The Election Fraud That Wasn't

Curmie Award and eight consecutive education-related entries notwithstanding—this was never intended as an education blog. It was always intended to be wide-ranging, often political, and more of an excuse to keep up my writing skills than anything else. So, despite a couple education stories on the back burner, we return to politics… or a variation on the theme, at least.

There’s one of those crazy conspiracy theory e-mails currently making the rounds of late—this one claiming all manner of election fraud, because (subtext) real Americans wouldn’t vote for a black Kenyan Indonesian fascist socialist Muslim atheist like Barack Obama. Oh, and the media are engaged in some huge cover-up because they’re all Anti-American Commie pinko feminazi bi-sexuals. They’re probably left-handed, too, but some of them cover it up pretty well. Such inanities are neither new nor the exclusive purview of the lunatic right: there’s all kinds of stuff out there about how Anonymous prevented Karl Rove’s minions from stealing Ohio in 2012 (just like he did in 2004), and similar flights of fancy. But there’s a difference between this particular delusion and most of its predecessors on both the left and the right: there isn’t just a lack of evidence this time; the claims (well, most of them, anyway) are demonstrably false.

It is certainly possible that more Florida voters in 2000 intended to vote for Al Gore than intended to vote for George W. Bush, although, as I’ve said before, “people too stupid to figure out a ballot disproportionately supported our guy” kind of lacks pizzazz as a rallying cry. It’s even plausible—extremely unlikely but plausible—that Bush didn’t really get more votes in Ohio than John Kerry did in 2004. The key thing here is that we don’t know, so the more paranoid members of the losing side are granted a certain amount of free rein for their fantasies.

This time, however, there are specific claims that can be put to the test, and our friends at Snopes.com did precisely that. I’d actually seen a variation on this e-mail posted on Facebook by a conservative acquaintance (FB terminology to the contrary notwithstanding, I seriously doubt that I could call anyone who believes this crap a “friend”). There are a total of eight claims in the version of the e-mail examined by Snopes. Of these, Snopes finds precisely zero to have merit. Surprise!

To be fair, I’m a little skeptical myself that there are 59 Philadelphia-area voting districts in which Mitt Romney didn’t receive a single vote. The e-mail claims that’s “a mathematical and statistical impossibility.” Snopes, citing research from the Philadelphia Inquirer sees evidence only of “a general historical trend widely seen throughout the city.” And they literally couldn’t find a Republican voter in some of those precincts. So… maybe…

True, Philadelphia voted 85-14 for Obama, and no one expected (or should have expected) anything but a blowout. Interestingly, Obama won slightly less convincingly than most of the other Democrats did in that area. Still, no votes for Romney in 59 voting districts? Hmm…

OK, so Romney won only 7% of the African-American vote nationally. And let’s say that an urban black voter in the City of Brotherly Love is 100 times less likely to vote for Romney than the national average. That puts the GOP challenger at .07 percent likelihood of getting the vote of an individual, randomly selected, African-American Philadelphian. But the article says the areas in question often contain “between 200 and 500 voters,” and remember, there are 59 of them. If we go with the lowest number, that’s 11800 votes (200 times 59) with nary a Romney supporter. The chances of some one person voting against Romney, then, are 99.93%; the chances of every person voting against Romney are (.9993)^11800, or roughly 0.025%. That’s about 1 chance in 4000. No, that’s not quite on the scale of probability numbers for, say, global warming. And it’s not “a mathematical and statistical impossibility.” But do I think there was some manipulation or suppression or other chicanery? Yes. Yes, I do.

And the fact that the numbers this year mirror those of four years ago isn’t proof of a fair election, only of an equally fair election to a previous one that might well have been rigged in the same way.

Indeed, the strongest argument that all those people really did vote for Obama (or at least not for Romney) is the palpable desperation of the rest of the e-mail. (This is a repeat of the phenomenon I refer to as the Christine Vole effect, by which an essential truth is overlooked because it is surrounded by so many untruths.) My personal favorites are the next two on the list, both dealing specifically with Wood County (i.e., Bowling Green), Ohio. You see, “[in] 21 districts… Obama received 100% of the votes where GOP Inspectors were illegally removed from their polling locations—and not one single vote was recorded for Romney. (Another statistical impossibility.)” Moreover, “106,258 voted in a county with only 98,213 eligible voters.”

This is indeed damning evidence… or, rather, it would be if there were a grain of truth in it. Alas for the tin-foil hat brigade, there is not. All it takes, really, is a glance at the official numbers. Snopes did that; the creator of the viral e-mail either didn’t bother, can’t read, or didn’t think anyone else would check. Any way you slice it, s/he just made shit up. The precinct-by-precinct breakdown shows that, whether “GOP Inspectors were illegally removed” or not, and I’m skeptical at best of the claim, the fact is that President Obama didn’t get all the votes anywhere in Wood County, let alone in 21 different locations: Obama won the county fairly narrowly, 51-46; his widest margin was 76-23. And no, there weren’t more votes than eligible voters: in fact 64,342 votes were counted from 108,014 eligible voters. Where those other numbers came from is anybody’s guess, but they certainly bespeak a higher priority on proving a point than on telling the truth.

Ohio—this time Ohio County (state unknown) also figures into another of the e-mailer’s delusions: that “[in] Ohio County, Obama won by 108% of the total number of eligible voters.” The fact that this “sentence” is such a grammatical and syntactical nightmare that I’m not even sure what it’s intended to say is, in and of itself, a pretty fair indication of the intellectual rigor involved (a point I make repeatedly, and with little success, to my students). But, as Snopes points out, there are three Ohio Counties in the country (in Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia), and Romney won them all. Or was that supposed to be “in an (unnamed) Ohio County”? After all, the demonstrably false numbers for Wood County do show a 108% voter turnout. Who knows? But, again as I tell my students all the time, I’m going to grade your paper based on what you said, not on a best-case scenario of what I think you might have meant. And if the best case is that you’re repeating a point as if it were further evidence, and that point is founded on absurdly faulty data, well, your best course of action just might be to STFU.

Snopes debunks the rest of the allegations, too, but they fall at least within hailing distance of honest mistakes: a confusion between “cards” and “ballots” in Florida, and an overstatement about the relationship between voter ID laws and Obama’s success: it is (predictably) true that Governor Romney won every state that required a photo ID (photo ID being the GOP’s selected cause to pretend to care about fair elections), but he also won a lot of states that don’t have such a requirement, at least not yet.

It shouldn’t escape our notice that every allegation of impropriety was in FLOHPA. No one in over a half century has won the presidency without winning at least two of the three, all of which are nominally “battleground states,” although Pennsylvania is, as Nate Silver points out, “the only state in the nation that has been unfailingly Democratic-leaning relative to the national popular vote in every presidential election since 1950” (in other words, Republicans carry it not infrequently, but only by lesser margins than the national popular vote). To me, that’s another variation on the theme of why the Electoral College is an anachronism at best and an anti-democratic leviathan at worst, but that’s a rant for another day. And it shouldn’t surprise us that Ohio, where the loony left is convinced George W. Bush’s minions stole the 2004 election, and Florida, where even rational people of both parties were skeptical about the 2000 debacle, should not be the subject of ululation from the loony right.

Was there actual fraud in Philadelphia? It isn’t certain, but I think the phrase “beyond reasonable doubt” is operative. This isn’t, of course, a Democratic-specific phenomenon, although the first examples to come to mind—Albany, NY; Washington, DC; and of course Chicago—are notorious for their Democratic “machines.” One of the most memorable faculty meetings I ever attended featured a resolution by a friend in the Sociology Department that if local politicians insist on bribing our students to vote for them, at least they do so off campus. The proposal went nowhere, with one senior professor chastising his junior and (gasp) Yankee colleague for seeking to “change the local way of life.” (Much chuckling ensued.) That was the GOP in Kentucky, for those of you keeping score at home.

