We Have a Winner!

The voting is complete, and we have a winner in the most closely-fought battle yet for the not necessarily prestigious Curmie Award, bestowed each year on the person or institution who most embarrasses the profession of education. And the winner is… (fanfare… drum roll…) Principal Greer Phillips of PS 79 (the Horan School) in East Harlem.

Ms. Phillips ordered a lockdown drill at PS 79, complete with false claims of an armed intruder—without notifying either the faculty or the police that it was only a drill—in a school with a high percentage of special needs kids less than a week after the events in Newtown, Connecticut last December. It was this incident, indeed, that led me to decide that events “from late 2012 that didn’t find their way into the public perception (or at least into mine) until 2013” were still eligible for this year’s Curmie. It struck me at the time I wrote about this story last January 26 that boneheadedness of this caliber should not be excluded from Curmie consideration just because I hadn’t seen the story until after the new year. Apparently, you (collectively) agreed.

In all, 46 people voted, with 109 total votes cast in the open balloting which allowed readers to vote for as many nominees as they chose. Principal Phillips was named on 19 ballots, narrowly claiming the crown from some tough competition: Principal Tracey Perkins of Cypress Lake (FL) High School got 17 votes for punishing a student who disarmed a classmate who was carrying a loaded gun; officials at Dietrich High School in Idaho and at Batavia High School in Illinois collected 16 apiece for punishing teachers who said the word “vagina” in a biology classroom and reminding students of their 5th amendment rights before administering a survey that could well have led to self-incrimination, respectively. [Carla Scuzzarella of Andover (MA) High School also registered 16 votes, but new information about the Erin Cox case suggests at least the distinct possibility that Dr. Scuzzarella did nothing wrong.]

Principal Valerie Lara-Black of Mary Blair Elementary School in Loveland, Colorado was next in line with 10 votes for suspending a 2nd-grader who threw an imaginary grenade into an imaginary box containing “something evil.” Principal John Hynes of Grace Brethren High School in Simi Valley, California got 9 nods for changing the grades of at least one student, possibly more… including his own daughter. The board shares in his honorable mention for not firing him. Finally, the unnamed teacher who poured pencil shavings into the open mouth of a 13-year-old student at Boles Junior High in Arlington, Texas (and, again, the authorities who let her off with a short suspension) rounds out the finalists with 8 votes.

A few thoughts… First, I really had no dog in this fight. I was a little surprised that the pencil-shavings incident didn’t attract more votes, not because it necessarily deserved them, but only because it seemed closest to the kind of outrageous behavior by teachers which won two years ago and copped the first two places last year. Similarly, the outright dishonesty of John Hynes struck me as uniquely problematic. But they were, perhaps, perceived as anomalies—after all, the voting guidelines did say, “a thoroughly heinous but isolated act shouldn’t necessarily get your vote over a less outrageous action that might be seen as either an exemplar of a systemic problem or a harbinger of bad things to come.”

Punishing students and faculty for doing nothing wrong (a 2nd grader “saving the world”), or indeed for doing something specifically right—disarming a gunman, reminding students of constitutional rights, using the correct terminology for human anatomy—these are the deeply troubling glimpses into the world of educational administration. Even Curmie isn’t cynical enough to suggest that this is the norm, but it sure does seem to be approaching it. It’s all about following the rules even if they’re irrelevant, submitting to authority even if it’s overweening, coddling parents unless they have a legitimate concern. Because, you see, a). we mean well and b). we know best.

Curmie calls bullshit.

Nonetheless, it’s difficult to argue with the collective wisdom of Curmiphiles. Principal Phillips managed to do something not merely colossally stupid, but arrogant, cruel, smug, unethical, insensitive, reckless, boorish, and—oh, yeah—illegal, as well. Plus, in the kneejerk world of post-Newtown, it also succeeded in being an emblem of everything that makes me crazy about the world of public education and self-righteous liberal do-gooding.

I may not have had a preference among the finalists at the beginning of the voting, but you have convinced me that the right person won. I’ll send the Curmie along to her, but perhaps first I should call her up and tell her that there’s a serial killer waiting for her in her apartment and that he’s amusing himself by setting her cat on fire. She won’t really appreciate the Curmie until she gets out of therapy, anyway, right?

Announcing the Nominations for the 3rd Annual Curmie Award

It’s that time again: the nominations for the 3rd annual Curmie Awards for the person or institution who most embarrasses the profession of education. I remind you that the award is not for the most egregious act, but the one that shows the profession in the worst light. That is, a thoroughly heinous but isolated act shouldn’t necessarily get your vote over a less outrageous action that might be seen as either an exemplar of a systemic problem or a harbinger of bad things to come.

