Curmie Contenders: That Isn't a Weapon Edition (volume 2)

Sigh.

Curmie feels no need to reaffirm his commitment to safe schools and to reasonable gun control measures (background checks and bans on private ownership of assault weapons, for example). Still, what a lot of schools are doing with silly rules and idiotic “zero tolerance” policies is brain-meltingly stupid. We’ve already talked about this once this year, in a lengthy five-part post encapsulated here:

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…)

And now… four more.

Not a weapon.

We start in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, where 7-year-old Park Elementary School student Josh Welch was suspended for chewing a pop-tart into the shape of a gun and waving it around. Well, sort of the shape of a gun: the boy’s father hired a lawyer, who describes the offending pastry thus: “The chewed cereal bar looked no more like a gun than the puzzle pieces of the states of Idaho, Oklahoma, or Florida. ... There is no evidence that any other student was frightened by the pastry.” School administrators responded by wondering what those states look like. OK, I made that part up, but I didn’t make up the part about the school’s refusal to remove the incident from Josh’s record.

Of course no other students were frightened: they’re capable of distinguishing between reality and imagination. This is the only good news to come out of this story. There are ways in which stupidity is its own punishment, and there’s plenty of it at play here. But there’s a troubling aspect to this business, and not simply that the NRA has given the kid a lifetime membership at a fundraiser for area Republican pols. That’s a publicity stunt, nothing more, and even National Review blogger Charles C.W. Cooke believes that the “NRA would have spent its time and money far more profitably had it conducted a dogged campaign to hound out of public service whomever thought it appropriate to punish a small child for making pastry shapes.” When Curmie starts citing NR mouthpieces with approbation, things are bad.

Here’s a logic question for you, Gentle Reader.

1). No rational person believes that a pop-tart, even one bitten into a shape that more or less resembles a gun, is a weapon.

2). Administrators at Park Elementary School think a gun-shaped pop-tart wielded by a 2nd-grader is a weapon.

3). Therefore…?

Not a weapon.

Next stop: Simpsonville, South Carolina, where Rhett Parham, an autistic 13-year-old, was suspended by Hillcrest Middle School for bringing a crude drawing of a bomb to school. Yes, a drawing. A cartoon, actually. And the kid is autistic. Wow.

Rhett had modeled his drawing on an old Nintendo 64 video game and showed it to some older students at school. One of them, naturally, ran squealing to the administration, who promptly over-reacted, just like it says to do in How to Be an Idiot.

Rhett’s mom responds completely appropriately: “I’m angry. I’m upset and I’m incredulous, honestly, that a child could come in and bring a drawing and that’s somehow perceived as a threat -- especially someone with special needs who really doesn’t filter information the same way that typical children do.”

Contrast that with the mewling of the district:

It is important and necessary to thoroughly investigate any threat to student safety, including a student’s intent. This is one of the most difficult judgments a school official must make. This investigation began when threatening comments were made, resulting in the responsible removal of the student from the school to ensure everyone’s safety while the incident and intent were assessed.

The school’s administration responded appropriately to the severity of this incident, investigated it fully, and acted in accord with applicable laws, policies and procedures. The school administration has met and will continue to meet with the parents to resolve the matter.

There is, by the way, no evidence of “threatening comments”; the “responsible removal” was anything but; there was never the slightest threat to anyone’s safety; it would be difficult to imagine a less “appropriate” response. Indeed, if anyone deserves a suspension, it’s the obnoxious little nark who started the ball rolling.

Not a weapon.

And so we move on… to Coventry, Rhode Island, where 12-year-old Joseph Lyssikatos was suspended from Alan Shawn Feinstein Middle School for carrying a gun-shaped keychain, perhaps an inch and a half or two inches in length, that he’d won at an amusement park. Rules are rules, you see. Oy vey.

It’s difficult to argue with Joseph’s father, Keith Bonanno, when he says, “It was clearly a toy you would get in a bubble at a gumball machine. This is bordering on insanity over here,” except, perhaps to suggest that the border was a few miles back. We’re out of the suburbs and all the way into downtown Looneyville.

To aggravate the situation, school officials told his parents that they’re “lucky he didn’t get suspended for ten days, or, even worse, expelled.” The radio interviewer asks the obvious follow-up question, “Expelled for what?” And… guess what… “gun replica” and “zero tolerance” are part of the answer. The boy is a good student, taking advanced math, has no record of behavioral problems… all of which mean nothing, of course, because… Zero Tolerance.