At the very least, such allegations are legitimate interpretations of available evidence. But while the ethics of voter fraud are the same regardless of the outcome, it is still relevant that President Obama would have won the election without Pennsylvania, and would have won Pennsylvania even if he took only 90% instead of 100% of the votes in those Philadelphia polling places.

But the whole point here is to de-legitimize President Obama’s re-election. And that is serious business: not merely unethical, but seditious. I don’t care what your politics are, undermining faith in the electoral process without something more compelling than made-up numbers is intensely damaging to the nation. Look, I think my current Congresscritter, Louie Gohmert, is one of the biggest buffoons ever to trod the planet. The district’s cumulative IQ goes up a couple of points every time he heads off to Washington. If there were anything I could do, legally and ethically, to get him replaced by someone chosen at random from the local phone book, I’d jump at the opportunity. But I have no doubt that he got more votes than his opponent in November. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll stop embarrassing us. Who knows? Maybe someday he’ll get too crazy to be re-elected even in this gerrymandered safe district. Until then, though, he’s what we’ve got, and we need to find a way to carry on.

This is a tactic I recommend to my colleagues on the right. Because, as the checking snopes.com before forwarding dumb e-mails Facebook page commented on their link to the Snopes article, “Sore losers or actually fraud? Looks more like the first.” Yep, sure does. And that hurts us all.

Announcing the Winner of the 2nd Annual Curmie Award

The votes are counted, and the winner of the 2nd Annual Curmie Award for the person or institution most embarrassing to the profession of education is… Lillian Gomez, the Florida teacher who decided that marinating Play-Doh and crayons in hot sauce and feeding the concoction to her autistic students would be a good way to teach them not to put things in their mouths.

Gomez collected 27 votes from the 50 voters (up from 32 last year), who, since they could vote for multiple candidates, generated some 103 individual votes. Certainly she is a worthy recipient, reminiscent of last year’s winner, the unnamed teacher who crammed an autistic student into a bag designed for gym balls. Voters were clearly appalled by Gomez’s actions, which of course were even more problematic given the fact that her victims were special needs kids.

This year’s Curmie runner-up, with 22 votes, is John Rosi, the Washington state teacher/coach who not only condoned the bullying of a student in his class, but actually participated. The pusillanimous administration that let him off with a slap on the wrist shares in his dubious honor.

Third place, with 19 votes, and the winner of the Institutional Subdivision, is Umatilla (FL) High School, which punished a high school student who defended a mentally challenged girl on her schoolbus against a gaggle of tormentors.

Other nominees, in descending order of their final finish: Northside ISD in San Antonio (16 votes) for demanding the use of “smart” IDs that can track the whereabouts of every student at all times… except, of course, the bad kids who take the damned thing off; and Geneva (IL) Middle School South (10), which demanded access to a student’s Facebook account to check rumors about her (they also asked a bunch of questions that suggested more prurient interest than concern for student well-being).

Rounding out the list, with three votes apiece, were the Griffith (IN) Public Schools for punishing students for private Facebook conversations, American University anthropology prof Adrienne Pine for breast-feeding her child during class and then going all feminazi on a (female) reporter for the school newspaper, and Highland (IN) Middle School for suspending a group of adolescent boys for inadvertently viewing a topless photograph of their teacher on a school-issued iPad.

A couple of rules changes may be in order for down the road: I’m thinking that the requirement that the events in question must have happened within the calendar year may be too restrictive—sometimes the events themselves barely make news; it’s the ensuing court case (for example) that brings an event to Curmie’s attention. Also, of course, anything that happens in the last couple of weeks of the year is likely to be overlooked while I’m hip deep in grading and then often (as this year) travelling for the holidays.

I think we need to divide the categories, too. For the second year in a row the Curmie has commemorated an egregious case of abuse by a teacher. Certainly such conduct is utterly unacceptable, and the perpetrators should never be allowed in a classroom again. But the Curmie isn’t for the most reprehensible conduct; it’s for the greatest embarrassment to the profession, and whereas I wouldn’t open up the award to a vote if I didn’t intend to abide by the outcome (hear that, PolitiFact?), I see far greater long-term damage done by other nominees, specifically administrators who had time to think about the consequences of their actions.

Umatilla High’s actions are outrageous because the victim of administrative cravenness and pomposity is not merely innocent, but in fact heroic. Stormy Rich, the girl at the center of the controversy, not only did the ethical thing by defending a fellow traveler (in more than one sense of the term) who was unable to defend herself, she made repeated attempts to get the administration to do their damned jobs and take appropriate action. It was only when they proved to be somewhere between negligent and slothful that she intervened.

The other cases all deal with schools’ over-reaching sense of authority: to demand access to a private Facebook account based on little more than caprice, to suspend students for (obviously) joking about “killing” a classmate in a private Facebook conversation that took place outside school hours and off campus, to track the whereabouts of every student at every moment, and to threaten dire consequences to those who will not willingly acquiesce. In short, there are a lot of school administrators out there who regard students as some sort of glorified lab rats whose every action, no matter how private, should be subject to their voyeuristic, Big Brotherly gaze.

And that situation is going to get worse as schools increasingly rely on daft zero tolerance policies and are desperately chasing after increased numbers—numbers on standardized tests that do nothing to demonstrate real learning but make big money for corporations who contribute a lot of money to political campaigns; numbers of student butts in seats so attendance-based financial allocations can be sucked up; numbers of students “counseled,” thereby justifying pulling resources out of actual classroom instruction and channeling them into the rabbit warren of administration.

I detest “teachers” like Gomez and Rosi, and I respect the decision of the voters who put them at the top of the list of Curmie candidates. Still, they are aberrations, and no objective observer would think otherwise. They shock us because they are so palpably outside the mainstream. The folks at Northside, Griffith, and Highland shock us because we sense they’re a portent of things to come. There’s this gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach that there will be more and more school districts who think it’s their job to control every aspect of their students’ lives: anything to avoid actually teaching them.

But I digress. This post is to celebrate Lillian Gomez and her well-deserved Curmie Award. I suggest the trophy be dipped in hot sauce and crammed down her throat.

No Burning Love for the Jordan, Utah School Board

There’s still time to vote for the 2012 Curmie Award (go here for descriptions of the nominees; voting continues until Tuesday morning), but we’ve already got our first 2013 contender. Since the concept of offensiveness figures prominently in the story, I shall endeavor to refrain from overly colorful language in describing the school board in the Jordan, Utah district. Suffice it to say I would suggest they perform actions recently recommended to Harry Reid by John Boehner.

It is, alas, a depressingly familiar tale. Just in the relatively short time I’ve been writing this blog, there was the pusillanimous idiot in Pennsylvania who shut down a production of Kismet (yes, Kismet) because—get this—the central characters are Muslims. More recently, it was the hypocritical and lazy administrators in Ohio who fired the director/choreographer of Legally Blonde, which had been vetted (or was supposed to have been vetted, at least) by the powers-that-be before the contract was signed with Music Theatre International. And there have been others I heard about but didn’t have a chance to write about, and no doubt many others that escaped my notice.

The details hardly matter, but here’s an overview. Last year, a different school in the district did a production of Dead Man Walking, which upset the Utah Eagle Forum—N.B., not students, or parents, or anyone the current jargon refers to as “stakeholders,” but a radical political group—who argued that the play “was filled with profanity, sexual language, racial slurs, political bias and ‘inappropriate use of biblical teachings.’” These last two are especially ironic epithets coming from that lot, one of the crazier collections of strident and narrow-minded politicos and pseudo-Christian zealots ever to be gathered anywhere outside the Tea Party caucus. But let’s move on.

As has become the wont of school boards across the country, the folks in Jordan showed all the moral courage of limp lettuce, and capitulated to the loonies. They instituted a new policy this summer, requiring consent forms to be signed by parents, and “more parents will serve on the school and district committees that select which plays to produce.” The first part of this new strategy is silly but innocuous; the second part is idiotic, at least if the news article accurately portrays the process.

