SB5: Some Thoughts from a Male Texan

Curmie doesn’t cry much. Wednesday, a little over a week ago, was an exception.

There was the goodbye scene towards the end of Godspell, which had its first dress rehearsal in the morning and its second in the evening: these were tears of emotion, and of pride that the cast and crew had done such excellent work.

There was the devastating news that a friend and student—and the fiancé of a Godspell cast member—had been killed in a car crash. Those tears were all about pain… I struggled, reasonably successfully, to keep them from hitting my cheeks: I needed to be the strong one for a couple of hours. I blubbered like an infant the next morning, but no one saw me.

Early Wednesday, there were the SCOTUS decisions on DOMA and Prop 8. They brought a tear to my eye, too, especially that this court would align itself on the right (as in “correct”) side of history instead of (as I feared) the right (as opposed to “left”) side.

But the story that made me sob with pride was what transpired in Austin, Texas on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning. Most readers of this blog will know the basics already, but I suspect this made fewer headlines nationally than it did here in Texas, so…

Like all the other GOP politicos who pretend to favor small government but are all about intrusion into the lives of anyone who isn’t rich, white, heterosexual, Christian, and male, Texas Governor Rick Perry sure does love to impose his ideological and theocratic will on the populace. Obviously, in the state that has the worst record in the country for job creation relative to changes in the workforce, that has the lowest voter turnout in the nation, that places last in healthcare and in percentage of the population with a high school diploma… surely in such a Utopia, there can be no issue more urgent an issue than regulating the state’s uteruses. After all, if contraception were to be readily available and abortion services within the financial and geographical reach of the state’s women, how could we remain #1 in teen births, let alone let them fillies know who’s boss? And who cares if the bill’s sponsor in the Texas House doesn’t know what a rape kit is? Right? ‘Murica.

And so it was that when Governor Goodhair’s minions couldn’t get their act together to pass the most restrictive anti-abortion bill in the country (at the time… Ohio may have since lurched even more emphatically into a previous century), there needed to be a special session, right? After all, the fact that there is nothing wrong with the status quo except the under-funding of women’s health services shouldn’t be taken to mean that there isn’t an emergency to be solved only by paternalistic intervention, right? Indeed, a bipartisan poll suggests that the majority of the Texas citizenry doesn’t want the bill passed, at least under these circumstances (in much the same way, one suspects, that the attempts to recall hugely unpopular Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker failed: people might not like the status quo, but they don’t like to feel like they’re parties to the manipulation of the system, either).

And let’s be real: there was no real purpose to the special session other than to pass this one bill, outlawing abortions after the 20th week and imposing a series of restrictions on abortion centers and the medical staff who work there. The first part of the bill may have merit, but it is patently unconstitutional (at least in the opinions of SCOTUS, who collectively represent the only opinions that matter); the second half of the bill, like so many causes championed by 21st century Republicans, creates an utterly fictitious problem and solves that phantom dilemma through the most repressive means imaginable, in this case de facto shutting down over 88% of the state’s abortion facilities. But the GOP, for all their gerrymandered supermajority, couldn’t get it done. Oh, sure, the bill sailed through the House, but it got stalled just long enough in the Senate for a Hail Mary pass by a 50-year-old pink-sneaker-clad Senator named Wendy Davis.

Davis announced her intention to filibuster the bill, and then made good on her promise. And off she went. Now, the thing is, Texas filibuster rules are different than those at the national level. You aren’t allowed any breaks at all—not even to pee. You aren’t allowed to as much as lean on your desk for support (one wonders about how someone with a certifiable disability would be treated). You’re not allowed to take even a sip of water. And you have to stay on topic. Jimmy Stewart was a wimp by comparison.

Naturally, there was a cat and mouse quality to the exercise. Davis, needless to say, was searching for anything vaguely on-topic to talk about; the GOP establishment eagerly pounced on anything that might constitute a violation of the rules. The most impressive thing about Davis’s performance wasn’t that she held the floor for nearly 11 hours (she used a catheter to prevent the need to leave her post to obey the proverbial call of nature): it’s that she went that long without straying from the topic even a little. Both of the “violations” cited by Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst, who is trying very hard to be as stupid and corrupt as his boss, were marginal at best: discussions of required sonograms and of Planned Parenthood funding would strike me as germane… but then, I’m not an ideological jackass (a jackass, yes, but not an ideological one). The other “violation” in the three-strikes-you’re-out policy was when a colleague helped her adjust a back brace. It’s a technicality, but at least it’s real.

So Davis’s filibuster didn’t work. The goal was to talk through midnight, when the special session would be officially over. She got shut down at 10:03 pm, after an impressive but nonetheless insufficient 10 hours and 45 minutes. What Davis did, however, was to bring the finish line within sight.

The Guardian (time to ask once again why the best reporting on American politics comes from British newspapers) reports the ensuing events as follows:

A rush of procedural motions and inquiries by Democrat senators delayed the final vote on the bill. [Letitia] Van de Putte asked for a summary of previous points of order, saying she had been away from the senate attending her father's funeral.

The leader of the Democrats in the senate, Kirk Watson, began what amounted to his own filibuster.

With less than 15 minutes to go until midnight Van de Putte asked what a female member of the senate had to do to be heard over her male colleagues. She believed she had raised a motion earlier but was not heard.

It was at this point the crowded public gallery began chanting and cheering. A vote was called on the SB5 bill but the noise was at such a level that voting was suspended until order was restored.

The gallery appeared to take this as an invitation to ramp up their noise for the remaining 15 minutes, with encouragement from Democrats on the floor. The session ended in chaos and confusion, and without the vote being completed by midnight.

Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst promptly declared that the vote had indeed been taken and that the motion had passed. Then he claimed that there was some sort of special time-out—similar to the ones employed by 8-year-olds on the playground, one presumes—that meant that the fact that although the vote wasn’t really taken until after midnight, it should count, anyway. There is considerable evidence that the GOP honchos doctored the official record, which was originally (and accurately) timestamped shortly after midnight, to pretend the vote was taken just before instead of just after the witching hour. When I went to bed that night, it looked like they were going to get away with it. But when I awoke on Wednesday, it was to the news that Dewhurst, confronted with incontrovertible proof that his assertions were… erm… bovine feces, had conceded defeat in the wee hours of the morning.

It didn’t take long, of course, for the GOP to re-group. Governor Goodhair called yet another special session to begin this Monday. The bill will almost certainly pass this time, because the idea that a Texas Republican might actually exercise a little intellect, discretion, or restraint is roughly equivalent to suggesting that a hungry piranha might save a little food for later. And Davis has already said she won’t filibuster this time, acknowledging that “you can’t have a 30-day filibuster.”

My response on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page follows:

To the surprise of absolutely no one who has paid the slightest bit of attention to his ultra-partisan, ideologically-driven agenda, his complete lack of basic human decency, his serial corruption, and his often illegal and almost always unethical political maneuverings, Texas Governor Rick Perry has called yet another special legislative session to ram through the restrictive and patently unconstitutional abortion bill that was derailed last night.

He'll probably get away with it in the short term, too, but even a quick read of Texas history leads inevitably to the realization that the greatest rallying cries are often born of defeat. Or perhaps, given his dim-wittedness, Governor Goodhair thinks the Alamo was a victory for Texas.

There will be repercussions. The attempts to tamper with official records will get publicity. Wendy Davis is already a household name in this state. And the GOP's obeisance to their religio-corporate masters will indeed be chronicled for all to see.

Yes, he'll probably “win” in the short term, but that “victory” won't be out of the public view. We will indeed see the fraud that is the man behind the curtain, and we will be the better for it.

As Curmie's cast sings “Save the People” in dress rehearsal of Godspell tonight, he'll be paying attention to the words:

“Will crime bring crime forever,

Strength aiding still the strong?