Curmie is reminded of one of the most famous (not to be confused with “best”) episodes of the classic TV series “Star Trek.” Entitled “The Apple,” it depicts a society in which the natives (including a pre-“Starsky and Hutch” David Soul) wander around in somnambulant daze, intoning “we must feed Vaal,” referring to the ostensibly dragon-headed idol who simultaneously provides them with food and shelter on the one hand and controls everything about their lives on the other. It is, in other words, a relationship that is both symbiotic and pernicious. Substitute “zero tolerance” for “Vaal” and school administrators for the natives, and the parallel seems pretty accurate.

Not a weapon.

Finally (please, God, let it be “finally”), there’s a case in Arizona, where parents have pulled their 3rd-grade son out of Scottsdale Country Day School when he was threatened with expulsion for what the “headmaster” described as “highly disturbing” drawings—that’s them at left. Here, Gentle Reader, is when you wonder what the hell is so disturbing about them, and I say “I don’t know; my IQ is above room temperature. Sorry.”

The three drawings depict a ninja, a soldier, and a Star Wars character: possibilities for the 8-year-old’s Hallowe’en costume. Ah, but… they’re armed (!), and there’s a rule against that. Of course there is: it’s grounds for suspension to display “any behavior that is deemed threatening such as violent behavior, drawings depicting weapons, blood, or aggression…” The boy’s father muses, “I think we really send our children the wrong message when we show that, as adults, we're so afraid of our shadow that an innocent picture - that any 8-year-old might've drawn - is cause for this kind of concern.” To which Curmie responds: “yep.”

Meanwhile, headmaster Steve Prahcharov claims that he can’t guarantee the safety of the other kids if such a loathsome creature as this is allowed to roam the hallways. After all, mixed in with passages about saving the earth and protecting humanity are plans for escaping a killer zombie at school. One wonders which part so terrifies Prahcharov. Perhaps the real problem is that the kid pointed out the school’s lack of an effective zombie defense plan.

Seriously, there’s something very wrong in all these stories. I’m not going to try to guess at the motives of those involved—post-Newtown over-sensitivity to gun violence is insufficient to explain such inanity, but I’m not ready to come to the same conclusions as Curmie’s netpal Jack Marshall, over at Ethics Alarms:

this is a deliberate and relentless process of state indoctrination. The schools, teachers and administrators are determined to make future generations of Americans just as fearful and negatively disposed toward guns, and thus toward self-sufficiency and the Second Amendment, while pushing them to embrace complete dependence on a government that cannot be depended upon, and trust in a government that has proven progressively more untrustworthy.

I’m not sure Jack’s wrong, either, by the way, although I kind of suspect that it’s once again time to invoke Hanlon’s Razor.

What I can say is that we are well on our way to a potentially devastating “crying wolf” scenario. A drawing of a bomb isn’t a weapon. A 2”-long keychain “gun” isn’t a weapon. A breakfast pastry in the hands of a little boy, regardless of what shape it is, isn’t a weapon. Drawings of potential Hallowe’en costumes aren’t weapons. We’re not talking here about anything, anything, that could reasonably be construed as dangerous—not by a child, not from a distance, nothing. Someday, some kid is going to bring a real gun to school—not with any malice, necessarily—and when we hear about it, we’re all going to say, “what, again?” because we figure it’s another drawing… or foodstuff… or tiny toy. And someday, that real gun is going to hurt someone because, inured by episode after episode of unprovoked hysteria, no one will know what to do when there’s a real threat.

Now That's a Curmie Contender

[EDIT: It turns out that Erin Cox may well be a fraud, and that school authorities behaved appropriately. I leave the story up simply as a reminder to us all that a little skepticism is seldom misplaced. Curmie apologizes to Principal Scuzzarella and the other school officials.]

Even a quick perusal of the nominees for Curmie Awards past (2011 nominees here, 2012 nominees here) will reveal some of my particular bêtes noires when it comes to school administrations: punishing students (or faculty) who didn’t do anything wrong, clinging to inane “zero tolerance” policies, attempting to police legal behavior that takes place off school grounds. A recent case in North Andover, MA, rolls all of these personal pet peeves into one tidy bundle.