It is not a good idea to have parents as much as sign off on choices. It is stupid to have them actually making those choices, which involve all manner of considerations about which the average parent is profoundly ignorant: they won’t be concerned with the available talent pool (which varies enormously year to year); with the balance of leads to chorus roles; with staging considerations regarding sets, costumes, lights, etc.; with the difficulty of the music for both singers and instrumentalists; with directorial preferences (there are musicals I’d be happy to do—it’s not out the realm of possibility that I’ll be doing one of them this summer—and others for which I’d choose the poke in the eye with a sharp stick); with balance for the rest of the season and over a student’s career; even with the ratio of male to female roles.

No, what parents want is a good role for their kid. Oh, and a title they’ve heard of. Carousel is one of the creepiest plays ever; Henry Higgins—our hero—is a condescending, sexist, erm… sphincter in My Fair Lady (far more so than his Shavian predecessor in Pygmalion); Godspell requires a conflation of John the Baptist and Judas; all the heroes of West Side Story are gang members; the best songs in Jesus Christ, Superstar go to Mary Magdalene and Herod; the title character in Sweet Charity never strays far from her origins as a prostitute in the Fellini film on which the musical is based; “Hernando’s Hideaway” from The Pajama Game (done right, at least) drips with sexuality; Luther Billis cross-dresses in South Pacific, and extra-marital sex is taken as a given (albeit never made explicit). Need I go on? Does anyone doubt that every one of these titles would be approved without as much as a whimper of dissent?

Whatever the wisdom of creating a parental review board, however, there’s one objective fact at play here: the new standards were established after the district had signed a contract with Theatrical Rights Worldwide (TRW), who controls the rights to All Shook Up, a musical that ran for six months on Broadway a few years ago. I don’t know the play, but I’ll trust blogger Adult Onset Atheist that it:

has a thin but popular plotline revolving around teen angst and an authority’s disapproval of “entertainment.” Some people trace this plot to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, but the myriad of derivatives has cemented it as a well-worn plot device whose ties to any source earlier than the 20th century is accidental. It is more likely that the authors of All Shook Up owe more to the 1980’s movie “Footloose” than the play written in 1601.

(Read his entire post and the follow-up, by the way.) Anyway, you get the idea.

Ah, there’s the rub. To you and me, Gentle Reader, this sounds like entertaining, if perhaps relatively mindless, fun. But to a gaggle of censorious buffoons who no doubt swooned to the actual Elvis the Pelvis in their own youth, ah, well, we can’t suggest that… you know… today’s teen-agers are intrigued by (whisper) sex, or something, or that the choreography to accompany Elvis songs might involve a little butt-waggling. Remember that consummate hypocrite Ed Sullivan was happy to attract the audience Elvis would bring, but wouldn’t allow him to be photographed below the waist… in 1957! Even in Utah, however, most people have escaped the ‘50s.

Anyway, the play was allowed to head into rehearsal, during which time no one from the administration bothered to read the script, attend a rehearsal, or otherwise check out a play that was based on the appeal of biggest sex god of his generation. And, remember, this was a play that had already been approved. It apparently occurred to no one in authority that the new regulations might make a show that was acceptable under the old standards to be problematic under the new ones. Moreover, a subsequent news article suggests that “district officials said they failed to give All Shook Up careful scrutiny.” This, apparently, was the fault of the production staff and the students instead of the people charged with providing that scrutiny, as they were the ones punished for district officials’ incompetence.

Everything was fine until a single parent (apparently) complained. It is unclear—because the school board prefers to do the bidding of anonymous whiners—whether this was the parent of a student involved with the production, i.e. someone who had signed a consent form (!), or the parent of another child at the school. In the former case, it might, might, be reasonable to pull your own kid from the show. In the latter case, the obvious solution is… wait for it… don’t go.

But that’s not how angry moralistic zealots behave. Nope. If I, in my infinite, ignorant, arrogance decide that something is offensive, then nobody gets to enjoy it. And the single protest worked. The school board did their best doggie obedience school riff: they rolled over and played dead: morally, ethically, pedagogically, and probably legally dead. Because, as school board mouthpiece Sandy Riesgraf intoned, “We don’t want to offend anyone.”

I’m not sure that I can improve on the commentary of a very wise young woman named Jennifer Fortson (a former student of Curmie’s, I’m proud to say), who responded to that inanity on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page,

ANYONE? That seems a lofty (read: unattainable) goal. Know what offends LOTS of people? Schools who are so concerned with being PC that they have no problem screwing over dozens of students, directors, and volunteers who did their due diligence a year ago and have done nothing wrong since...

My only tweak would be that I’m not sure it’s a PC issue: more of having no core values, no respect for free expression, and no moral courage. But we end up at the same place: what is offensive to any real educator isn’t that someone might say a naughty word, or shake a bottom a little suggestively, or challenge cultural norms: it’s that they’d be forbidden from doing so by an organization whose primary charge is (or… erm… sanguinarily well ought to be) to instill in students those very principles of intellectual and aesthetic curiosity.

Of course, the board also proclaimed—without checking—that “the musical could not be changed to be less offensive because of copyright laws,” thereby necessitating cancellation of the show. (At least they kind of get the concept that you can’t just arbitrarily change an artwork without permission.)

The board also decided they could get their money back from TRW. It is indeed possible that there might be a partial refund for the royalty (and part of the payment might be based on ticket sales, which of course would be zero), but the hundreds of dollars for script and score rentals: not a chance.

Anyway, it was apparently in the attempt to get the refund that they actually took the ridiculously obvious step of… you know… calling TRW. They did this, of course, after announcing the show’s cancellation. Because if you’re stupider than snake spit, that’s how you do things. And they found out that the rights-holders might be amenable to some modest changes. So, after incurring the wrath of all and sundry in the community, and the fecal matter started to interface the whirling rotors on the Interwebs, the board brought the show back in a Bowdlerized version. (They won’t even make public what changes they requested and were permitted to make.) Whoopee!

This is a mixed blessing, but at least an instructive one. I kind of wish TRW had told school officials to perform an act most readily accomplished by contortionist hermaphrodites. As it is, every idiot administrator (as always, apologies for the redundancy) will want to carve out his or her own special brand of censorship, not just for this show, and not just for TRW-owned properties. Every moralistic yahoo who doesn’t think it’s right that Emile DeBecque had had children with a Polynesian woman will now be on the horn to Rodgers and Hammerstein (the company, not the guys) to whinge about “community standards.”

But the whole scenario does bring certain truths into greater focus, and there may be lessons for sane people in all this. Just assume, in other words, that school boards will always take the more craven alternative. Given a choice between standing up for real education and capitulating to a loud-mouthed boor, for example, they’ll always opt for the latter. But that also means that they’ll cave again if we get louder than the opposition. Because school boards in general can be counted on for two things: they’re dumber than dirt, and they have no core values.

This is an important, even if not positive, lesson for our students as well as ourselves. Because these people really are stupid… erm… Oedipally-inclined personnel. It’s good to know. Small solace, to be sure, but good to know.

Nominations for the 2012 Curmie Award

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the announcement of the nominees for the 2012 Curmie Award, awarded to the person or institution who most embarrasses the profession of education.

As I wrote last year, “the transgressions in question must be directly related to the profession, to someone acting in an official capacity: junior high teachers who sleep with their students are abhorrent, but there’s nothing about that act that links directly to education. That there are unethical teachers is not news, and the same person might initiate a similar relationship with a child s/he knows through church, Little League, or the neighborhood.”

I’ve also decided that the Florida school nurse who denied an asthmatic student access to his inhaler because of a paperwork snafu wasn’t acting in the capacity of educator at the time: she’s a heinous bitch who should be sued and fired, but not a Curmie nominee. And I think I’m going to eliminate the colossally stupid decision by the Florida State Board of Education. Boards of Education are generally more political than pedagogical, and are comprised almost exclusively of non-educators; you don’t really embarrass a profession to which you don’t belong.