Is it thy will, O Father

That men shall toil for wrong?

“‘No’ say thy mountains

‘No’ say thy skies

Man's clouded sun shall brightly rise

And songs be heard instead of sighs...”

We'll be fine, everyone. Some fights take longer than others. We shall overcome someday.

Indeed, whereas the bill will probably pass this time around, it will not do so to the deafening yawns of the corporate media, which studiously avoided coverage of… you know… actual news.

And that is really the most important element of this contretemps: the entrenched establishments of both parties really aren’t fans of allowing citizens to have any real influence over political decision-making. Want to find out if a politician is honest? Ask about the events in Austin last week. Then ask about similar events with Tea Partiers in the roles of the orange-clad (mostly) women. See if one of those events is “what democracy looks like” and the other an “unruly, screaming mob.” Conversely, are we just trying to conduct the “people’s business” or to “suppress actual citizens”? Are our tactics fine until (gasp!) the other guys try them?

All that said, this was an impressive display by opponents of the bill, and I am very proud of the level of civic engagement evidenced by at least four of my former students, who were in the crowd that night. The fact that I agree with them on this issue helps. But part of my job as an educator is to inspire students to engage with the world, whether I agree with their perspectives or not. If I can turn out a theatre person or two, that’s nice. But Job 1 is to help create independent-minded, skeptical, informed, citizens. Spring, Kelli, Meghan, and Mercedes (there may be others who were there, but I’m sure of these) can represent me and my work any time. Even Especially if they’re a little less than polite.

When Real Educators Honor the Fake Ones... and I don't mean actors

Haven’t written here in forever… where to begin…

How about this: today was the commencement ceremony for my undergrad alma mater, Dartmouth College. The commencement speaker for the second year in a row was a faux educator who has done far more harm than good to the American educational system while simultaneously playing to the adoring squeals of media whores, corporate busybodies (hey, Bill Gates: I admit I know nothing about software… why don’t you do the same with respect to education?), and—alas!—people who should know better.

Anyway, last year’s speaker was Wendy Kopp, founder and CEO of Teach for America, one of those good ideas in theory which, looked at objectively, has been a colossal failure. The idea is to recruit the best and brightest from the nation’s top universities, then to turn them loose on troubled school districts to bring about REFORM. No one is willing to define exactly what that means, but it sure does sound promising, dunnit?

For another viewpoint, one that closely resembles mine, here’s Salon’s Andrew Hartman a few months ago:

From its inception, the media anointed TFA the savior of American education. Prior to a single corps member stepping foot in a classroom, The New York Times and Newsweek lavished Kopp’s new organization with cover stories full of insipid praise. Adulation has remained the norm. Its recent twenty-year anniversary summit, held in Washington, D.C., featured fawning video remarks by President Obama and a glitzy “who’s who” roster of liberal cheerleaders, including John Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, Gloria Steinem, and TFA board member John Legend. The organs of middlebrow centrist opinion—Time Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic—glorify TFA at every opportunity. The Washington Post heralds the nation’s education reform movement as the “TFA insurgency”—a perplexing linguistic choice given so-called “insurgency” methods have informed national education policies from Reagan to Obama. TFA is, at best, another chimerical attempt in a long history of chimerical attempts to sell educational reform as a solution to class inequality. At worst, it’s a Trojan horse for all that is unseemly about the contemporary education reform movement.

The original idea was to replace weak and often part-time or substitute teachers with bright and energetic—but, frankly, dilettante—recent college alums with good academic pedigrees but only five weeks of preparation. These alleged teachers would commit to two years in the classroom before moving on to “real” careers on Wall Street or wherever… you know, careers worthy of their skills. Veteran Fordham professor Mark Naison describes one promotional poster as urging college students to:

“Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School.” The message of that flyer was: “use teaching in high-poverty areas as a stepping stone to a career in business.” It was not only disrespectful to every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it effectively advocated using students in high-poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in “resume-padding” for ambitious young people.

Supposedly, at least according to early recruitment strategies, TFA-ers would enhance the reputation of public school teachers, because, you see, with so many of the nation’s academic elite working for them, all those career educator boats would rise in the new high tide of excellence. It really takes someone from the media/education/corporate elite to miss the condescension dripping from the rhetoric. I am frankly mortified but hardly surprised that my alma mater bought into this tripe.

Gentle Reader, Curmie is aware of the irony that he graduated with honors from an Ivy League school and never took an education course in his life (the perfect TFA-er!) and yet took up a career as a teacher, albeit at the university rather than primary or secondary level. It must surely seem strange for one such as I to be so adamantly opposed to TFA’s operation. The answer is simple, though no less ironic. There is no question that my undergraduate experience was extremely beneficial to developing my critical thinking skills—the very skills my alma mater seems to have abandoned in its fawning over the smug and elitist TFA agenda.

But the fact is that anyone with a functioning bullshitometer will be immediately skeptical of TFA’s grandiose claims. The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss, who actually covers education issues instead of merely opining about them, points out a host of problems with TFA’s hype: that the studies cited are unlikely to be peer-reviewed, that standardized testing just might not be the panacea that TFA and others claim it to be, that the single best predictor of a teacher’s effectiveness is experience (and, by definition, the TFA folks will have only one or two years on the job)… you get the idea.

Indeed, TFA has allowed school administrators and politicians more interested in slashing budgets than in educating students—and that’s a good many of the former and the vast majority of the latter—to save money at the expense of quality by laying off good and experienced teachers in favor of TFA drive-bys.

There are lots of other reasons to distrust TFA: the fact that few of the university students accepted into the program come from anything like the communities in which they will serve, for example. Obviously, people from higher socio-economic classes ought not to be precluded from participating in TFA or similar programs, but there does seem to be a systematic attempt to prioritize prestige over product in the selection of TFA “associates”: an apt metaphor, I fear, for the entire operation.

As Naison writes:

…the most objectionable aspect of Teach For America — other than its contempt for lifetime educators — is its willingness to create another pathway to wealth and power for those already privileged in the rapidly expanding educational-industrial complex, which already offers numerous careers for the ambitious and well-connected. An organization which began by promoting idealism and educational equity has become, to all too many of its recruits, a vehicle for profiting from the misery of America’s poor.

Still, if Kopp represents much of what we ought not to be celebrating in the American educational system, she’s not even in the same league of charlatanism as this year’s Dartmouth honoree, Geoffrey Canada, hero of “Waiting for Superman” and the executive poobah of the Harlem Children’s Zone, another ostensibly high-minded program designed to exploit public school teachers and students for the benefit of… well, Mr. Canada.

Whereas Kopp’s operation is at least forthright in its elitism and demonization of teachers’ unions (and teachers), for example, Canada is a full-out fraud. He’s the guy who insists that class size doesn’t matter, while keeping his classes to 15 (he sucks up gazillions of dollars in corporate largesse to be able to afford that). He’s the guy who claims that a good education doesn’t necessarily cost a lot of money while spending $16K a year per student. By the way, that’s just the in-class costs, not counting “the costs of a 4 p.m.-to-6 p.m. after-school program, rewards for student performance, a chef who prepares healthy meals, central administration and most building costs, and the students’ free health and dental care, which comes out of the zone’s overall budget.” So tack on another few thousand per student. The national average per student in 2011: $10,694.

Canada also bellows full-throatedly about his successes at raising test scores. Let’s leave aside the obvious points that test scores are not the sole determinant of educational value, or that non-school factors (family life, economic class, etc.) are generally conceded to play a greater role in predicting educational success than any changes in personnel or curriculum. For the sake of argument, let’s treat test scores as worth the paper they’re printed on, and we’ll even ignore Canada’s significantly better facilities and pretend that the playing field is even.