Erin Cox (left) is a senior at North Andover High School. She’s an honor student and is, or was, the captain of the volleyball team, and a two-time all-star. A couple of weeks ago, she got a text from an underage friend who thought (no doubt correctly) that she was too intoxicated to drive home from a party. So Cox went to pick her up to give her a ride home. Unfortunately for Ms. Cox, she arrived at about the time the cops did (different reports say she got there just before, just as, or just after the police showed up). The police made several arrests, but recognized the fact that Cox was neither drunk not in possession of alcohol, so she was not among those arrested. Still, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, she appears to have been “summoned to court for drinking.” Given the fact the police obviously found no evidence against her, and apparently agreed that she had not been drinking—not to mention the fact that she could readily prove that she hadn’t been at the party even as a bystander—this constituted more than a little over-reach, but, as Fox News reports, “police later backed Cox's version of events.”

In other words, there was no harm done… until the cretinous yahoos at the high school got into the act, that is. Principal Carla Scuzzarella, you see, stripped Cox of her team captaincy and suspended her from five games, because… well, because. There’s a zero tolerance policy, of course, and Scuzzarella, who would apparently have to evolve to have the brains of a rotting rutabaga, dutifully exacted what apparently passes for justice in her little fiefdom. Needless to say, Superintendent Kevin Hutchinson, just as addle-pated as his minion, rushed to her defense, babbling about how participation in athletics is a privilege and claiming that student-athletes receive due process and a fair hearing. The fact that there is no evidence of such a hearing, or any common sense attributable to anyone in that administration, rather undercuts that argument, however, does it not?

Cox sued the district to re-instate her on the team. The court ruled it had no jurisdiction (one wonders who does), but not before the school’s attorney, one Geoffrey Bok, allegedly claimed that Cox had been arrested: that would be, to coin a phrase, a lie. Cox’s lawyer, Wendy Murphy, made the following statement:

That a school would then lie to a judge in a court of law is an outrage and shows the length some school officials will go to to retaliate against a family that dares to challenge an irrational zero tolerance policy.

In fact, as the police officer at the scene reported in a statement that was provided to the principal and the judge, Erin was not arrested and did nothing wrong. He added that she had not been drinking, had no intention of drinking, was there to help a friend and did not have even the ‘slightest’ odor of alcohol on her person.

So let’s review the bidding. There’s a zero tolerance policy about drugs and alcohol. Such policies are always, and I do mean always the result of an administration too morally craven and/or too intellectually comatose to recognize that one size never fits all.

This policy, moreover, applies to off-campus events, where the school has no legitimate jurisdiction. If the police choose to act, that is their decision and their responsibility. The school might, then, reasonably, apply sanctions to students found guilty of a crime… or, perhaps, even those charged with one. But the school district, however much they might wish it to be otherwise, is neither a law enforcement nor a judicial authority. Oh, and of course in this case, the school's lawyer appears to have lied in court in a Hail-Mary attempt to make the principal’s absurd over-reach a little less ridiculous.

Finally, of course, there’s the fact that Erin Cox not only did nothing wrong, she in fact did something right. Were it not for her, her friend might well have driven away from the party before the police arrived, putting a drunken teenager behind the wheel of a car. At the very least, she is to be praised for acting responsibly—and, if I might say so, maturely—in taking care of her friend; the friend, too, while not all her decisions that night were the best, did at least have the sense to ask her friend—Cox—to drive her home. Both these decisions—to ask for help and to give it—are admirable. Both, of course, are being punished by an administration too concerned with rules and too little concerned with moral responsibility, justice, or education. For if nothing else comes of this case, the next time a situation like this comes up, some student somewhere is going to hesitate to do the right thing; some friend is going to be reluctant to ask for a ride; sooner or later, someone is going to get hurt or killed… all because Principal Scuzzarella has neither the moral authority nor the intellect to do her job.

Needless to say, public opinion from observers from the left, right and center on this case is running overwhelmingly in favor of Ms. Cox and against the Silly Squad at the high school. Of course, there’s one exception: Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the quintessence of a narcissistic enterprise if ever there was one. Only the Susan G. Komen Foundation offers any real opposition in the competition to be the alleged charity most about itself and least about its stated cause. Drunk driving is still very much a concern, but MADD per se hasn’t been relevant for at least a generation, if indeed it ever was. So color me unsurprised that they’d object to getting a drunk driver off the road and would side with the authoritarian morons. 17-year-old designated drivers weren’t their idea, after all.

So yes, MADD gets to share in the ignominy of being shown to be ridiculous. But they’re not eligible for a Curmie Award. Scuzzarella and her gaggle of brainless dissemblers, on the other hand: that, my friends, is Curmie material.

