combination class, but when we moved I was one of six first graders in a kindergarten class, and I was really slow at writing the letters, insisted on completing the projects I began, was highly emotionally reactive, and had poor phonological awareness.
So, I never considered the idea of me ever being popular as even remotely likely. So it really bothered me when the counselor would say, "You know, they wouldn't be picking on you if you weren't (X weird thing)." I would say, "Yeah, I get that - I never asked to be popular. But I do demand my basic right to a safe education as a student, as an American, and as a human being be respected, just as the school rules, the state educational code, and the Constitution of the United States have promised."
Ideally, I would've just left the school and started at the community college, if I had known that option was available, though I did miss sixty-one days of school not counting the times I skipped classes in the middle of the day. But I thought it was either private school (couldn't afford) or public, and the private school probably wouldn't have been much more rigorous, but they would have the ability to kick out problem students (unless their parents were major donors or connected to the school somehow...)
The biggest problem I see in how schools deal with bullies is they, IME, take the established guidelines for a common situation, and try to apply it to lots of different situations where it may not be the best advice. They don't really modify the approach unless the situation is plainly on the extreme end of things, and in my own experience, the most extreme times were met with approaches that did not differ from how they'd treat swearing at a teacher. Their faces got that serious look, and that little hushed sigh of concern before going into the standard "I hear your pain" psycho-pablum voice.
My dad taught me when I was eight, that if someone hit me, I ought to hit back, do anything I needed to get them away and get out of there, that I shouldn't hold back on retaliating just because I'd get in the same amount of trouble as the assaulter. As it turned out, even more punishment than the original assaulter was pretty common.
I wanted to exact some kind of revenge on the worst offenders, and planned elaborate revenge fantasies, but although I would have felt no remorse killing the worst two who had put me under threat of death, I never considered going through with it in real life, because being put on trial for killing a bully when no one believed they did what they did, and those who do did everything they could to discount your credibility, would have been the ultimate in secondary wounding.
Also, the Columbine case which is often trotted out for the "they'll snap and kill everyone" trope, from what I know Harris and Klebold were not poor, bullied outcasts. They were bullies themselves, more than the victims of bullies retaliating. I was ten when that happened, and the people at school, when making fun of me, say, "What are you going to do? Shoot us all like Columbine?" I could just roll my eyes and wonder how stupid you would have to be to suggest that the person you bully imitate someone who actually shot up a bunch of people at school. "Watch your back."
Also, this "zero tolerance" policy is crap. The people you end up punishing with it are the people drawing pictures of shooting people (which should certainly get the attention of the psychologist to make sure they aren't actually dangerous/disturbed, but unconditional expulsion is a little extreme), wearing clothes that still have a pocketknife from a fishing trip, and the people who defend themselves from violence the school officials don't do anything about. We need students to know who they can contact about this stuff when they can't turn to their school officials or their parents.
Like a way to go straight to the police, or counseling centers, particularly for people who are less worldly (like a socially retarded person such as myself) and may not have the wherewithal to walk straight to the police department, so they stay in the office where they begin to buy the lies they are fed that they would be doing damage if they told their parents, that their parents would view them as damaged and at fault, being groomed to fulfill the sick kicks their sociopathic counselor gets from this manipulative relationship. When you punish someone all their life whenever they take the initiative to get something done every time they go through all the official channels, you squelch the belief that these official channels are ever good for anything. Maybe one of those hotlines they have, or something.
Perhaps you could find a more reliable, more informative source and cite that, instead.