The only further stipulations are that the events in question must have occurred within the 2012 calendar year, and that I must have written about the story, also in 2012. I realize that the former requirement means eliminating stories like the ones about jock-protecting at the University of Montana and at Southern Columbia Area High School in Catawissa, PA, as well as a depressingly similar story I haven’t yet written about at Trotwood-Madison (OH) High School. It also takes out the story of handcuffing students to banisters in Jackson, MS.

Perspicacious readers will notice, too, that there are no nominees this year from the wide world of standardized testing cheats: those who help students with answers, those who misreport scores, and so on. It’s not that these people are unworthy Curmie-winners; I just didn’t happen to write about any of them this year (unlike last). Also, two trends seem to emerge: this year’s list is more weighted towards public schools than towards universities, and towards the tendency for schools to pry into the private affairs of students without either the legitimate authority to do so or real exigent circumstances. Curmie the civil libertarian seems to be ascendant. Make of that what you will.

The rules are simple. From over 40 contenders, I decide on the eight finalists (there are no write-ins); you (collectively) decide on the winner. In determining the finalists, I have tried to weigh a variety of factors: the egregiousness of the offense on its face, the extent to which it might be portentous of further bad things to come, any sense of particular injustice (punishment of the innocent or even of the heroic, for example), the degree to which the Curmie-worthy outrage might have been a spur-of-the-moment outburst rather than a deliberate act, any mitigating circumstances, whether the problem seems to have been appropriately addressed, whether the case looks a lot like a different nominee, etc.

You, of course, Gentle Reader, are free to place whatever weight you choose on any of these factors. Remember, however, that the award is for the greatest embarrassment to the profession, not for the most heinous individual act, nor the one that pisses you off the most, which might well be different.

If you wish to comment, please do so here rather than at the Facebook page. Remember that your comments should be in addition to, not instead of, voting in the poll in the upper right corner of the page. You may vote for as many nominees as you choose, although I ask that you not vote for the same candidate more than once: no ballot-stuffing, please. The poll will be up for a week (until 10:00 a.m. CST on January 8), with a winner to be announced as soon as possible after that. So: there are the rules. Don’t like ’em? Fine. Write your own damned blog.

So… honorable mentions first. These are the candidates who came in 9th through 15th on my list. If one of your favorites is here (or if it didn’t even make this cut), I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is: not everything fits. Trust me, there’s some really Curmie-worthy stuff that didn’t even crack the Top 20. In the order I wrote about them, then, the honorable mentions.

--Administrators at Lanier Middle School in Sugar Hill, GA, for punishing a student who self-reported that he’d unknowingly brought a small pocket knife to school.

--The powers-that-be at Jack Robey Junior High in Pine Bluff, AR, for defending a “school resource officer” who had used military grade pepper spray to clear a congested hallway.

--Aurora (CO) Public Schools, for charging a 6-year-old with sexual harassment for quoting the lyrics of a popular song to a classmate.

--Tanya Dixon-Neely of North Rowan (NC) High School, for a protracted pro-Obama screed featuring more than a few objectively untrue statements.

--The good folks at Wagoner (OK) High School, who forced a number of classes at the public high school to watch an anti-abortion propaganda film that compares abortion to the Holocaust… complete with film of Adolf Hitler.

--Principal David Smith and the rest of the merry band at Prague (OK) High School, who sought to deny the class valedictorian her diploma because she’d said “hell” in her commencement speech.

--Wilson Elementary School in Oklahoma City, for making a kindergartener turn his University of Michigan shirt inside out because of a policy put in place to curtail gang activity. A University of Oklahoma shirt would have been fine, by the way.

Yes, those are just the honorable mentions… pretty impressive list, huh? And now… (drum roll)… the finalists for the 2012 Curmie.

School administrators at Geneva (IL) Middle School South, for asking intensely personal questions about a 13-year-old student’s sex life (without even notifying the girl’s parents), and demanding that she open her Facebook account for their inspection… all based on a rumor. In aggravation: the image of school administrators as voyeuristic bullies. In mitigation: the fact that the overwhelming majority of what we know comes from the girl’s mother, who might not be the most objective source.

Authorities at Umatilla (FL) High School who punished a high school girl for protecting a mentally challenged student who was being bullied by a gaggle of mean girls on the school bus. Naturally, the actual bullies were unaffected. In aggravation: the girl did everything right. She appealed to the bus driver and to school authorities, and only intervened when they failed to do so. In mitigation: there are harsher punishments than not allowing a student to ride the bus to a different school than she attends.

Griffith (IN) Public Schools for suspending a trio of 8th-grade girls for joking in a private Facebook conversation about which of their classmates they want to “kill.” In aggravation: the conversation was private, off-campus, unrelated to school, and obviously in jest (as an ACLU lawyer pointed out, “if you make a legitimate threat against someone, you don’t follow it up with an emoticon”). In mitigation: what if this was that one in a trillion moment when a joking threat was a disguise for a real one (the TSA excuse)?

American University anthropologist Adrienne Pine, for breast-feeding a sickly infant in class, then going ballistic when asked about the episode by a student journalist. In aggravation: publishing the journalist’s name, failing to understand the basics of how reporting and editing works, generally being an asshat. In mitigation: at least an argument regarding some exigency to the breast-feeding per se.

The euphemistically-termed brain trust at Northside ISD in San Antonio, for requiring Smart IDs that track student whereabouts at all times. The chip-implanted cards are required for everything from using the library to voting for Homecoming royalty. In aggravation: the IDs intrude into the privacy of good students while doing nothing to solve the problem they were intended to address. In mitigation: nothing but desperate whorishness... I’m not sure that counts.

Authorities at Highland Middle School in Anderson, IN, for suspending and threatening to expel a quartet of 13-year-old boys who completely inadvertently stumbled upon a topless photograph of their teacher on a school-issued iPad. In aggravation: these are pubescent boys, handed a picture of a topless woman. Of course, they’re going to look. And it was a school iPad. In mitigation: it’s unlikely the boys were given permission to look through photo files; they’re still innocent of what they’re charged with, but perhaps not quite the victims they pretend to be.

Kopachuk (WA) Middle School teacher John Rosi, for not only tolerating the bullying of a smaller boy by a dozen other kids, but actually joining in, and to the school administrators who gave him only a slap on the wrist. In aggravation: an apology letter that drips with sanctimony. In mitigation: the outside possibility that he really didn’t understand that this kind of “horseplay” isn’t really horseplay.

Lillian Gomez, a teacher at Sunrise Elementary School in Kissimmee, Florida, for force-feeding crayons and Play-Doh soaked in hot sauce to autistic students to teach them not to put things in their mouths. In aggravation: Duh? You need aggravation? In mitigation: too much like last year’s winner?

There you have them, ladies and gentlemen... the Curmie nominees. Have at them.

Last-Minute Curmie Contenders: Abusive Teacher Edition

One last pair of last-minute Curmie contenders, this time the Abusive Teacher Edition.

Applicant #1 is John Rosi of Kopachuk (WA) Middle School. For one 15-minute period last February, in a class allegedly devoted to reading and math preparation, students abused a classmate. They dragged him around the room. The carried him by his arms and legs. They peeled off his socks and stuffed them in his mouth, then wrote on his feet. They buried him under chairs and under pillows. (One moment is captured at right.)

Where was the “teacher,” Rosi, during this? Joining in. Yes, joining in as a smaller boy was bullied by the entire class. He sat on the boy, saying he was feeling “gassy.” He poked the kid in the stomach. The whole thing was recorded on cell phones, Rosi knew it and… get this… mugged for the cameras.

Rosi, of course, isn’t really a teacher at all. He’s a wrestling coach, and a moron. In one of the most disingenuous apologies since Pierre Corneille (shout-out to veterans of my theatre history class), he proclaims that he “[knows] the difference between inflicting pain and innocent horseplay,” and that he viewed the incident as a “chance for the kids to take a break from the daily grind.”

He’s either lying, or his shoe size exceeds his IQ by a factor of two. The physical pain experienced by the boy is the least of his worries, as anyone with the slightest understanding of adolescence can attest. And that a teacher would not merely condone but actually participate in this brutality ought to get his sorry ass fired.