Curmie Contenders: I... Can't... Keep... Up

It’s May, so I’m beginning to feel like Oprah: You get a Curmie nomination, and you get a Curmie nomination, and you get a Curmie nomination, and you get a Curmie nomination. Yes, four of them: all making news in the past week or so, each worthy, if that is the word, of serious consideration for the coveted award given to the educator who most embarrasses the profession.

I have my personal… erm… favorite of the quartet, but since I mean it that all four might get a Curmie nomination this December, I don’t want to prejudice the voting. So I’ll take them in the order I found out about them.

Leading off, then, is the story out of North Rowan High School in North Carolina. Social studies teacher Tanya Dixon-Neely was taped by student Hunter Rogers saying some pretty stupid things in the classroom.

Now, allow me to register a few caveats. First, Rogers is no hero for surreptitiously recording the class without permission and then posting the tape to YouTube instead of turning it over to school officials. (Curiously, I don’t see anything in the news reports about Rogers being suspended or even reprimanded for using a cell phone in class.) He’s an unethical little brat who thinks the ends justify the means: and the default position is that the means were sleazy if not illegal. Perhaps Dixon-Neely deserved it. His classmates didn’t… unless they were all in on the subterfuge, and Dixon-Neely was being set up to be ambushed. The fact that Dixon-Neely seems to have been prodded into her angry outburst doesn’t do much for the accusers’ credibility.

Second, the combination of poor sound quality and no video, coupled with a couple of pops and gaps, makes me wonder if the tape was edited. Andrew Breitbart might no longer be with us, but his legacy is. As I wrote a year ago, “I suspect that I’m not the only faculty member in the country who wonders whether today is the day that some student will show up in my class with a grudge, a recording device, and access to editing equipment.”

Third, some of what Dixon-Neely argues—and has been widely ridiculed for arguing—is indeed true, or at least could be argued to be true in general terms. I’d suggest, for example, that the behavior that Barack Obama admits to in one of his books doesn’t rise to the level of bullying, but the allegations about Mitt Romney do… of course, that’s not exactly what Dixon-Neely actually says, and she passes on an opportunity for a teaching moment. Moreover, the fact that we have a constitutional right to criticize the President doesn’t mean that people haven’t been arrested for doing so, as, say, the case of Nicole and Jeff Rank demonstrates. Oh, sure, the authorities called it something else, but yeah, they pretty much got arrested for criticizing then-President Bush.

Is this what Dixon-Neely was referencing? Given the incoherence of some of the rest of what she says, probably not, but we can’t know that for certain, and she deserves due process. That doesn’t mean that getting her out of the classroom was a bad idea; it means that there may be more to her side of the story than the deafening drum-beat of the rightist press will allow us to hear. It’s also saddening to see the specifically racist and sexist anger directed at Dixon-Neely. She deserves criticism for screwing up, for sure. But ”Ignorant Black Leftist SLUT Tanya Dixon-Neely Needs To Be Fired”? Really?

Still, the idea that you can disparage Romney because “he’s running for President; Obama is the President” is pretty bizarre, and describing President Bush as “shitty” may be an opinion with which I agree, but it is an opinion, vulgarly expressed. Opinions framed as opinions about non-political matters are fine. So is challenging a student’s assumptions. Using the excremental adjective to describe a POTUS while on the clock as a teacher, however: nope. It’s pretty clear that Ms. Dixon-Neely ceased to function as a teacher and began being an Obama campaigner not long into the tirade. I struggle in vain to imagine a scenario by which this would be appropriate behavior. Yeah, Hunter Rogers is a right little asshole, but Dixon-Neely is a Curmie contender.

Next up: the school nurse at Deltona High School in Florida who refused to give an asthmatic student his inhaler while he was having an attack. In fact, she locked herself in her office while he gasped for breath on her floor. And then, (you can see this coming, can’t you, Gentle Reader?) the school officials defended her actions. You see, they didn’t have a parental consent form signed this year. His mom had filled out the form in previous years and hadn’t revoked that permission. Not good enough. And, of course, they’d confiscated his inhaler—unopened, with his name and prescription clearly legible—from his locker. But, you see, there are rules.

What the hell is going on? It’s the rules to let a kid die? It’s the rules for someone whose profession is to heal the sick to refuse treatment? What kind of Ayn Randian nightmare is happening here? Yeah, I get it. The school could get sued if some other kid got the inhaler and had an allergic reaction or whatever. This is because some “victims” are greedy, because some lawyers are unethical, because some judges and juries are stupid. That’s where these odious “zero tolerance” policies come from. I proposed a solution to this problem on my old blog nearly seven years ago. Curiously enough, no one listened.