Let’s just look at the numbers. Canada crows that 100% of his students graduate. Well, yeah… if you add enough qualifiers. Of course, if you add enough qualifiers, you can make anything “true.” George W. Bush was, in fact, the greatest (Republican) President in (21st century) American history. What goes unspoken in Canada’s self-aggrandizing is the fact that his statistics are based on students who make it to senior year. He casually neglects to mention that he dismissed an entire class… twice! Even if we ignore those purges, Canada’s claims of 100% completion rate are at best misleading and more accurately described as utterly fabricated. There were 97 6th graders in HCZ in 2005-06; 62 graduated in 2012. That’s a little short of 100%: about 36% less, to be precise. The others? Some may have moved, although one suspects that this was relatively infrequent. The rest either dropped out or were removed.

I am not suggesting here that such figures are problematic in and of themselves. A school in a high-poverty area that graduates close to 2/3 of its students and places all or nearly all of those graduates in colleges and universities is doing something right. Indeed, I am always skeptical of extremely high retention rates. As a university professor, I am always interested in keeping our attrition rates low, but not necessarily “as low as possible.” We wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we gave passing grades for work that doesn’t meet reasonable standards, and—for as many different reasons as there are students who fail—some of our charges just don’t make it. That’s not the problem with Canada. It’s the misrepresentation that is so egregious that nothing he says should ever again be taken at face value. If he’s willing to lie about something that can be readily checked, what’s he going to say if he suspects there’s no way for the rest of us to find out the truth?

Moreover, even as the “Waiting for Superman” director David Guggenheim orgasms over the wonderfulness of Canada’s “reforms,” actual achievement is somewhat more down-to-earth. Diane Ravitch points out that “even Geoffrey Canada’s schools have many students who are not proficient. On the 2010 state tests, 60 percent of the fourth-grade students in one of his charter schools were not proficient in reading, nor were 50 percent in the other.”

In other words, by spending more money in better facilities, Canada was able to achieve some positive but hardly amazing results. Somehow I suspect that traditional schools could have achieved similar results without the hype and without paying $400K to the administrator in charge.

Which brings us back to Dartmouth. Two years in a row they’ve not only given an honorary degree to an educationist hack, but have chosen said anti-teacher, anti-student self-promoter as the commencement speaker. There were certainly other options—one of my personal heroes, Johnny Clegg, received an honorary degree last year, for example. What’s to be done? Well, I could cut my Alumni Fund contribution in half… that would send shock waves through the budgetary process, amounting to about .0000005% of the annual operating expenses. Or I could squawk ineffectually in a blog post. Yeah, I think I’ll do that.

What Educationists Could (Really) Learn from the NFL Combine

Four events from Curmie’s (much) younger days.

1. I was maybe ten. Someone at my school had bought a contraption (an Ur-version of a modern computer) that measured not only how accurately but how quickly students responded to a series of math and vocabulary questions. I was accused of cheating (how and why would I do that on a test that didn’t count for anything?) because I answered all the questions correctly in a time that would have been considered excellent for a college student.

2. I was in college. A friend was doing a psychology experiment on the effects of caffeine in various quantities. She’d read off a number and my job was to add 17 to it. She charted response time and accuracy. Then she bought me a coke, I drank it, and we repeated the process. I don’t remember how many times we did this. I do remember that every time, I answered correctly to every question and did so in a time a quantum step or two faster than any of the math majors she tested.

3. This was also in college, but in a different venue. Another friend would read off a three digit number, then start carrying on a conversation. After an appointed length of time—30 seconds, a minute, 3 minutes—she’d ask me to repeat the numbers. I did, accurately, every time. Then we repeated the test with letters: same result.

4. Because I did my MA in England, I was actually already teaching college when I took the GRE. My preparation for the math section was minimal: I did a little brushing up on algebra, but I didn’t take any test prep courses, and I hadn’t been in a math classroom in about five years. The night before the exam, I was at a party until about 4:00 before the 8:00 a.m. test, and yes, I’d had a couple of beers. With this unimpeachable regimen, I proceeded to get a perfect score on the math section of the GRE.

I don’t know why these related memories clicked into my mind yesterday morning, but I suspect it might have something to do with the ongoing debate about standardized testing: in particular, the comments of one John Barker. I’ve made it pretty clear over the years what I think of the increasing emphasis on standardized testing and the accompanying teach-to-the-test mentality that has infested public education in recent years. That is, whereas I grant the “objectivity” of these exams, I am skeptical of their accuracy, their relevance, their potential either to measure outcomes or to predict future performance, and even—in light of the cheating scandals we know about (and the certainty that there are those we don’t)—the integrity of the process. I’ve made these points repeatedly on this blog and its predecessor over a period of nearly eight years: here, here, here, here, here, and here, for example.

Mr. Barker, the chief accountability officer for the Chicago Public Schools, thinks otherwise. Well, duh. His job is to legitimize his own salary—well over twice mine, by the way—and to pretend that his ultimate boss, the despicable Rahm Emanuel, is something other than the venal corporate meat puppet he truly is.

The Barker quotation that’s attracting all the attention from the teaching profession is this: “My philosophy has always been that if it's a good test, teach to it.” This inanity encapsulates precisely the sort of folksy pseudo-sensibility that characterizes the accountability crowd. The implicit underpinnings of this argumentation are two-fold: that every student, everywhere, ought to be learning not merely the same basic concepts, but precisely the same thing, and a smug, unspoken assertion that the “good test” in question not only exists, but is employed universally. Needless to say, these self-serving rationales have something of the aroma of merde de taureau about them.

But I want to concentrate attention on another of Barker’s pronouncements: “I was watching the NFL combine last night, and these guys are running 40-yard dashes. If they haven't trained for that particular test, they're going to have a problem. But as you run the race in that particular test, you get better and you know more about yourself.” Seriously, he said that. Look, Gentle Reader, you and I both know that the comparison is inane. I’m pretty sure we can take as given that the sprints in question aren’t designed to increase participants’ self-knowledge.

And here’s where we return to the stories of Curmie’s youth. What, after all, was determined by the fact that I had scores that were (literally) off the charts on a couple of tests? That I was some sort of genius? Hardly. I was a bright enough guy, but all that was really determined was that I can do easy math really quickly and that I employed some basic mnemonic devices in memorizing number or letter sequences, even when I wasn’t intending to do so. I recall, for example, that one of the letter sequences happened to be a friend’s initials, a fact I noticed immediately and couldn’t “unremember” even though I’d been instructed not to try too hard to get the answers correct. And, of course, as an actor, I was used to finding (or creating) connections between seemingly unique data to aid in the process of (wait for it) memorization.

How’d I do so well on the GRE? Well, for one thing, they didn’t ask anything hard: no analytical geometry or calculus or probability, much less stuff I’d never seen before. Nobody does easy math better than I do. Lots of people do hard math better than I do. If you want somebody to add 17 to a two-digit number in a hurry, I’m your man. But when you start talking about natural logarithms and second derivatives, I’d really suggest that you look elsewhere. What these tests, any or all of them, didn’t show was whether I could memorize long strings of letters and numbers, or to do higher order math: addition (or even basic algebra) is a long way from calculus or set theory.

Thus, I’d like to look at the parallelism between that scouting combine and a standardized test in a slightly different light: namely, what is done with the data collected. Those NFL scouts at the combine understand that a time in the 40 provides a single piece of objective but only marginally relevant data. No offensive tackle is going to be asked to run 40 yards on a single play, and certainly not in a straight line. Even receivers are going to be sent in motion or not, to be positioned as a wide-out or in the slot, etc. Quickness means more than speed, and pure speed without strength (also objectively measurable) and savvy (not measurable) doesn’t amount to much.