It wasn’t, of course. He was suspended for 10 days and re-assigned. This is a guy whose base salary is more than mine (I’m a full professor at an accredited university, with a PhD and over 20 years of full-time teaching experience), and that doesn’t count the $10K coaching add-on. You’d think he might have the sense God gave a louse. Nope. But his false piety paid off (he’s a coach, after all). In a school run by a competent principal, in a district administered by a superintendent who actually cared about his students, Rosi would not only have been fired before he could blink, he’d have been lucky to escape without jail time. Not with the likes of Acting Superintendent Chuck Cuzzetta: it wasn’t a complete abrogation of every tenet of professional ethics; it was “inappropriate classroom management,” and Rosi’s punishment was “pretty significant.” Not in my book.

How do you top that? Well, maybe with this year’s variation on the theme of last year’s Curmie Award Winner. Remember the teacher who stuffed a special needs kid into the equivalent of a gym bag? Well, Lillian Gomez (left) of Sunrise Elementary School in Kissimmee, Florida, apparently asked herself, “how about soaking crayons and Play-Doh in hot sauce and force-feeding the concoction to autistic students? Yeah, that will teach those brats not to put things in their mouths.”

The good news here is that the school district, the Osceola County system, seems to have acted appropriately. They got rid of her. And she appealed… to a judge… who recommended that she not be fired. Really. Apparently, however, that was a recommendation rather than an order, and… write this down because it doesn’t happen very often… the school board stood up on its hind legs and said “no.”

Jay Wheeler of the school board said, “We decided to put child safety first, and not put somebody back in the classroom that intended to do harm to children.” This might seem obvious to most people, but this is somebody on a school board, so it’s actually something of an event that Wheeler and his comrades decided to do the right thing instead of the easy thing.

The fact that Gomez is no longer in the classroom—no thanks to an idiot judge who cares more about intent (whether she intended to punish students) than volition (she absolutely intended to hurt students, whatever the specific motivation for her actions)—is a good thing, but it doesn’t change her suitability for a Curmie… it’s just that the district doesn’t get to share in her ignominy.

So there you have it: the final two candidates for the coveted Curmie. It is, alas, a long list, and there were plenty of stories I missed. I hope to have the nominees decided and the poll up tomorrow. Happy New Year, everyone!

Last-Minute Curmie Contenders: Stupid Decisions Edition

We’re still scurrying towards the finish line to get a few more Curmie contenders into the mix. This iteration is the Stupid Decisions Edition. There are almost too many candidates to be able to narrow the field much, but here’s a quintet of my favorite whoppers. It’s a pretty broad category, so I’ve suggested a few subheads.

The clear winner in the Not Even Legislatures Are as Stupid as State School Boards Division goes to the great state of Florida, whose state Board of Education decided in November to establish different standards for different students, based on race. Yes, on race. Not on a combination of variables—economic status, parental education level, etc. Nope: race. Actually, other taxonomies are considered, but separately: the result is the same as if other categories weren't considered at all.

That this is one of the most colossally heinous ideas of the millennium is self-evident. It perpetuates the myth of African-American and Hispanic inferiority, undermines the accomplishments of schools, teachers, and students of all demographic profiles, and further excuses inequities in funding and other real-world means of leveling the proverbial playing field. Rather than adopt a strategy to raise achievement levels for all constituencies, the state board institutionalized different standards as a recognition of reality and as a means of continuing a waiver from some parts of the NCLB act.

Here’s the relevant part of the new policy:

The board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent.

Yes, you see, Asians are smart, and blacks are stupid, so of course we can’t expect them to achieve at the same level. This mind-meltingly inane policy manages to be condescending and balkanizing at the same time. It treats students as numbers rather than as individuals, ignores those of mixed race (like, say, the guy in White House, for example), plays to the most destructive fantasies of both the loony left and the loony right, and generally succeeds in being the single most inane state school board decision in years… and I say this as an educator in Texas, where an SBOE ruling that was merely counter-productive and inept would be hailed as progress.

The Big Brother Arrogance Subdivision was captured by the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio. Not content with the inherent invasion of privacy of “smart” student IDs that track students’ locations at all times, these idiots have upped the ante: students who refused to bow down to the Orwellian gods

cannot access common areas like the cafeteria or library, and cannot purchase tickets to extracurricular activities. WND reports that the district has threatened to suspend, fine or involuntarily transfer students who fail to comply and officials have noted that “there will be consequences for refusal to wear an ID card as we begin to move forward with full implementation.”

Oh, and they can’t vote for Homecoming King and Queen, either.

The rationale for this hugely intrusive program is, of course, money. The powers that be are, to put it kindly, whores. They’ll do anything for money—in this case funding that is based on attendance—including implementing an inane program the has no chance of success (if I’m going to go truant, I’m not going to take my stupid badge with me), and which, since all students are subject to this monstrosity of a rule, punishes the good students in a vain attempt to control the activities of the bad ones.

It is none of the school’s damned business where students are when they aren’t in class, and if you want to have them in class at the appointed hour, try giving them an education worth having. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, associated with implementing this policy should be fired on the spot. Now.

The Outrageous Punishment of the Innocent category is claimed by Highland Middle School in Anderson, IN. An unidentified teacher had synched her iPhone to her school-issued iPad. Apparently she wasn’t thinking, and a topless photograph of her popped up when a quartet of 13-year-old boys were playing a game on the iPad. Needless to say, they looked.

The result? Why, the boys were suspended and threatened with expulsion, of course. Even the Assistant Superintendent, an intellectually deficient creature named Beth Clark, grants that the image appeared quite by accident. The teacher, whose actions were reckless but not (apparently) volitional, was punished in some unspecified way, but kept her job. That probably makes sense: if, as appears to be the case, she inadvertently mishandled technology, she learned a lesson and won’t make that mistake again. If it was intentional, it will happen again, and the walls had better come tumbling down. The students, who did literally nothing wrong—and no one suggests otherwise—became pariahs. Uh, no.

This is yet another case of a school administration being either too craven or too dim-witted (or both) to be smarter than the rulebook. Discretion, people. Seriously.

The Nanny State Run Amok Division was captured easily by the lunatics running the asylum in the Grand Island (NE) Public Schools. Three-year-old Hunter Spanjer is deaf. His name, in S.E.E. (Signing Exact English, the sign language he uses), is based, not unreasonably, on the notion of hunting: hunting/Hunter… get it? That means a gesture that sort of resembles a weapon. Sort of. Decide for yourself. That’s Hunter in all his threatening glory at right.

But that apparently violates—wait for it—the “weapons in schools” policy that forbids “any instrument that looks like a weapon.” Seriously, how can these people feed themselves? First off, a hand is not an “instrument.” We’re done, already. Secondly, it’s his name, and the only way he has of identifying himself. Thirdly… did I mention that he’s three?

School mouthpiece Jack Sheard intoned that “We are working with the parents to come to the best solution we can for the child.” Hey, I’ve got an idea, Jack. How about you try not being a fucking moron? Would you give that a whirl? It’s a stupid policy to begin with, but you can’t really blame the document for this one. Someone… some adult with pretensions of competence… decided that a three-year-old signing his name was a violation of a weapons policy. The mind boggles.

Be it noted: the school reversed its policy (while pretending otherwise, of course) after being humiliated locally and, thanks to bloggers, internationally. That hardly matters. That anyone, anyone, would even for an instant consider young Hunter to be anything like a threat is too ridiculous for words.

Finally, there’s the Censorious Asshat category (thanks to our friends at Popehat for the appellation), won this go-‘round by Principal Christopher Kloesz of Loveland High School near Cincinnati. He fired Sonja Hansen, the theatre director/choreographer of the school’s recent production of the stage musical version of Legally Blonde, which, by the way, got standing ovations every night, for violating one of those intentionally vague “code of conduct” tenets.