But this case raises the bar of callousness. Remember, the school seized the inhaler or there wouldn’t have been a problem. Even though knew the medication was his, that it had been prescribed, that there were release forms from previous years on record, they not only wouldn’t then administer potentially life-saving medication to young Michael Rudi, they wouldn’t let him do it himself, and they couldn’t be bothered to call 911. Frighteningly, this kind of depraved indifference is apparently not uncommon: I’ve heard of this happening at least twice in Texas, just in cases involving my students or former students. Ironically but absolutely appropriately, this inhuman treatment of a fellow traveler resulted in precisely what the stupid policy was intended to prevent: a lawsuit.

While part of me would like the nurse to be placed in an airtight room until she passes out, my better nature prevails. Just sue the shit out of her, the school, and every idiot administrator who sought to justify her indefensible actions. Maybe, just maybe, someone will get the message.

Next on the hit parade is the news from Walker, Michigan, where Kenowa Hills High School Principal Katie Pennington suspended 65 seniors for riding bicycles to school as a last-day-of-class senior activity. The students were escorted by a police cruiser, the city’s mayor “rode shotgun” and provided donuts for the group.

But, as is the tradition at Kenowa Hills, and probably at every other high school in the country, the students didn’t tell their administration about what they were going to do. (I’d call it a prank, but I yield to the linguistic distinction drawn by Zac Totten, the class president: “A prank is something that causes harm, funny for one side and not the other. I think she reacted the way she did because we kind of blind-sided her.”) Yes, that’s the problem: she wasn’t in on the gag, and that is an offense grievous enough to suspend over 20% of your imminent graduates, denying them their traditional “senior walk.”

What an idiot. Yes, one might point out that there were safety issues involved, that a little more advance warning would have provided a second police cruiser, that discretion is generally a good thing. But no one got hurt; there’s nothing illegal about riding a bicycle. People in town thought it was a great idea. I can understand the safety concerns, if indeed they were legitimate and not simply a convenient cover for what was in fact no more that administrative petulance.

After the case brought national notoriety, Pennington and Superintendent Gerald Hopkins, who (wait for it…) supported her actions, relented. Pennington even offered a public apology. That’s a step, I suppose. Reversing a silly decision before it makes national headlines would be better. Best of all would be a higher-fiber diet.

Finally, case #4, which I am rushing to write up lest there be a #5 on the horizon before I finish. This one concerns Jessica Barba, a student at Longwood High School in Middle Island, New York. For a class project, she created a video and a Facebook page, both clearly labeled as fictional, to demonstrate the real effects of bullying. “Hailey Bennett,” the adolescent heroine of the piece, is isolated when her best friend moves away, is subjected to constant bullying at school, and ultimately commits suicide.

It’s not the best project in history—not least because of the atrocious spelling employed throughout—but there is some creativity there, the video is well-edited, it shows the evidence of a lot more work than most high school kids will put into any assignment, and the project as a whole relates to a real issue in schools. Bullying happens, and too little is done to stop it. (No, Gentle Reader, I’m not going off on that screed.) Jessica can articulate a persuasive response (that was the assignment) to this situation far more effectively than she can to whether the elections in Egypt will lead to a new golden age, a return to military rule, or an increase in power for Islamic fundamentalists. She’s 15. Go figure.

But some parent apparently saw the Facebook page (why? how?), didn’t notice that it was clearly marked as fictional, and called the cops, who in turn over-reacted, as did the school, which promptly suspended the girl for… erm… “[creating] a substantial disruption to the school.” Those are the words of the Superintendent, unidentified in the article by Meghan Neal in the New York Daily News, but apparently one Allan Gerstenlauer, assuming the website is kept up to date. Of course, winning the big game in basketball would also cause substantial disruption, but I guess we’re not supposed to notice that.

As often happens in cases like these, it was the national press attention that really turned the tide. Let’s face it, whether this is a good thing or not, if Matt Lauer calls you out, you’d better be ready. There was also an on-line petition that gathered nearly 15,000 signatures. Caving more to public pressure than to any real beliefs, school officials rescinded the suspension and wiped Jessica’s record clean.

Three further observations:

First, whatever else may be true here, it’s clear that once again school officials think they have the right to control every aspect of their students’ lives. I don’t care that kids at school were talking about the video. If there was a disruption, maybe that’s a good thing. And, once again, we’ve got a school demanding a student’s Facebook password to delete the offending page. Maybe, maybe the account should have been taken down because it violated Facebook’s TOS agreement. But that’s Facebook’s call. Dammit, we’ve just been here. This kind of intrusion is stupid, unprofessional and unethical in Geneva, IL. What makes these bozos think it’s any different on Long Island?