That is, whereas a scout or a general manager might be interested that this player is two-tenths of a second faster than that one for forty yards, those times will be factored in with dozens of other bits of data—some objective, some subjective—in determining whom the team should draft. Crucially, the scouts analyze everything they can about a prospect: his strength and speed, sure, but also his work ethic, sense of teamwork, flexibility (in both the physical and attitudinal senses of the term), knowledge of the techniques of the game, etc. No player will be drafted or not based solely on his speed in the 40, and no one is going to be stupid enough to judge his college coach on the basis of that number.

Moreover, whereas it may be true that a particular prospect does a little better on the test because he’s “trained for it,” and someone else is “going to have a problem,” that very fact diminishes if not completely undermines the legitimacy of the result: since no one is going to be asked to run, unobstructed, for 40 yards (or to bench press stationary weights, or whatever) in a football game, the purpose of the test is to approximate the skill set actually required by a top-notch player in a manner that is objective and at least reasonably accurate. That a player “trains” for the test so that, hypothetically, he gets a faster start from a body position he’ll never use in a game situation only distorts the test results, rendering them even less valuable than they’d already been. The analogy to test preparation services—which, assuming they work at all, of course, benefit those who can afford them at the relative expense of those who can’t—seems obvious.

Yes, it tells you something about a student that s/he does really well on some exam, the same way it tells you something about a football player if he gets a great time in the 40. The difference is that NFL teams are smart enough to know that they’re seeing only a snapshot, whereas the educationists—especially those, like the good Mr. Barker, who have apparently never spent a day as an actual educator—place increasingly higher emphasis on those isolated moments in time. Would I rather have a football player who runs the 40 in 4.5 seconds than one who runs a 4.7? All other things being equal, sure. But all other things are never equal. Never. Allow me to repeat: never.

Not only are strength, explosiveness, balance, and a host of other variables just as important as speed, but there’s one more factor that in fact occupies the very center of the discussion, although Barker may be too dim-witted to understand. A 4.7 is a great time for a lineman; a 4.5 is average (by NFL standards) for a wide receiver. That doesn’t mean the wide receiver is “better,” only different. Don’t make a quarterback try to decide between the guy who’ll make great catches and the guy who’ll keep him vertical to throw the pass at all.

Similarly, whereas standardized testing can provide useful insight into a student’s preparation, such exams not only don’t measure everything (try creating an objective test for poetry, or intellectual curiosity, or kindness), they don’t really even measure what they measure. Looked at intelligently, which is to say skeptically, they provide some useful information. But that requires both work ethic and wisdom, two attributes conspicuously absent in most educationists. Student populations differ—class to class, neighborhood to neighborhood, year to year. The data I, as a university professor, compile for our bullshit assessment tells us far more about the caliber of students we’re attracting than about either my skills or the course structure.

A grain of salt would come in handy, in other words. Otherwise, we end up with wicked fast players who can’t… you know… catch or block or tackle. And that’s no way to win.

This Buckeye Is No Dope

Over at Ethics Alarms, Jack Marshall had a piece a few weeks ago (sorry to be so slow… I got a story up on the Facebook page even before Jack’s article, but it’s somewhere on the far side of understatement to say that I’m way behind on my writing) about an elderly couple pulled over by the cops for having a decal of a marijuana leaf on their car. Trouble was, it wasn’t: it was a logo for the Ohio State Buckeyes… you know, that university in Columbus, Ohio that usually fields pretty good sports teams?

Jack is right to chide the journalists involved for not pointing out the obvious 1st amendment issue involved, namely that it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been a marijuana leaf, but I think there’s something else at play here. Fact is, although, like Joe Blundo of the Columbus Dispatch (but unlike a lot of the more national coverage: USA Today, for example), I’d have mentioned the obvious unconstitutionality of the stop, I’d have probably led my story with the colossal stupidity of the officers involved.

Maybe it’s because I’m a college sports fan, with a beloved niece at Ohio State. Maybe it’s because I’m of a certain age, and those of my generation are pretty likely to know what does and does not resemble a marijuana leaf. Maybe it’s because I’m the son of a PhD in botany. Maybe it’s that for the stop to have made any sense (completely apart from its illegality), we’d have to believe that drug kingpins are interested in advertising their business: “Hey, over here. I’m running a dope ring!” In other words, that even if that logo were a marijuana leaf, and even if the 1st amendment didn’t exist, the cops would still be idiots.

But I’m troubled by the implications here. We assume that cops—not all of them, of course, but more than a few proverbial “bad apples”—are stupid. There was even that court case a few years back in which New London, CT successfully defended their right to deny employment opportunities to those who score too high on IQ tests. And the string of idiocies perpetrated by the police, especially with respect to pot, extends so far, both quantitatively and qualitatively, into the realm of the wackadoodle that a gaggle of uniformed mouth-breathers in Tennessee just adds to the collection.

One of the commenters on Jack’s essay points us to a Radley Balko article which enumerates some (frighteningly enough, the list, long and horrifying as it is, isn’t comprehensive) of the “oops” moments in the War on Drugs:

The list of things for which police have waged often violent drug raids after mistaking them for marijuana is a long one. It includes (but likely is not limited to) elderberry bushes, tomato plants (several times), yellow bell pepper plants, umbrella leaf, ragweed, okra, hibiscus, kenaf plants, daisies, the scent of moss, the scent of a skunk, and a plastic plant purchased for a pet lizard's planetarium.

By my count, there have also been at least three incidents in which drug cops have mistakenly raided the home of a current or former mayor.

But there remains something strangely comforting about stories about stupid police officers. They allow us to pass the blame to the incompetent few.

Unfortunately, this strategy not only allows but indeed encourages us to ignore the more systemic problems. Obviously, there are many wonderful policemen and –women who really do believe in the whole “serve and protect” mantra. Too many cops, though, are as arrogant as they are stupid: they went into the business because they couldn’t get a better job, and because they get to swagger around town wearing sidearms and a smirk that aptly conveys their bestial pseudo-superiority.

I’m not talking about the one who stops you for speeding and exaggerates the offense. I’m talking about the one who treats you like a criminal for reporting possible evidence of a crime, who ignores obvious violations when committed by like-minded folks but manufactures reasons to harass those who disagree (whose bumper sticker supports the wrong candidate, for example), whose every action seems a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to compensate for an infinitesimal sex organ.

These officers—a noxious admixture of hubris and boneheadedness—have always been with us. The difference is that they, and more specifically their tactics, are increasingly accepted. At the macro level, we get the greatest single assault on civil liberties since the HUAC Committee: the PATRIOT Act, born of over-reaction and continued by craven capitulation.

At the micro level, the absurdities would be laughable except for the real damage to real people. Pick your story: New York City’s “stop and frisk” policy, which de facto defines suspicious activity as being young, male, and either black or Hispanic; the myriad attacks by police on #Occupy protesters; the jackass transportation cop who killed a suspect who was already immobilized; the idiot with a badge who arrested MC Hammer for the apparent crime of sitting in a car while black.

What all this translates into is that cops increasingly think they’re both invincible and unaccountable. Trouble is, this sentiment is slowly but inexorably becoming accurate. And here is where I must diverge from Jack’s analysis. While placing more blame elsewhere, he also chastises the victim of the harassment, Bonnie Jonas-Boggioni, for not being more confrontational with the idiot cops, for not saying,

“It is none of your business, Officer! The First Amendment gives us the right to display any picture, design or message on our car that we choose, and if you want a civil rights law suit that will bring even more embarrassment to your department and community than the fact that you can’t tell an Ohio State decal from a pot-head manifesto, I suggest you keep doing what you’re doing. Otherwise, back off and let us go on our way.”

I’d offer a couple defenses of their conduct, however. First, this is a cop incompetent enough to mistake a buckeye for a marijuana leaf and to think that someone displaying even the latter wouldn’t have the absolute legal right to do so. Such a sorry excuse for an American, let alone a police officer, is likely to be precisely the kind of armed, arrogant and testosto-moronic jerk who would think himself within his rights to beat up a couple of senior citizens who had the audacity to question his absolute authority to be an assclown.