According to Hansen,

Kloesz… cited “bootie-bounce dance moves” and the use of the word “skank” in the script. Loveland, along with most schools across the U.S., has a strict no-alcohol policy, and Hansen was cited for a scene in the musical that includes a champagne party involving a group of buttoned-up Harvard University students. She pointed out that it was not staged as a rowdy college party….

Hansen said she was shocked by the administration’s negative reaction to Legally Blonde after the school produced the full version of Grease in recent years, as well as Beauty and the Beast last spring “with a huge tavern scene and beer mugs.” Students also used real cigarettes as props during a scene in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. “I didn't hear any complaints,” Hansen recalled, noting that the Loveland High production of Grease, which includes drinking, smoking, sexuality and teen pregnancy in its script, had higher ticket sales than Legally Blonde. “I never saw anyone leave. We had no one ask for refunds,” she said of Legally Blonde’s run.

At first glance, this is just a case of a principal who is arrogant, prudish, cowardly, stupid, and inconsistent. That in itself would be enough for legitimate Curmie consideration… but it’s worse than that.

The school administration had signed off on the show when the contract with Music Theatre International was signed months ago. The word “skank” is right there in the script. So is the drinking scene (and perhaps someone ought to explain the concept of aesthetic distance to the dim-witted Mr. Kloesz). I’m willing to bet the choreography was less risqué than what happened at the Homecoming dance. Rehearsals had been going on for months, and were open. In other words, Kloesz (who was new to the position this fall) didn’t honor commitments made in the school’s name, and, in addition to being… well, a censorious asshat, is also too fucking lazy to do his job (assuming censorial powers to be a legitimate part of the job at all) and read the script, attend a rehearsal, or otherwise abort the project before people spent literally thousands of hours of work on it. Better yet, tell Hansen you don’t want X, Y or Z next time: don’t fire her for doing her job, just because you didn’t do yours.

Superintendent Dr. John Marschhausen seems to be not quite as stupid as Kloesz (that’s pretty stiff competition, after all), but even more craven. He issued an apology to Hansen even as he was signing off on her dismissal. Stand up to the guy who works for you, you pusillanimous putz!

I’ll give the last word to the creators of the play—composer Lawrence O’Keefe, lyricist Nell Benjamin, and book writer Heather Hach. Here’s a statement they sent to Playbill:

We have no idea what the superintendent's statement means. We are surprised and disappointed that an educator who put on a show about a woman succeeding through education was fired for it. Any show that tries to be smart and funny may offend some people, but Mrs. Hansen and her students looked beyond that and saw the positive message of tolerance and female empowerment at the heart of the show. We only wish the school administration had done the same. We applaud the parents and students who supported Mrs. Hansen.

Yeah, what they said.

So, there you have it… the Stupid Decisions Edition. I may try to squeeze out one more compendium before the end of 2012… but it might not happen.

By the way, I’m indebted to Jack Marshall for bringing the last three of these stories to my attention. You can read his commentary here, here, and here, respectively.

Last-Minute Curmie Contenders: Anti-Obama Edition

We’ve had our share of overzealous educators interjecting their political opinions into the classroom and other school-specific activity. In March, I wrote about Michael Denman, who seemed to think that requiring his students to do what amounted to opposition research for the Obama campaign (without a concomitant project about the Obama campaign) was a good idea. In May, it was Tanya Dixon-Neely who rambled semi-coherently about how you can get arrested for criticizing the President and similar nonsense. In June, it was Tom Stack, who disinvited a commencement-related speaker after determining him to be (gasp) conservative. And Lynette Gaymon added screaming at a student for wearing a Romney/Ryan shirt to the mix.

Needless to say, not all the perpetrators of this sort of unprofessionalism are liberals or Obamaphiles. And so, as we scramble to fit in a couple more Curmie contenders, we offer the other side of the political equation: a pair of idiots on the other side of the political divide.

First up is Linda White, a science teacher at Clinton Jr. High in Mississippi, who argued that President Obama shouldn’t be re-elected because he’s a Muslim, unlike “good Christian” Mitt Romney. OK, this is remarkably stupid from a number of perspectives.

First, why is any teacher arguing for anyone’s election or non-election? Second, why is a science teacher talking about the election at all to people who can’t vote? Third, it’s a matter of bigotry, not politics, to argue for or against a candidate because of his religion. Fourth, any rational and objective observer would argue that Mr. Obama is more of a traditional Christian than Mr. Romney, who, as a Mormon, would not be considered a Christian at all by most mainstream denominations (except, of course, by those more interested in electing Republicans than in worshipping God).

It’s bad enough that a teacher would introduce politics into the classroom. To spew demonstrably false information as the basis for a political rant, however, has got to set a new standard for unprofessional behavior. Yes, I know the same could be said for Dixon-Neely. I’m just trying to decide whether it’s worse if the inaccuracies are worse if they’re related to the teacher’s alleged expertise (Dixon-Neely) or about a subject the teacher shouldn’t be talking about to begin with (White).

After the election, it was the turn of a Delcambre (LA) Elementary School teacher, subsequently identified as Mandy LeBlanc. According to multiple students, LeBlanc showed up at school the day after the election dressed in black, mourning the “death of America” after Obama’s re-election. And America is the “new China.” And Michelle Obama’s nutrition program will have kids looking like “toothpicks” in a matter of months. And… so on.

I suppose it’s a good thing that the crap LeBlanc was spewing was at least a matter of opinion—stupid opinion, but at least opinion. Of course, there’s also a racial element to this whole business. There is only one black teacher in the entire school system, and there are allegations that a couple of (black) parents who complained about LeBlanc’s antics were fired from their janitorial jobs in the school system as a result of their protests.

I have no idea whether these charges of racism have merit. It’s pretty clear that the school is protecting LeBlanc, and that she’s unfit to be in the classroom. Beyond that… who knows?

I should mention here that there are other criticisms by teachers of Obama and/or the election which really do fall under the heading of free speech. Yes, threats of violence are inherently unacceptable, and over-the-top political rants are ill-advised, but that line is hard to draw. If I say I’m glad Obama was re-elected, is that OK? What about if I say I’m glad the amoral plutocrat didn’t get the gig? What if I call Romney a lying weasel fit only for fertilizer? The answer, to me, is that anything I say outside of the classroom, even if public, ought to be protected except in the case of threats, sedition, etc. I don’t lose my constitutional rights just become I’m employed as a teacher at a state university.

And, by extension, those public school teachers whose politics are different from mine ought to have the same protections. That would include Sharon Aceta, the Rock Hill, SC teacher who was briefly suspended for violating the school’s social media policy. Her Facebook post, on her personal page: “Congrats Obama. As one of my students sang down the hallway, ‘We get to keep our fooood stamps’...which I pay for because they can’t budget their money...and really, neither can you.” So freaking what? Yes, it’s a dumb comment, and likely (but not necessarily) a lie in that I bet she didn’t actually overhear a student, but it’s protected speech and the school system’s argument that “Sometimes you just can't speak out publicly about what you'd personally like to say, about anything” is frankly, more than a little creepy.

The same line of reasoning applies to unnamed Columbus, OH teacher who posted the following to his personal Facebook page: “Congrats to those dependent on government, homosexuals, potheads, JAY-Z fans, non Christians, non taxpayers, illegals, communists, Muslims, planned murder clinics, enemies of America, Satan You WON!” Wow. I mean, that’s some pretty choice stuff. Is this someone I want teaching my kids (if I had them)? Probably not. But a single heat-of-the-moment Facebook political rant isn’t enough to prove that he’s anything more sinister than someone with whom I’m not likely to see eye to eye politically, and the district was right not to over-react.

I should also mention that Facebook posts and tweets about students are a different matter. Depending on context, they could be simply letting off steam (I do this not infrequently). But naming names or calling students stupid (as opposed to having done something stupid, which intelligent people do all the time) does cross the line.

So… there’s the anti-Obama Curmie crowd: two teachers for in-class antics, a school system of overstepping its own authority, and one dumb comment that rightfully drew an investigation but no punishment that we know of.