Second, not every kid can drop by the “Today Show” studios with her parents. This, too, raises a familiar issue, a variation on the theme of one I discussed a few months ago. The internet helps, but you can be sure that somewhere in the country there’s some idiot administrator over-reaching just as much as the clowns in charge of this high school did… and getting away with it because there’s no Neil Gaiman or Clint Dempsey or Matt Lauer to take up the cause. (Side note here: my first post on the situation at UW-Stout has had more views than any other two articles I’ve written, combined, and about 10 times as often as the median. Wanna bet having the link tweeted by Adam Baldwin had something to do with that?)

Third, there was a snarky piece by Judith Warner in Time about this case. Warner is right to wonder,

shouldn’t a 15-year-old, ostensibly advanced enough in English to be taking a “persuasive speech” class (as opposed to, say, an old-fashioned class focused on reading and writing) know that “bestfriend” isn’t a word? That a “whole in her heart” makes no sense and that there’s no such thing as a “branned name shirt”?

What comes next is problematic, however:

And while we’re on the subject of academics, is allowing a kid to do something for a homework assignment that she’d probably love to do anyway – make a video, post on Facebook – really such a great idea? In an era of panic over the shrinking skills of our future workforce, and of “results-oriented” education reform, can we afford to waste students’ time on feel-good assignments rather than push them to master the basics of grammar, spelling and punctuation?

Rubbish. Warner would have us believe that students who actually enjoy an assignment are somehow doing something wrong. Look, I’m a grammar Nazi (ask any of my students), but correct spelling is only one component of education. Yes, I wish I didn’t cringe every time I look at a stack of papers from university juniors and seniors, let alone high school sophomores: I know that there will be some colossally stupid constructions in half or more of those essays. But any reasonable view of education seeks a balance between left-brain and right-brain activity. Jessica Barba deserves to lose points for her orthographic sloppiness. Neither Warner nor I know whether she did. But she’s got a good heart, a creative flair, and a fair amount of technical skill. There’s the potential for a promising adult in there. Still, she wasn’t completely successful. Her message about the perils of bullying and humiliation clearly didn’t resonate with the pompous Ms. Warner. Otherwise, this 15-year-old girl wouldn’t have been held up to ridicule in a national publication.

So there you have it… four more contenders for the Curmie. By my rough count, that brings the total for 2012 to about 16. It’s only May. Jolly.

Incompetent School Administrators vs. Self-Entitled Lawyer's Kid: Talk about a Battle with No One to Root For!

From California (where else?) comes a story of a school that actually sought to punish a student for plagiarism… and, predictably, got sued for it. A sophomore at Sequoia High School in Redwood got caught having copied someone else’s homework. The boy is in an honors program, and the prescribed punishment for cheating is removal from that program. He will, perish the thought, be forced to finish the year in regular English. Oh, the humanity!

The boy’s father, however, is an idiot asshole attorney, one Jack Berghouse, who just couldn’t resist the urge to strut his stuff. He has filed suit against the school district, its superintendent, and the school principal for having the audacity to enforce the rules specified in the “Academic Honesty Pledge” signed by both the boy and his mother. Ah, but according to Berghouse, the school seems to have two parallel and mutually exclusive policies, one of which says that a student will be removed from class only after a second offense.

It may be that Berghouse has a legal argument, and Jack Marshall, from whose blog article I first heard of this case, is right to argue that “technicalities are important… when important consequences are involved.” That said, I think he’s wrong to wonder if we should “condemn Jack Berghouse for being a good lawyer.”

Why? Because, from where I sit, he isn’t a good lawyer. A good lawyer would have the best interests of his client in mind at all times. What Berghouse has done is to make the fact that his son is a self-important prick—he reportedly posted to Facebook that the school was guilty of “tyranny” for… um… busting him for being a dishonest jackass—national news. Seriously, the people who work in admissions offices for the nation’s top colleges and universities are a pretty savvy lot, often themselves alumni of the schools they now represent. If I’m working in a place like that, I’m checking out news articles all the time.