Secondly, the level of brain-melting inanity represented by the traffic stop is indeed flabbergasting, even for a Tennessee cop. The most difficult questions I have to answer as a college professor aren’t the hard ones, the ones which require nuance or which push the boundaries of my own expertise (“I don’t know” is a much under-utilized response in my profession). No, the hard questions are the stupid ones—“Wasn’t Hitler a Communist?” “There were black people in America in the 1770s?” “How long did the Thirty Years War last?” Sometimes these questions are asked by people who don’t belong in college. More often, they’re posed by bright enough students who either aren’t thinking or who took high school history from the assistant football coach. But it takes a second to recover from the idiocy of the question, and I confess to sometimes being flustered by the ludicrousness of it all. Sometimes I consider Kafka a cockeyed optimist.

Thirdly, Ms. Jonas-Boggioni did indeed defy the “advice” of Officer Idiot to remove the decal “permanently”: “I didn’t take it off…. This little old lady is no drug dealer.” The threshold for civil disobedience seems to have lowered a little since I was a lad, and defiance comes a little cheaper. But when you’re when you’re bellied up to the cantina bar, sometimes it’s wiser to leave the droid outside and just marvel at the view.

It's Not Libel If It's True

Throughout most of what we now think of as the Golden Age of Athens, the City Dionysia, known today primarily for the production of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, also included comedies. Specifically, these were Old Comedies: the topical, satirical and vulgar works we now associate almost exclusively with Aristophanes, the only Old Comedy playwright with even a single play available to us intact. I mention this because this state-sponsored self-mockery really was a symbol of the strength of the polis.

We see this phenomenon play out in our own day, not simply in snarky (and often accurate) comments that some anti-gay crusader must be a little worried about his own sexuality, but also in more deeply-rooted societal self-images. Witness, for example, the aftermath of 9/11. The tangible symbol that we were going to be OK was when David Letterman returned to telling jokes about George W. Bush. When you’re in trouble, you don’t joke about the President; when you start feeling all right again, the comedy begins to flow.

Moreover, most of us place a high value on the ability to weather the storm, to be criticized and to retain one’s ethical sensibilities and one’s sense of perspective. No one who has ever stood for anything has made it through life without taking a public pounding. The Internet has made these episodes more frequent, and most of us have adapted reasonably well. Not so the folks at the Edwin Mellen Press, whose reputation as a scholarly publishing house just took a self-initiated hit.

In August of 2010, Dale Askey (left), then a librarian at Kansas State University, posted an article entitled “The Curious Case of the Edwin Mellen Press” on his personal blog. Askey described Edwin Mellen as a “vanity press” (technically not true, but it certainly shares certain characteristics with vanity presses: I’ve called it a “first cousin of a vanity press” for years), with “few, if any, noted scholars serving as series editors” (arguable), benefiting largely from librarians not returning books sent for approval at “egregiously high prices” (their prices, at least for non-library buyers, are higher than most, but not by a lot; I can’t speak to the approval book argument).

Adults working for the Edwin Mellen Press would, perhaps, argue the points on the blog’s comments section, then go back to publishing books. Ah, but that would be adults. The press filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against not only Askey, but McMaster University, where he is now employed, because they didn’t immediately make him take the post down. No, I didn’t make that up: they’re suing the university for not violating the freedom of speech and academic freedom of one of their employees by forcing him to take down a private blog post he made before they’d ever heard of him.

There is a separate suit filed by Mellen’s founder against Askey alone, presumably having to do with comments on the blog post. Since the post has been taken down—Askey won’t say when or under what circumstances—it’s impossible to know the details. [EDIT: turns out a capture of the post is online, as part of the documentation for the suit, here.] But Jake New of the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that at least some of the comments in question were made by other people, not Askey himself. Mellen is saying, apparently, that Askey was under an obligation to remove negative material posted by others. I’m no lawyer, but I do recognize the aroma of bovine feces when I smell it.

New continues, “The notice goes on to allege that the press asked McMaster to remove the post and for an apology, but that the university did not oblige and then ‘pursued an Internet campaign to put the Press out of business.’” Uh huh. It strikes me that they’re doing a pretty good job of going out of business without any assistance.

The Mellen website claims that their books “qualify for tenure promotion.” Maybe that’s supposed to read “tenure/promotion”? Anyway, their books help a faculty member’s case if and only if the university in question says so. And, frankly, there are a lot of people on those tenure and promotion committees who aren’t going to be terribly impressed. That’s why, for example, a poll in which readers were asked to rank the most-respected publishers in philosophy places Edwin Mellen dead last.

The comments on the blog piece about those rankings—here we are at comments, again—tell an important story, as well. Witness “Chris,” who would regard an Edwin Mellen listing on a CV as a “significant negative.” More significantly, check out the commentary of Leslie Green, Professor of the Philosophy of Law and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford:

The Edwin Mellen Press may well, as this survey suggests, have the worst quality philosophy list; but it tops the league in disgraceful conduct in defense of its dismal reputation.

A professional librarian at McMaster University’s library complained, in a 2010 blog-post, that Mellen was a poor publisher with a weak list of low-quality books, scarcely edited, cheaply produced, but at exorbitant prices. Librarians are expert at making such judgments; that’s what universities pay them to do. And the post made a key point about the public interest: ‘in a time when libraries cannot purchase so much of the first-class scholarship, there is simply no reason to support such ventures.’

No one likes bad reviews; but Mellen’s approach is not to disprove the assessment, pledge to improve its quality, or reconsider its business-model. It is to slam McMaster University and its librarian with a three million dollar lawsuit in the Ontario Superior Court, alleging libel and claiming massive aggravated and exemplary damages. The matter is pending.

The lawsuit is threadbare. With respect to the parts of Mellen’s list with which I am familiar, the librarian’s statements noted above are all true and the quality judgments are correct. (And this survey suggests that would be a common assessment.) Moreover, on the facts in this situation, it is obviously fair comment, and public policy considerations strongly suggest that university librarians enjoy a qualified privilege with respect to their assessments of the books they consider buying for their universities. It would be a disaster for universities, students, researchers and the taxpayer if aggrieved publishers were permitted to silence discussions of the quality of their publications by threats of lawsuit.

McMaster University’s response to this appalling tactic has been surprising. Public silence. No one at McMaster has spoken in defense of the librarian or the University; no University administrator has pushed back against the crude threat to academic freedom that this represents. (But then the President of McMaster’s list of the seven ‘McMaster Principles’ omits any mention of academic freedom.) Are the McMaster faculty, administration, and faculty associations already so cowed by libel-chill that they are afraid to speak up? Or are they unaware of Mellen’s attack? Or—and this is just as worrying—is it that McMaster values its professional librarians so little that it is willing to let them bear the brunt of such harassment, so long as the University itself can avoid vicarious liability?

Let’s hope someone at McMaster forcefully says ‘enough’ to this sort of bullying. Universities have a negative duty not to abridge the academic freedom of their members; they also have a positive duty to see to it that others do not do it either.

Don’t expect me to improve on that analysis, Gentle Reader, except perhaps to point out that SLAPP lawsuits really piss me off, and that the press has squandered the respectability it did have. Publishers ought to be all about the unfettered exchange of ideas, ought to be passionate about free expression, ought to champion the rights of those who speak the truth as they see it. Instead, they have demonstrated beyond all doubt that they aren’t the slightest bit interested in any of those ideals: they want to pretend to do so as a means of making money.

They also confirm one of Curmie’s go-to maxims: if you have to tell me, it ain’t so. And they’re spending a lot of energy telling us they’re not a “dubious publisher.”