As usual, 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.

Also, the recipient must be, at some level, an actual educator. Hence, the outrageous institutionalization of restricting academic freedom by the Kansas Board of Regents doesn’t qualify: those folks are political appointees, not educators… that’s both the problem and the reason those censorious asshats (another tip of the cap to the folks at Popehat for that expression) won’t get a Curmie… or at least a regular, voted-on-by-the-readership one. I reserve the right to give them a special Curmie, along the same lines as the one awarded recently to the Florida Fifth Circuit Count of Appeals for forcing the Osceola County School District to put 2012 Curmie winner Lillian Gomez back in the classroom because feeding hot sauce-laced crayons to autistic kids is “not so egregious such that loss of effectiveness could be decided as a matter of law.”

There are two changes from previous practice. It’s still the case that I must have written about the events in question during 2013, but I’m expanding the time parameters a little to allow stories from late 2012 that didn’t find their way into the public perception (or at least into mine) until 2013. And all nominees must be in the United States (I suppose this isn’t a change, per se, but this year I need to make the rule explicit because of a story from Canada).

I tried to balance different types of professional infractions: teachers behaving badly, administrative arrogance, rampaging nannyism, and so on. Curmie’s civil libertarianism will be well in evidence, as will his version of the domino theory: if Awful Thing X is allowed to take place without outcry, then surely Awful Thing Y will be next.

Curmie wrote a lot fewer posts in 2013 than in previous years—40, as opposed to 79 in 2012 and 101 in 2011. That means that there were a lot of stories I didn’t get to: nothing about the prom follies in Missouri (two different places) and Indiana, the 14-year-old arrested for wearing a pro-NRA shirt, the utter idiocy of Georgia higher education Chancellor Hank Huckaby’s comments about “students’ studying the wrong areas,” the California school that allowed cops to entrap a special needs student on a drug offense, the silliness of the Kentucky High School Athletic Association proclaimed new standards for post-game handshakes, the SAT’s “lying is the best policy” approach to essay grading, the Colorado school that charged a 6-year-old with sexual harassment, the Washington school that apparently sees nothing wrong with forcing students to open their Facebook accounts to the prurient gaze of administrators, SUNY Oswego officials who placed a journalism student on interim suspension for telling prospective commenters for a feature story that “what you say… does not have to be positive,”… and more.

Still, I managed over a dozen posts featuring some 28 different stories, and the hard part wasn’t finding enough Curmie-worthy prospects, but in narrowing the list to eight finalists and eight (dis)honorable mentions. There were nine (yes, nine) segments about stupid gun-related regulations that have nothing to do with actual safety issues (toy guns that really do look like real guns would be another matter). All of these incidents were outrageous, but six of them didn’t even get dishonorable mention status, in part because that would load up the nominations with a particular kind of idiocy, when there are so many from which to choose. Also not making the cut were a couple of displays of administrative stupidity stemming from a combination of humorlessness, hyper-literalism and arrogant nannyism. No attempts to shut down high school theatre productions made the list, either, although there was one strong contender and another case I didn’t get the chance to write about. It turns out that all the finalists are from the world of elementary and secondary education: one teacher, one private school administrator, six public school administrators. There are a couple of college administrations on the DisHonorable Mention list, but this is the year of public and private schools.

But enough about what isn’t on the list. We move on to the DisHonorable Mentions for the 2013 Curmie Award, in the order I wrote about them:

Life Learning Academy in San Francisco for suspending Courtni Webb and threatening her with expulsion for writing a poem in a personal notebook that expressed some empathy for Newtown killer Adam Lanza.

Newlin Fell Elementary School in South Philadelphia for screaming at, searching, and otherwise humiliating 5th-grader Melody Valentin for having a piece of paper torn into the very rough outline of gun, which she was in the process of throwing away.

The unnamed teacher at Cleveland High School in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, for ridiculing 9th grader (and African-American) Christopher Rougier for dressing up as Santa because “Santa Claus is white.” (Apparently elves and reindeer can be black, however: just thought you might want to know that, Gentle Reader.)

The Glendale (CA) Unified School District for hiring a private company to spy on the social media posts of their students, a process which is either illegal and unconstitutional or doomed to ineffectuality.

The Cleveland State University chapter of the AAUP for claiming that $666 raises are tantamount to accusations of Satanism.

The University of Massachusetts for cancelling all electronic dance music concerts on campus because attendees often use the potent Ecstasy variant known as “Molly.”