Here’s what happens if Berghouse isn’t quite such a pompous ass: the school offered to admit the son to the prestigious International Baccalaureate program beginning next year, with no mention of the cheating incident, but he cannot return to Honors English… this year: the story says he will “still be left out of the advanced studies sophomore English class” (emphasis mine). That’s… OMG… another month or so! No college worth a damn cares what section of English a kid took as a sophomore if he’s got an IB degree and good board scores. But Berghouse is too blinded by the worst of lawyerly and/or parenting instincts to see that: he’s got to win, even if winning costs more than not playing.

Here’s what happens now: Prestigious University gets an application from some kid from Sequoia High School. “Wait, Bob, wasn’t that the place where the kid cheated and his father the shyster got him off on a technicality?” “Yeah, Rachel, I think you’re right. Let me Google that… yep… father’s name was Berghouse. What’s the father’s name on that application?” So—is Prestigious University going to be more or less interested in a prospective student who thinks that it’s tyranny to enforce rules of basic honesty and who has a father who’s the stereotypical lawyer, ready to sue anybody for any reason? This time, it’s for enforcing the rules about cheating. Next time, it’s for giving Special Snowflake Berghouse a well-deserved C in Biology or keeping him off the debate team for fabricating evidence.

Moreover, many top colleges have an alumni interview as part of the application process. I did this as a high school senior, and I've conducted a handful of these interviews as an alumnus. And guess what? The alumni interviewer lives in (or near) your town. So even if the news of this case doesn't find its way back to Cambridge or New Haven or Hanover, local news coverage will make it reasonably likely that grads in the Redwood area will be on the lookout for this kid in a year and a half or so.

Perhaps Berghouse’s legal case is sound. I don’t understand how it could be, but I’m not a lawyer, and I do understand that law and justice are discrete concepts. It strikes me, however, that one of two things must be true. Either the document signed by student and parent clearly states a zero tolerance policy, in which case the signatures would, it seems to me, over-ride any possible ambiguity elsewhere… or the pledge itself is ambiguous, in which case why would two members of a lawyer’s family sign it?

Wherever the confusion lies, it’s pretty clear that in adopting a new policy last year, the school missed one place in the old guidelines that just didn’t get updated. Having sat on Bylaws Committees a number of times, I can tell you that such omissions are virtually a fact of life.

But where normal people see an unintentional mistake, self-important jackasses like Berghouse see a loophole. According to the article in the San Mateo County Times, “By drafting a confusing and poorly written honesty pledge, Berghouse said, Sequoia teachers have cheated far more” than, presumably, his obviously cheating offspring. Would someone please slap this asshole? There’s a difference between an honest mistake and an intentional act of dishonesty. And it’s not that the former is worse. Anyone but Berghouse is capable of seeing that distinction. He, however, is a walking lawyer joke.

What is particularly disingenuous, however, is the idea that Berghouse purports to be surprised by the public’s indignation—“I had no freaking idea this would happen.” This suggests of one of two things: that we know where junior learned his dishonesty, or that Papa Berghouse is dumber than an anvil. Actually, the former is pretty clear: we can start with the preposterous claim that the lawsuit is “for the other kids at Sequoia.” Really? Then you’re demanding the re-instatement of the other three students who were caught at the same time? Volunteering your time to re-write the pledge and eliminate the contradictions? Showing appropriate parenting skills and demanding as much accountability from your spawn as from the school? No… didn’t think so.

But it just might be that the latter is also true. There is a particular breed of people who just don’t get it that being a self-entitled jerk does not endear one to the community. Most people, however, don’t like people who get off on technicalities. Hell, I’m a civil libertarian and I don’t like people who get off on technicalities. And let’s say the public reaction isn’t going to go all soft and fuzzy when they find out it’s a lawyer’s kid who doesn’t think he needs to play by the same rules as everybody else.

This isn’t to say the school gets off scot-free, however. First off, there’s that zero tolerance policy, which is almost by definition a stupid idea. Also, of course, the argument is often made that the punishment for such offenses is disproportionate to the crime. This is one of the few times that this claim might actually have merit. The kid is what, 15? 16? He did something really stupid once, and is punished by getting booted out of an English program he otherwise earned? For copying a homework assignment?

I have something of a reputation for identifying and prosecuting plagiarists, and even I think the penalty may be a little steep. There’s a difference between copying a friend’s journal entry and appropriating a term paper. I see both not infrequently. The former leads to a reprimand and a lowered grade; the latter generally results in an F in the course and a formal report to the Dean. Different punishments for different degrees of transgression: what a concept!