Last-Minute Curmie Contenders: Dress Code Edition

It’s the end of the year and Curmie is behind on his writing, so this is the mad flurry to try to get potential Curmie Award nominees eligible by writing about them in 2012. This post is the dress code edition (there have already been a couple of good examples of dress code stupidity this year: turns out I barely scratched the surface); it includes a range of stories from throughout the year. I do apologize, however, that a couple of the following will be based on a single news source. I’m normally more conscientious, but I want to get all this written up. I’ll be sure to check other sources if any of these stories lead to an actual Curmie nomination.

Let me start by mentioning in passing a case that isn’t Curmie-eligible because, as far as I can determine, no educator has done anything wrong. This is the Rebecca Julius case at Concordia College in Minnesota. Ms. Julius wore a “sin is sin” shirt in response to the straight-gay alliance group’s “love is love” t-shirt. She has a right to do so. She created a firestorm for herself. That’s OK, too.

Free speech doesn’t mean other people aren’t allowed to respond to the stimulus you provide; it means you can’t be punished by official authorities (the state, in other words). Other than provoking precisely the response she wanted, Ms. Julius seems to have suffered no ill effects. I find nothing to suggest she was forbidden from wearing the shirt. Moreover, as a private, church-affiliated school, Concordia would have had the legal (not to say ethical) right to forbid the shirt, making all the 1st Amendment-based howling from predictable quarters, to use one of my mother’s favorite phrases, so much balloon juice. I do want to come back to this case later, but I make no promises that I’ll do so.

I’m also skipping the story about Maverick Couch, the gay Cincinnati-area high school student who won his court case for the right to wear a “Jesus Is Not a Homophobe” t-shirt because the events actually took place in 2011, although the case was decided this year. And I’m skipping a couple other cases where the clothing in question really could be considered offensive or disruptive or whatever, even though I might not personally agree with that assessment. Trust me, there’s still plenty to talk about.

We start, then, early in 2012 with a story I missed when it first occurred: the decision by Pottstown (PA) Middle School Principal Gail Cooper to ban Ugg boots from her school. No, this was not the fashion police. This is one of those situations in which some fairly dim-witted authority figure seeks to solve Problem X by outlawing something that has no reason to be outlawed. It’s this kind of thinking that means you now have to jump through hoops to buy Sudafed, because someone might use those pills as ingredients for their meth operation. (Be it noted: it’s also the reasoning that suggests that criminalizing all gun possession or ownership is an appropriate solution to the problem of gun violence.)

The problem is two-fold. First: it’s a dumb rule on its face. This is Pennsylvania in the winter. It snows there. I just saw snow in Pennsylvania at Christmas. I am confident that this was not an aberration. “Outdoor, open-top boots” are kinda de rigeur at least a few days a years. And, of course, there’s nothing problematic about the boots themselves: it’s their capacity to hide a cell phone that’s really at the center of this kerfuffle.

Secondly, the rule is both gendered and ineffectual: boys don’t wear Uggs. The suggestion that the new rule is no different from requiring students to remove coats and hats is, of course, silly. Boots must be removed and replaced. That means a change of footwear stays in the locker, or must be schlepped from home every day. And since the rule is gendered, the idea—asserted on a Facebook post—that girls who really want to violate the cell phone ban can do so by hiding the offending objects in their bras (or pockets, or…) seems plausible. BTW, did anyone else just have a flashback to that scene at the end of “Diamonds Are Forever” in which Tiffany Case tries unsuccessfully to hide something roughly the size of a cell phone in her bikini? Of course, if there are a lot of middle-schoolers in Pottstown who look like Jill St. John in her prime, Curmie is rather jealous that he wasn’t twelve at a different time and place.

If you want to ban cell phones, do it. And make the punishment sufficient that the problem gets solved. Done. Banning Ugg boots is both stupid (leading to cynicism about rules in general) and no-doubt ineffective (leading to contempt for the system): not exactly what we ought to be teaching our adolescents.

In Meridian, CT, there are different horrors: skinny jeans, leggings, and women’s cut t-shirts. Yes, apparel that is “form fitting” is verboten. Also, “undergarments and private body areas must not be evident or visible through clothing.” There are also the usual admonitions about skirt length, yadda yadda yadda. Part of this makes sense. But, as usual, the people writing the policy (it passed, of course, in the then-imminent school board vote mentioned in the linked article) are either illiterate (certainly a possibility, given some of the grammatical nightmares therein contained) or prudish or just flat-out stupid.

As written, the policy would ban any indication that a student is wearing undergarments… a bra-line, for example. Of course, it’s also prohibited to suggest that such undergarments aren’t being worn. The whole idea is both silly and doomed to failure, completely apart from the legitimate concerns expressed by teachers’ union rep Geoff Kenyon that the new rules would create an “us vs. them mentality” and “[channel] too much valuable time, energy and resources into a futile pursuit.” Sigh.

A few months later, in Oklahoma City, a kindergartener was forced to turn his t-shirt inside out because it violated the school’s dress code. Was it political? Was there profane or obscene language? Did it advocate violence? Well… no. It was a generic University of Michigan shirt. Oh, that explains it. Because… well… OK, I give up.

Ah, but you see, at Wilson Elementary School, there’s a policy that gear from professional teams (even the Oklahoma City Thunder) and universities is forbidden. There’s an exception for Oklahoma universities… sources disagree about whether all OK universities (Oklahoma City University, for example) are exempted or whether it’s just OU and OSU that get a waiver. Anyway, it’s a profoundly stupid rule, created “[in] cooperation with the Oklahoma City Police Department Gang Task Force… after concerns that nationwide gangs used popular sports clothing to represent individual gangs.”

This is the same kind of circuitous thinking that gives us bans on Ugg boots, with the further twist that gangs presumably wouldn’t want to associate themselves with a couple of major universities, but would with others. Because, you know, I gotta admit: when I see a five-year-old in a Michigan shirt, I don’t think “that’s cute; probably one of his parents went there.” Nope. I jump straight to “gang member.” Really, I mean just check out the thuggishness on display in the photo at left.

Two points. First, gang task forces exist for one purpose only: to make it look like gang task forces serve a legitimate function. If they actually solved the problem, their alleged expertise would not only be unnecessary (i.e., the status quo), but would be perceived as the waste of resources it truly is, which of course is a situation that must never be allowed to occur.

Second, it doesn’t matter that the district is now re-examining the policy, or that the little boy was adopted by the Michigan athletic department. It was an unspeakably cretinous rule from the get-go, and the fact that it was enforced even once, on a five-year-old is all the evidence we need to make this a legitimate Curmie contender.

Elsewhere, twelve-year-old Danielle O’Neal is a felon waiting to happen, at least according to the Pamlico County Schools in North Carolina. She… oh, the horror… had her shirt untucked and (wait for it) visible under her sweater. In public, no less. Not only that, but this criminal mastermind is a repeat offender. Only last year, she forgot to wear a belt. I know, I know, the next step is mass murder… or, even worse, mismatched socks.

Yeah, yeah, I get it. Rules are rules. But even ridiculous rules (no belt? really?) can be enforced intelligently. Instead, somebody made a stupid announcement that there’d be no more warnings, and there’s nothing in the code to distinguish between serious and minor violations. This is why, Principal Lisa Jackson, someone created the concept of discretion. Nope. This is serious. The girl needs to serve an in-school suspension and have the episode be recorded in her permanent record. After all, “my job is to make sure students follow our school's Code of Conduct, which includes the dress code adopted by the Board of Education.” Bullshit. You job, you freaking idiot, is to be smarter than the rule book. Tell the damned kid to tuck in her shirt. Boom. We’re done.

And please, please, Superintendent Wanda Dawson, spare me from claptrap about how enforcing a dress code has improved success rates… or provide some evidence for that assertion. Either way would be fine. It is plausible that eliminating gang paraphernalia and other forms of legitimately inappropriate attire might have a positive effect. But I await with bated breath the study that demonstrates that an untucked shirt on a 7th grade girl sends educational accomplishment into a death spiral.