Curmie Contenders: That Isn't a Weapon Edition

Plato was a really smart man, but he banned poets (a.k.a. playwrights) from his utopian Republic because they represented as real that which was in fact untrue: that isn’t really Agamemnon or Antigone or Achilles up there, after all. Plato, in other words, couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of aesthetic distance. Now, I’ll forgive his not knowing a term that wasn’t going to be invented for another couple of millennia, but the concept is really basic: no deception is involved if both actor and spectator (or “reader,” in the terms of some postmodern theorists) tacitly agree that for a limited period of time and in conventionally prescribed ways, the actor will pretend to be someone he is not and the spectator will pretend to believe him. It can be both illuminating and fun, and the “falsehood,” such as it is, warrants less ethical soul-searching than taking your kids to see Santa Claus.

That said, today, apparently, we need to go over this material very slooooooooooowly: 1). a hand with the forefinger and thumb extended is not a weapon, even if you say “bang” or “pow”; 2). a piece of paper with a quarter of it ripped off is not a weapon; 3). a Hello Kitty product, even one labeled a “bubble gun,” is not a weapon, and talking about “shooting it” does not equal shooting it; 4). a collection of Lego blocks, however configured, is not a weapon; 5). imaginary grenades thrown at equally imaginary boxes aren't weapons, either. These statements are obvious to you, Gentle Reader. They are obvious to me. They are obvious to primary school students. Not so much to school administrators, however. (Deep sigh…)

Exhibit A: Rodney Lynch, age six, was suspended in December at Roscoe R. Nix Elementary School in Silver Spring, MD, for allegedly finger-shooting a classmate (he says she “shot” him first, and it was she who said “pow”—seriously, who cares?). A couple more students were suspended by another Maryland School a couple weeks later for the same heinous infraction: being a kid threatening behavior.

Lynch supposedly “threatened to shoot another student.” If that were true, of course, disciplinary action would be appropriate. It isn’t, of course, except in the fevered imaginations of the likes of Principal Annette Folkes, as evidenced by the fact that the accusation disappeared along with the notation in young Rodney’s permanent record when the boy’s parents put a lawyer on the case.

The later case, in Trappe, appears to have involved a game of (gasp!) cops and robbers. The father of one of the boys describes the school’s obvious over-reaction as “easily the most ludicrous thing I have ever heard of.” Yeah, pretty much, except perhaps for the district’s whining about not being able to discuss the matter because of FERPA. Or because such a statement would show the world what an idiot Principal Marcia Sprankle is. One of the two.

Come to think of it, though, these cases may be among the least insane to be discussed here. We move on to Exhibit B, which in my humble opinion is even more outrageous. You see, Melody Valentin, a fifth-grader in South Philadelphia, got screamed at by an administrator who claimed she could be arrested and initiated a search in front of her classmates. Her crime against humanity? Having a single sheet of paper ripped into the rough outline of a gun, which she was in the process of throwing away when an obnoxious little narc a classmate reported her to The Man. I confess that a sheet of paper with one quadrant missing does not immediately call the word “weapon” to my mind, but then again, I have an IQ above the temperature in Duluth in January. Clearly, I have no future in school administration.

And on to Exhibit C: this time the miscreant was a 5-year-old kindergarten girl who suggested to her friend that they shoot each other with her Hello Kitty bubble gun, which is, natch, made of pink plastic. She was allegedly suspended by the brainless trust at Mount Carmel Area Elementary School in Pennsylvania and ordered to undergo psychological evaluation, who described the incident as… get this… a “terrorist threat.” Somebody’s been hittin’ the funny Kool-Aid a little too hard.

What, really, is there to say in the face of such transcendent stupidity? Seriously, there are more brains in cracked jewel case than these folks are demonstrating. It is Stage 1 idiocy to care in the slightest whether little girls have or use bubble guns. Stage 2 manifests as censoring speech referring to actions which are a). entirely innocent b). still hypothetical and c). off school property. Stage 3, which ought to get you locked up for your own protection, consists of construing the actions of a kindergartener—any actions, any kindergartener—as even in the general vicinity of terroristic.

Alas, Gentle Reader, there’s an Exhibit D. Another kindergartner, this one a boy named Joseph Cardosa, attends Hyannis West Elementary School on Cape Cod. His crime against humanity? Making a gun out of Legos… at an after-school program. This being a first offense against the divinely inspired regulation that kids should under no circumstances be allowed to behave like kids, he was able to escape with a warning. A second crime of this earth-shaking magnitude will result in a two-week suspension from the program. After all, quoth the village idiot principal, the pseudo-gun was a “threat to other children and other children could have been scared.” No one apparently pointed out that “could have” is a pretty fuzzy term. And the fact is, of course, that the other five year olds knew perfectly well it wasn’t a real gun: they, unlike the adults of the case, seem to be able to distinguish reality from fantasy. (Note: this does not render the case of the little boy who shot himself with a real gun he thought was a toy any less tragic. But there’s a difference between a toy a child pretends to believe is real and an actual weapon that some idiot thinks needs to match her shoes, or some damned thing.)

When I started writing this piece, there were four examples of administrative lunacy. But I didn’t write fast enough… now there are five, and the cases are stacking up like cordwood. So: Exhibit E, and please, God, let me get this posted before there’s an F. So… 2nd-grader Alex Evans was suspended by Mary Blair Elementary School in Loveland, CO, for “[throwing a] pretend grenade at an imaginary box that had something evil inside.” This makes sense because Principal Valerie Lara-Black pretty clearly has an utterly imaginary right to be anywhere within cell phone range of a position of authority.

The school district rules are stupid enough, but individual schools can make add-ons provided they can come up with some restriction that makes no fucking sense at all. That’s what happened here, allowing local officials to outlaw not merely symbolic weaponry like “guns” made of single piece of torn paper, but also the completely invisible kind. Better not mess with this kid, though. He’s obviously got the whole invisibility cloak thing going on, and I’ve seen Star Wars, so I know how easy it is to allow the Force to be perverted to evil use.

There sort of is an Exhibit F, but this one is at least comprehensible. In the Bronx, PS 4 was placed into lockdown by police after a report that a student had brought a gun to school. It turned out to be a Nerf gun, but no one knew that—unlike in the other cases described here, where the imaginary grenade was known to be imaginary, the bubble gun to be a bubble gun, etc. Over-reaction? Probably. But at least an understandable one, especially given the fact that real guns can look fake as easily as fake ones look real.

What are real weapons? Well, the one that got left in a restroom by a newly-hired security guard in a Lapeer, MI charter school. The gun was reportedly unloaded… rendering it useless, of course, if the guard actually needed it as something other than a prop in a bad community theatre production of cops and robbers. There’s some question about whether the guns fired in the hallways in Cary-Grove (IL) High School are real: the report says they were starter’s pistols, but the argument was that students need to know what gunfire sounds like. Hint: not like a starter’s pistol. So the exercise was dangerous; we’re just not sure whether because actual firearms using actual blanks were used (here’s a listing of some of the deaths caused by using blanks) or whether it’s because students and teachers now erroneously think they know what guns sound like. In any case, these two episodes stand in sharp contrast to the obviously unthreatening behaviors that led to suspensions and warnings and similar consequences to schoolchildren who did literally nothing wrong.

Curmie voters, take note: some of these folks will be back at the end of December or the beginning of January.

Arizona Re-Asserts Its Claim to Having the Nation's Stupidest Politicians

State legislators. From Arizona. Talking about education. Gold, these people, sheer gold. Alas, only for Curmudgeons who like to make snarky comments about the less adept amongst us.

