There won’t be any Curmies awarded this year or in the
foreseeable future for three reasons.
First, Curmie has written a lot less of late about educators behaving
badly. That doesn’t mean there haven’t
been cases, of course, but, perhaps because he’s no longer in the game, as it
were, other stories have done more to pique his interest. Plus, the unethical or incompetent
protagonists in most of the education-related stories Curmie has covered recently
have been non-educators: students, politicians, or organizations like the NCAA.
Second, blogspot no longer supports the gadget that allowed
polls, so there would have to be a link to an outside site like Survey Monkey
or something, and Curmie doesn’t want to deal with all that noise.
Finally, there are a lot fewer of you. Individual posts are garnering only 20% or so
as many hits as in yesteryear. You,
Gentle Reader, are a member of an elite, not to say miniscule, group. It doesn’t make sense to continue the poll if
a half dozen votes would win the election.
All that said, Curmie’s netpal Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms alerted him to a story that, if Curmies were still a thing, would mean that
what passes for a brain trust at St. Francis High School in Mountain View, CA,
like Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando’s character in “On the Waterfront”), coulda
been a contender.
Our story begins in 2017, when three 14-year-old boys took a
photo of themselves posing with anti-acne masks covering their faces. One of the three apparently had rather severe
acne, and the other two joined him in what Reason’s Jacob Sullum describes as “an act of playful solidarity.”
The medication started light green in color, but grew darker as it dried. The lads photographed
themselves because they “looked silly.” Importantly,
the boys did not post the photo to social media.
Nothing to see here, right?
Well, not to any rational person, no.
But this is a story about high school administrators, remember? Two of those lads were about to enroll at St.
Francis, a high-priced private school. Again:
so far, so good.
Flash forward three years.
It’s now 2020 and the aftermath of the George Floyd incident in Minnesota. Some recent St. Francis grads had posted an
apparently not-PC meme about Floyd’s death, so there was, perhaps, some
increased tension. Unbeknownst to the
two boys attending St. Francis, the other lad in the photo had sent a copy to a
friend, who “tagged a music playlist on her Spotify account with a copy of the
photograph.” And one of her
friends (the administrators undoubtedly know who, but that information seems
not to be available to the rest of us) saw it there, recognized the boys, and proclaimed
them to be in blackface. The photo was
to be regarded as “another example” of racism at St. Francis.
Well, no self-respecting (i.e., self-important) school administrator wants that
kind of publicity, so instead of…you know… listening to the mother of one of
the boys, who explained the truth of the matter, they decided that due process was
far too much to ask, so they summarily issued an ultimatum that the boys either
withdraw or be expelled.
To be fair, those masks are pretty dark (see the photo above), and it’s not too outrageous
a leap of faith to see them as blackface, especially if you’ve been prompted to
do so. So some of the furor, though not
justified, was at least comprehensible.
But that doesn’t get the school off the hook. They leapt to a false conclusion when even a
cursory glance at the so-called evidence would have revealed that the boys did
nothing wrong. (Curmie isn’t convinced
that what 14-year-olds do ought to be held against them years later even if
they were in blackface, but that’s at least an arguable position.)
As Curmie has noted several times in the past, it’s important
to get names out there if possible. We
may not know the name of the student who posted that photo, but we do know that
President Jason Curtis immediately piled on without bothering to check the
facts, and that Dean of Students Ray Hisatake called the boys’ parents but obviously didn’t care that they offered a
reasonable and indeed true rebuttal to the accusations leveled against their sons.
The money quote, though, is that of Principal Katie Teekell,
who said her decision was based not on the boys’ “intent,” but on “optics” and “the
harm done to the St. Francis community.”
Of course, there is no indication that the student whose posting of the
photo was obviously intended to demean the school has suffered any punishment
at all. Meanwhile the boys who did
nothing wrong, and weren’t yet students at the school when the supposedly offending
photo was taken, were almost literally run out of town. The world knows that, now. So, Ms. Teekell, as Matt Damon might have
said in “Good Will Hunting,” “how do you like them optics?”
This being an education story, and Curmie being a career
educator, it seems only appropriate that we attempt to discern the explanation
for the administrators’ actions with a multiple-choice quiz.
So…
They acted the way they did because…
a. They have been so infected with a socio-political
agenda that they are incapable of seeing the world except through woke-colored
glasses.
b. They have the ethical sensibility of a hungry
cobra and the backbone of overcooked angel’s hair.
c. They’d come in third place in a battle of wits with a
dead battery and a turnip.
Yes, I know, Gentle Reader, “d. all of the above” is likely
the best answer, but perhaps your mileage may vary.
This story has received new life of late because the boys
sued the school and the jury recently awarded them over a million dollars. The award is based on a new California law
which demands the equivalent of due process from organizations like private
schools, unions, hospitals, etc. This is
the first case to invoke the new law in a suit against a private secondary
school.
The initial suit sought over twenty million dollars in
damages, but the jury rejected claims of breach of contract, defamation, and
violation of free speech. Curmie reminds
you, Gentle Reader, that he is not a lawyer, but he confesses astonishment that falsely labeling Bay Area teenagers (OK, they’re into their 20s now) as racists doesn’t
qualify as defamation. Still, each boy
will receive over a half million dollars, and the school might have learned its
lesson.
Yeah, that’s likely to happen…
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