Meanwhile, in Ohio, at Celina High School this political season (the story I read was datelined on Hallowe’en), crudely drawn t-shirts announcing “I support” with the rainbow logo were deemed “political” or “disruptive” or some other sort of Really Bad Thing that the idiots in the school administration decided was sufficient cause to ban those shorts but not, apparently, shirts proclaiming the President of the United States to be a socialist.

You, Gentle Reader, will have already perceived that there’s a backstory here. Earlier, on “twins day,” two female students had worn t-shirts labeled “Lesbian 1” and “Lesbian 2.” Naturally, the administration was Shocked and Appalled that two young women would Call Attention to Themselves in such a despicable manner, especially on a day pretty much reserved for… uh… calling attention to yourself. It wasn’t that they were lesbians. Oh, no, surely that had nothing to do with it. We’re not homophobic assholes; we just pretend to be when we’re at work. Not only that, but “[screaming] at” students is the appropriate means to deal with the situation.

It’s interesting that the administration’s point person on this is the Superintendent, Jesse Steiner, who was reportedly “unable to confirm” if there’s a rule in the handbook against “political” clothing. It’s reasonable if there is, but, of course, there isn’t. How do I know? Because the superintendent can’t open up the damned handbook and point to it. End of discussion.

The “disruption” idea is, to be sure, the kind of squishy phrase inserted by Steiner and like-minded autocrats in schools across the country. Translated into English, it means “there’s nothing illegal, unethical, or immoral about what you’re doing, but we don’t like it and we’re going to forbid it because we can.”

Drew Dennis, a litigation coordinator with ACLU Ohio, aptly describes the “disruption” argument a “heckler’s veto.” Moreover, there’s a pro-life student group that wears t-shirts featuring a picture of a fetus. Which shirt calls more attention to itself? And which one has been fine all along, whereas the other causes such uproar that the educational mission cannot be accomplished? You, oh perspicacious reader, already know the answer.

Also from this fall’s political season—a little earlier than the Ohio case, in fact—comes the saga of Samantha Pawlucy, who committed the apparent crime of wearing a Mitt Romney t-shirt to her geometry class at Charles Carroll High School in Philadelphia. Although her attire hadn’t as much as raised an eyebrow earlier in the day, she claims she was berated by math teacher Lynette Gaymon, who likened her “Republican shirt” to “a KKK shirt” (Gaymon is black, by the way), arguing that “this is a democratic school.”

Gaymon claims she was joking, and it’s possible although unlikely that she was. Certainly Pawlucy comes off as an opportunist with a lawsuit against the school, and her claim that she didn’t know if her parents are Republicans is either disingenuous or evidence that the girl is an idiot. Still, if Gaymon weren’t the real miscreant here, I suspect we’d be hearing from someone other than her that the episode was all in jest.

It will no doubt come as an enormous surprise to you, Gentle Reader, but Curmie’s own teaching style occasionally incorporates the ironic or even sardonic. There have been occasions in the last 33+ years in which something said as a joke was interpreted literally: and that’s by college students, not high school sophomores. But with Pawlucy’s claim that Gaymon was “screaming,” the opportunity certainly exists for someone else who was there to say, “erm, no, she wasn’t,” or to claim that any rational being would have interpreted the remarks as in jest. The fact that such an eventuality has apparently not occurred can be taken as significant.

Despite the conflicting claims, then, and despite the fact that I don’t especially trust either Pawlucy or her father, I’ve got to suspect that her version of events is closer to the truth. And if it is, then Gaymon’s actions are well beyond the Pale, and worthy of Curmie consideration.

More Curmie wannabees forthcoming...

I'm an Educator, and I'm OK

It’s almost time to vote for the Curmie Awards, and my fatigue or sloth or whatever else has kept me from writing will soon keep some worthy candidates out of the running if I don’t get to work. (One of the completely arbitrary and capricious rules is that I must have written about the story during the calendar year.) So here’s what we’ll do. I’ll try to write about as many stories over the next few days as holiday travel and internet connections allow… then the voting will actually take place in the new year, seeing that all signs now point to there being one after we seem to have survived yet another imminent apocalypse.

Before I launch into those nominations, however, and given the recent events in Connecticut, I feel compelled to make one thing absolutely clear. Readers who know me personally don’t need to be told this, but whereas I have no way of knowing who actually reads this blog, I do know that over half the people who “like” the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page aren’t my personal friends. That means there are, one presumes, at least a few dozen of you who may not know this: I am an educator, and I am proud of my profession and of the overwhelming majority of the people in it.

The teachers and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary were and are heroes, not because they did what no other teachers would have done, but because they did precisely what every teacher worthy of the name would have done: out-think evil-doers, sacrifice themselves for the sake of their young charges, and prove once again the power of love. Even the jabbering minions of the NRA can’t deny the simple fact that this was a game-changer: not simply has the gun lobby been put on the defensive in a way that all those other mass shootings never did (it’s up to us, Gentle Reader, to maintain that advantage), but the demonization of the teaching profession was just summarily de-railed. Bam.

I have always said there are two kinds of teachers: those who will walk through the fires of hell for their students, and those who won’t. There’s really no in-between. If you’ve got what it takes, whether you’re teaching kindergarteners or grad students, you’ll find solutions. If you don’t, you’ll find excuses: excuses for your own failings, excuses for those of your students.

Our job is often to say “no.” It is often to incur anger or resentment. It is often to be ignored in the classroom and ridiculed in the hallways. It is to tell the truth—politely, encouragingly, but unequivocally: that paper, that presentation, that performance… it wasn’t very good. I know you thought it deserved an A. But it’s a C+. You can do better.

A few years ago, one of my students had done good but not excellent work in one of my classes, and she got the B she deserved on a couple tests in a row. She said, probably truthfully, that she’d never had to work so hard without getting an A. I said something non-committal and went on about my day. The next test, she aced. Apparently—I don’t recall this, but she says it’s true—I wrote a note next to the encircled “A” in her blue book: “I knew you could do it.” She remembers those words now, two degrees later. Set their bar high, and expect them to clear it. Set your own bar higher, and forgive yourself when you fail to reach you goal. (N.B., there’s a difference between forgiveness and acceptance.)

Our job as educators is not to be the equivalent of the favorite aunt or uncle who loads the kids up with candy and then passes them back to the parents to deal with the effects of over-stimulation. No, we’re more parent-like… the term in loco parentis has passed out of favor; the legitimacy of the need for a parental substitute—even at the university level, let alone in elementary schools—is absolutely as real as it ever was. One of my students a few years ago wondered aloud how many people like him—post-adolescent men and women—I had “fathered” (his term). The answer is probably dozens. That’s not because I’m out of the ordinary. It’s because I’m not.

So when I ridicule the incompetent, the corrupt, the bone-headed, and the pompous in my own profession, it’s not because of some inchoate self-loathing. On the contrary. There are cowards and charlatans in every endeavor. And it’s a big country, with lots of worthy recipients of an award for most embarrassing the profession. The interwebs hum along, and nary a transgression in Spider Breath, Montana or Pigeon Puke, Mississippi stays out of the public eye for long. But the reason for the Curmie is that education, like every other profession, needs to be more self-policing.

The idiots who stuff special needs kids into gym bags as punishment, who pander to the wealthy, who abridge free speech in the name of some ill-defined notion of “comfort” or enforce idiotic dress codes: these are not the face of my profession I want shown to the public. They are the minority, but they must not be allowed to prosper when so much is at risk.

But for right now, let us talk instead of the folks at Sandy Hook. They did what teachers do. Rachel D’Avino, Dawn Hochsprung, Ann Marie Murphy, Lauren Rousseau, Mary Sherlach, Victoria Soto: these women took a bullet—literally—for their kids. Show me a lawyer or a stockbroker who’ll do that for a client. Go ahead. I dare you.

The most important thing to remember, however, is this: these educators didn’t become heroes in death. They’d become heroes years before… in their lives.