Mike Scott, the football coach at Annandale (VA) High School, for throwing the school’s marching band off the field in the middle of their senior night halftime show despite there being plenty of time remaining on the clock, and Principal Vincent Randazzo for doing next to nothing to punish the bullying coach.

Hillcrest Middle School in Simpsonville, South Carolina for suspending an autistic student for showing older students a cartoonish drawing of a bomb.

And now… The nominees for the 3rd Annual Curmie Awards…. (drum roll…)

Principal Greer Phillips of PS 79 (the Horan School) in East Harlem for conducting a completely unannounced (to teachers, to the police…) lockdown drill less than a week after the horrors at Sandy Hook Elementary. In aggravation: outrageous timing and an incompetently run drill complete with contradictory instructions, but also the makeup of the student body (a high percentage of students with emotional or cognitive problems). In mitigation: I can’t think of a thing.

Principal Valerie Lara-Black of Mary Blair Elementary School in Loveland, Colorado for suspending 2nd-grader Alex Evans for throwing an imaginary grenade into an equally imaginary box containing “something evil.” In aggravation: this is stupid behavior even if there’s something tangible. In mitigation: there’s probably some idiotic zero tolerance policy that purports to justify if not demand these flights of inanity.

Principal Tracey Perkins of Cypress Lake (FL) High School for suspending a 16-year-old student because he disarmed another student, a football player who was threatening a teammate with a loaded gun. You see, he was “involved in an incident in which a weapon was present.” In aggravation: apart from the sheer idiocy of the charges, they were changed after the school started being (quite rightly) embarrassed by the publicity. In mitigation: it is possible that the boy was indeed uncooperative with the ensuing investigation.

Principal Carla Scuzzarella of North Andover (MA) High School for stripping Erin Cox from her volleyball team captaincy and suspending her for five games because she went by a party where there was alcohol long enough to drive a drunken friend home. In aggravation: the police statement makes it clear that Ms. Cox had not been drinking, and the policy manual makes a specific point about the folly of guilt by association. In mitigation: there are reports that she was at the party longer than it would have taken just to collect her friend.  [EDIT: the follow-up on this case shown in the link provided by Renee in the comments below makes it clear that Ms. Cox may well not be the victim here, and that school authorities behaved appropriately.   Whereas there is little corroboration of the assertions in that news story (which seems to have been written by someone with an agenda of his own), Curmie apologizes to Principal Scuzzarella for what seems likely to have been a false accusation.  It is impossible to remove this nomination from the ballot, but I urge you not to vote for Ms. Scuzzarella.  If you have already voted, you can indeed change your vote.]

Officials at Dietrich (ID) High School for reporting science teacher Tim McDaniel to the school board and the state professional standards commission, allegedly for using the word “vagina.” Yes, in a biology class. In aggravation: Mr. McDaniel seems to be being penalized for the precise reason that he was doing his job. In mitigation: it is unclear to what extent the school per se was responsible for the brouhaha, although they clearly did little to prevent it.

Batavia (IL) High School and their equally incompetent school board for punishing social studies teacher John Dryden. His crime? Reminding his students of their 5th amendment rights while distributing a survey that could indeed have led to self-incrimination. In aggravation: the survey, with students’ name on it, was a clear invasion of student privacy, motivated by the usual nannyish hogwash. In mitigation: Dryden did react without checking with school officials about the intents of the survey.

The unnamed teacher at Boles Junior High in Arlington, Texas for pouring pencil shavings into the mouth of 8th-grader Marquis Jay, and to the authorities who cravenly gave her a slap on the wrist. In aggravation: you need aggravation??? In mitigation: the boy deserved some punishment—he was at best inattentive—and it seems to have been an unpremeditated and isolated incident.

Principal John Hynes of Grace Brethren High School in Simi Valley, California for the completely unauthorized action of changing the grades of at least one student (possibly several, including his own daughter), and the spineless board who allowed him get by with little punishment. In aggravation: it’s a short step from what has been admitted to and what has been alleged, which would be an outrageous abuse of power. In mitigation: with the exception of the one case, the allegations come almost exclusively from a now-former teacher. This may not be the most objective of sources.

So… there are the nominees. As usual, you are free to object if one of your “favorites” was omitted. Likewise, I’m free to tell you to get your own damned blog if you want to make the nominations.

Please vote for the most deserving recipient(s) in the box on the upper right of this page: you may vote for as many or as few nominees as you choose, but please don’t vote more than once. If you choose to comment, please do so in addition to rather than instead of voting—regardless of what people say in the comments, either here or on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, it’s only the actual votes that count.

The polls, as it were, will be open until 7:00 pm CST on Wednesday, January 8. Majority rules. (This isn’t PolitiFact, after all.)

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.