Anyway, there’s an actual bill—HB 2467, to be precise—sponsored by a couple of the dimmer bulbs in a state legislature not exactly renowned for its luminosity, which (except for the window-dressing) consists exclusively of the following:

Beginning in the 2013‑2014 school year, in addition to fulfilling the course of study and assessment requirements prescribed in this chapter, before a pupil is allowed to graduate from a public high school in this state, the principal or head teacher of the school shall verify in writing that the pupil has recited the following oath:

“I, _________, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge these duties; so help me God.”

Bob Thorpe: Not a genius.

The sponsors of this… uh… proposal, GOP (duh) Representatives Bob Thorpe, Sonny Borrelli, Carl Seel, T.J. Shope, and Steve Smith, seem to think that crafting inanities like this is a good use of their time and of taxpayer’s money. I beg to differ. Thorpe, apparently the principal progenitor of this balderdash, purports to “[promote] Constitutional freedoms.” The ones he believes in, at least: (2nd amendment: good; 9th amendment: usually good but sometimes scary; 1st amendment… there’s a 1st amendment?)

The oath itself, identical to that sworn by United States Senators, and a variation on the theme of the ones sworn by new citizens, political leaders, and members of the military, may be about the silliest thing I’ve seen in a while… and I spend a fair amount of time trying to ferret out nonsense like this.

A couple of left-leaning commentators have seized on this and want to concentrate on the insistence on invoking God in a public school. I’m not a 1st amendment lawyer, but I’m guessing this one is up for grabs. As a country, we purport to believe in the separation of church and state (well, all but the Tea Party ignoramuses do), but “In God We Trust” is still on our currency, “so help me God” still is recited by everyone from politicians to trial witnesses, and woe betide the President who doesn’t close every freaking speech by invoking God’s blessing on the nation. On the other hand, if school prayer is a no-no, then probably forcing an atheist student to swear by a God he doesn’t believe in strikes me as being a bit over the Constitutional line.

Secondly, there are likely to be a fair number of non-citizens who graduate from Arizona high schools, and I’m not talking (only) about illegals. I’ve had at least a few students—that I know of—who went to high school in the US, but are (or were, at the time) citizens of Canada, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom… you get the point. Demanding that non-citizens swear an oath of fealty to a country of which they’re not even citizens: more than a little creepy.

My particular favorite part of the bill, though, is about “[taking] this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.” Let’s think about that for a minute. It makes sense if one has successfully run for office or volunteered for military service, but in the context of just trying to graduate from high school, it’s transcendently stupid. Look at it this way: the oath is unnecessary if the student is willing to swear it freely, and simply a coerced exclamation from those who aren’t. Claiming a declaration is offered “without any mental reservation” is, frankly, nothing more than an insistence on prevarication. Anyone with literally no reservations about what some idiot politician (there’s another kind?) might decide he’s sworn to do is, frankly, too stupid to be granted a diploma.

Because that is, indeed, the rub: I kinda get the feeling that the quintet of buffoons who sponsored the bill think that the fact that I voted for Obama makes me an enemy of the state. Good thing I got my high school diploma at a different place and time, or the Bozo Brothers would be showing up on my doorstep, revocation order clutched tightly in their sweaty little fists.

So the new bill is unconstitutional, restrictive, and ethically problematic. It is as unenforceable as it is ineffective. But the real problem: it’s just plain dumb.

Curmie Contenders: Post-Newtown Edition

One of the advantages of being the sole proprietor of this blog—and of the Curmie Awards—is that I get to set the rules. And so it is that although both of these stories actually date from December, I’m going to amend the Curmie guidelines to make them eligible for the 3rd Annual Curmie Award, to be awarded in early January, 2014.

What these two stories have in common—other than idiot administrators (which has, alas, become something of a given) is a link to the horror of Newtown. Something about that particular calamity seems to have sparked a response in our collective psyche—something about this one made it unlike the others… probably a combination of so many victims being so young and of the unquestioned heroism of the teachers. But the tardy and tone-deaf statement by the NRA was—miracle of miracles—read by virtually everyone as, well, tardy and tone-deaf, and we might, just might, get some real dialogue going about some gun control legislation that would uphold 2nd amendment rights while suggesting, ever-so-politely, that allowing felons and the mentally ill access to assault rifles with 100-round magazines might not be entirely in keeping with what the founders intended by “a well-regulated militia.”

As an academic who spends a fair amount of time considering things Irish, I have become quite familiar with the (largely inaccurate) description of Sinn Féin as the “political wing of the Irish Republican Army.” I think of that phrasing every time some NRA honcho advocates something transcendently stupid—like putting armed guards in every school, for example. Because the NRA really is the lobbying wing of the gun manufacturing industry, and it tolerates the presence of mere gun-owners only because those people will never really have any power in the organization, which will continue to press for bazookas with which to kill Bambi.

Not all the post-Newtown stupidity came from the NRA, of course, and it’s the response of alleged educators that is really the subject of this entry. We start in East Harlem, where school officials decided that less than a week after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary would be the ideal time to conduct a lockdown drill. In a school for kids with special needs. Without telling the teachers. Or the police. Genius, these people, genius. Naturally, the school website touts the motto, “Where Students Come First!” Uh huh.

According to the New York Times,

The lockdown drill began about 10 a.m. on Tuesday with a woman’s voice on the school’s loudspeaker saying, “‘Shooter,’ or ‘intruder,’ and ‘get out, get out, lockdown,’” said the staff member, who added that it seemed so realistic that it was hard to tell if the woman speaking was actually talking to a gunman or to teachers and students throughout the school.

At 10:01 a.m., a woman dialed 911 from her cellphone and said she had heard a message over the loudspeaker “that there was an intruder in the school, and that she was in the class with her students,” said a Police Department spokeswoman.

Officers from the 25th Precinct station house responded, she said. When they arrived a minute later, school officials told them that it was just a drill.

The contradictory instructions—“lock down” vs. “get out”—caused even greater panic. To top it off, according to a website called Horanwatch (to be fair, this is apparently not the most unbiased of sources), the school’s security team followed up the drill by “[walking] the hallways smirking and criticizing staff, … mockingly smiling and making light of people discussing their fear…” (emphasis in original).

The same venue reports that:

In classrooms without locks, teachers used their bodies to hold doors closed and cover students. Staff were witnessed falling to the ground in prayer. Students and staff were seen crying, shaking, and exhibiting all behaviors of those under extreme trauma. Some students and staff were seen after urinating on themselves.

The administration’s behavior—holding a drill without telling anyone it was a drill—would be unconscionable under the most neutral of circumstances. Inevitably, staff will get on their phones to call loved ones, who become justifiably upset, possibly to the extent of taking unreasonable chances to get to the school. Not notifying the police is reckless and inevitably the source of an absurd waste of resources… who knows what crimes could have been prevented or solved had the cops not been diverted to the school? More importantly, it’s just plain cruel.

But this outrage is triply problematic, as the utter idiocy of the Principal Greer Phillips and her merry band of sadistic drones is aggravated both by the chronological propinquity of Sandy Hook, making everyone a little more on edge, but also by the nature of the student body. It’s bad enough pulling this crap on a regular student population, but a disproportionate number of these students have significant cognitive and/or emotional issues. Remember, too, that this is East Harlem—not likely a lot of post-traumatic counseling available for these kids.

The School Board is “looking into how this drill was conducted.” Seriously? What’s to look at? I understand due process. I understand extenuating circumstances. But whereas I like to think of myself as having a reasonable imagination, I am at a loss to construct any set of circumstances whereby what happened last month in East Harlem could even be construed to be in the same galaxy as justifiable. Rather, Phillips and the rest of her co-conspirators should be fired, sued, probably charged with a litany of criminal offenses, and paraded through the streets of East Harlem in stocks, with the populace urged to throw rotten vegetables at them. Then, the real punishment should start.

Meanwhile, on the other coast, high schooler Courtni Webb was suspended and threatened with expulsion for writing a poem in a personal notebook, expressing some level of empathy for Newtown shooter Adam Lanza. The cretinous yahoos who run Life Learning Academy, however, take “a zero tolerance approach to violence, the threat of violence….” Zero tolerance policies are inherently problematic, as they both ignore circumstances and demand punishment of students or teachers who violate not a rational policy, but an interpretation of words like “threat,” made by administrators who would have to grow some brain cells to have the mental acuity of a pothole.

Valerie Stratham, Courtni’s mother, is being excessively kind in saying merely that she “[feels] like they’re over-reacting,” pointing out that Courtni “doesn’t have a history of violence; she didn’t threaten anybody; she didn’t threaten herself.” Oh, come on, Ms. Stratham, if you’re going to be logical and sensible and stuff, there’s simply no way any educationist will take you seriously.

There are two issues here, both of which show the school to be run by utter incompetents. First, there’s the fact that the poem was found in a personal notebook by a teacher, who cheerfully scurried off to the principal to narc on a student. Point #1: what’s written in that notebook, Teach, is none of your fucking business if it isn’t directly related to a class. Reason #2472 why Curmie would never make it as a high school administrator: here’s the conversation if I were on the job:

Teacher: I found this poem in a student’s notebook.

Me: Why were you looking in her notebook?

Teacher: Um…

Me: Congratulations. You violated a student’s privacy for no good reason. You’re fired.

Teacher: But it says she understands why Adam Lanza did it.

Me: And empathy is a bad thing because…?

Teacher: But it’s a threat.

Me: Actually, you babbling buffoon, you’re the threat. You’re a threat to the 1st Amendment, you’re a threat to the 4th amendment, you’re a threat to students’ ability to learn critical thinking, and you’re a threat to my sanity. Now, get out of my office. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass. On second thought, let it. That seems to be where your brain is located, and it might jar a little sense into it.

Point #2: If you’re going to suspend a student for making threats, there bloody well better be some threats. Empathy isn’t a threat. Attempting to understand motives isn’t a threat. Writing poetry not intended to be seen by anyone else isn’t a threat. If you really want to be concerned about something, how about a little introspective shudder at the idea that a senior in high school can’t spell “trigger”?

Don’t give me your hand-wringing claptrap about “threatening language.” There was none. And please, for the love of all things holy, do not pretend that you have the slightest interest in “both the safety of our school community and for Courtni herself.” You are interested in throwing your weight around, enforcing inane policies, and covering your ass in the one in ten million chance that Ms. Webb really is planning some sort of assault on your little citadel of pomposity.

Jonathan Katz, an attorney with a specialty in 1st amendment issues, says that “This is a bad civics lesson for students to see someone being suspended in school for her words, especially these kind of words, where she could not be sanctioned if she was outside the schoolhouse gates.” And that, coupled with the invasion of privacy that enabled school officials to learn of the very existence of the poem, is a pretty neat encapsulation of a very great deal that is wrong with the education system in this country. Maybe a Curmie nomination will ease their angst.

BTW, Jack Marshall commented on the New York story here and, more briefly, on the California story here.

Let's Prosecute Rape Victims. Yes, Really.

Every once in a while someone mixes up a cocktail of such mind-melting stupidity, monumental inconsistency, and transcendent arrogance that there is little for the rest of us to do but drop everything and gaze in slack-jawed wonderment at the inanity before us. Behold, therefore, one Cathrynn Brown (right), a New Mexico legislator whose latest bill rockets off the scale, leaving “moronic” and “horrific” as feeble understatements of the idiocy involved.

It would (or would have, until it was changed under duress) criminalize abortions for rape and incest victims under the ingenious appellation of destruction of evidence. The language is clear: the strictures “shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime.”

Yes, Gentle Reader, you read that correctly. Look, reasonable people can disagree about the prudence, ethics, and morality of abortion in general. The long-time equivocation of some “centrists,” allowing the procedure in cases of rape and incest, may or may not be logically consistent (it makes sense if and only if the rights of the unborn are extant but not absolute), is here turned on its head: now, such victims are the only group specifically forbidden from getting an abortion.

Aviva Shen of ThinkProgress also points out that:

While anti-choice advocates maintain that a fetus should be afforded the full rights of personhood, charging abortion as “tampering with evidence” effectively turns the fetus into an object. This isn’t the first time so-called pro-life supporters have dropped the fetal personhood crusade when it was convenient—last year, a Catholic hospital in Colorado reversed its stance on fetal personhood in a malpractice suit, arguing in court that the term “person” should only apply to individuals who have already been born.

And so it goes. The idea of abortion as destruction of evidence is also patently absurd on its face. It would make as much sense to tell the victim of a stabbing that he can’t remove the knife, or of a vandalism victim that she can’t clean up the side of the house… ever. If you want to make the penalties for rape more severe, sign me up. But do it; don’t equivocate with disingenuous arguments about destruction of evidence.

Now, to be fair, I don’t necessarily think Ms. Brown is truly as inept as her legislation makes it appear. One wonders if she’d able to feed herself if she were. And she does say that she didn’t intend for rape and incest victims to face felony charges for actions that would be legal for everyone else. She’s not really a monster. She’s just illiterate. Or sloppy. Maybe.

The point is that only the prospective mother can “procure” an abortion, and that “facilitate” is a very broad term indeed. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to assert that, as written, Brown’s bill would not only criminalize the actions of the woman, but of the doctors and nurses, the neighbor who drove her to the facility, and a fair number of other people whose actions are otherwise both legal and appropriate.

Yes, that tag about the “intent to destroy evidence” does mitigate the harm, but it doesn’t eliminate it. It would if it were not for the fact that the “procurer” of the abortion and those who “facilitate” it are specifically included. If Ms. Brown wants a bill to do what she says she wants it to do, it’s easily accomplished, thus: “shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime.”

Here’s her revision: “a person who commits criminal sexual penetration or incest and who procures an abortion of a fetus resulting from the crime with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime is guilty of tampering with evidence.” Does this strike anyone else as weird? The fact that the references to compulsion and coercion have disappeared, for example? I have no idea what’s going on, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s still only the prospective mother who can “procure” an abortion, meaning that the only people who are covered by these restrictions are women who rape men or who are the aggressor (or adult) in cases of incest. Whereas such criminals might be tempted to abort a fetus for precisely the reason suggested, I doubt that Ms. Brown had that particular scenario in mind.

So what was going on in her mind? Who knows? It could be that she just doesn’t handle the language very well, or that she had a lapse that caused her to believe she was being clear when she wasn’t. That’s pretty much what she’s claiming… or admitting… or whatever. Her colleague Nate Gentry argues, for example, that the bill was intended to apply to, say, a step-father who impregnates his stepdaughter and then demands that she have an abortion. OK. Except that, as the ACLU’s Laura Schauer Ives points out, that is already covered under existing New Mexico law. And let’s be real: the only way you could get a conviction under Brown’s bill would be to have already proven the rape or incest allegation.

The best case scenario for Brown’s motives, then, is that this lawyer (no need for precision of language in that profession, right?) who serves on the board of a local Right to Life organization introduced utterly unnecessary legislation that completely accidentally demonized sexual assault victims who chose to end pregnancies. Forgive me if I raise an eyebrow of skepticism. I won’t claim anything with certainty, or even with great confidence, but it sure makes more sense to me that the bill was intended to do precisely what it said it was going to do, i.e. to criminalize any abortion Brown could figure out a way to criminalize; that she got busted; and that she’s now back-pedaling like a bad thing.

Ultimately, however, whether Brown is a prevaricating monster or simply a sloppy, grandstanding pol is not the question. The real issue is whether New Mexico House Bill 206, as originally written, was the Single Most Fucking Stupid Legislation Ever Introduced Anywhere.

Why, yes. Yes, it was.