Moreover, school policy is messed up in two ways. First, assuming Berghouse is correct in his assertion, the language is self-contradictory, thereby (possibly) allowing little weasels like Berghouse’s son to game the system. But, more fundamentally, the policy, even if well-written, employs the wrong strategies.

If you want to punish plagiarism and cheating, the penalty should show up on the transcript. Take a few points off his English grade for the quarter—fail him, even—and leave him in the course. If it’s an anomaly, no one will care. Although I was a generally very good student in high school, I got a 70 in Math one quarter (not for cheating: it was just that Analytic Geometry and I weren’t exactly friends). Not a single school as much as wondered what had happened; I was accepted everywhere I applied, including the Ivy League college I ultimately attended.

More to the point, there’s no good to be achieved by putting this young man in a regular section of English. It might, might be different in math or science, something less inter-active. But even at the high school level, a good English class is likely to be something of a seminar, meaning that the contributions of individual students matter. Students learn from each other, with guidance from the teacher. That means everyone in Honors English is being punished because of this incident. And everyone in the regular English class gets to deal with passive-aggressive MiniBerghouse, who is bored as well as arrogant and dishonest. Jolly.

No one wins here. The school looks bad for developing a frankly rather dumb, inflexible, and apparently poorly written policy; the district has to divert funds from its educational programs to defend a lawsuit against the likes of Berghouse, who appears to be everything that is worst about lawyers and parents rolled into one smug little package. The boy is punished not merely by having such a pain in the ass for a father, but may, because of the publicity this case generates (I’m happy to help, by the way), actually be more likely to be turned down by his chosen university.

More importantly, however, the entire American education system suffers, as schools across the country increasingly take note of the perils of enforcing standards—whether they be for scholarship, integrity, whatever. And that portends a bleaker future for all of us.

Another Story about Education in Georgia. It Ain't Pretty.

So, Jack Marshall, whose Ethics Alarms blog is linked frequently here, read my piece on the idiot teacher(s) in Georgia who thought that references to slavery, beatings, and baskets of cotton would be appropriate to include in math homework for 3rd graders. And his response:

If your child is taught by a moron—and technical definitions aside, that is not an unfair or uncivil description of a teacher who thinks it’s reasonable to give the question, “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?” to a third-grader, your child’s likelihood of growing up moronic is vastly increased.

And yet, as Richard Dreyfus’s character says to Quint the shark-hunter as they compare scars in “Jaws,” “I got that beat.” In fact, Rick, I got that beat in Georgia.

Trouble is, he’s probably right (although there’s a good chance that both will be Curmie nominees and you’ll get to decide).

Thirteen-year-old Jack Persyn is a student at Lanier Middle School in Sugar Hill, GA. He was at Chess Club before classes started a couple of days ago (obviously, he’s a threat to society—you know those Chess Club types) when he noticed that there was a 1 ½” jackknife in a bag his aunt had given him for Christmas; she’d bought it at a yard sale. So, knowing that there was school rule against having a “weapon” (a knife that size is a weapon?), Jack took it to a teacher. For his honesty, he was rewarded with a four-day in-school suspension.

School officials acknowledged that his possession of the knife on school property was an accident. The official disciplinary report says that he “immediately self-reported.” They punished him anyway. That makes them morons. They claim they don’t have a zero-tolerance policy. That makes them lying morons.

OK. Like most people who have travelled at all extensively, I have inadvertently taken something I shouldn’t have through airport security. No, not something really dumb like a loaded gun (I’m not a football coach or a Tea Party leader, after all). But I remember looking through a pocket in my carry-on bag while waiting for a connecting flight in the St. Louis airport a few years ago and finding… wait for it… a 2 ½” knife. I quickly realized that this was the knife I hadn’t been able to find for several weeks. And that meant I’d taken it through airport security not once but three times, including twice when I’d been singled out for a special search by the hopeless incompetents known as the TSA.

But I digress. The point is that I’m not as honorable as Jack Persyn: I didn’t run scurrying to the authorities to turn myself in. I just threw the knife back in the bag, vowed to remember to take it out when I got home, and went back to reading my book. That’s because I’m old enough and cynical enough to suspect that the powers-that-be would cause me more hassle than the situation merited. Besides, I didn’t want to have that knife confiscated: it was a Christmas present from my (now) brother-in-law before I married his sister. (We’re now four months away from our 30th anniversary.)

Young Mr. Persyn, however, is a better and/or more naïve person than I. He could easily have done precisely what I did. He could have tossed the knife back in his bag and made a mental note to take it out when he got home. But he did the right thing. No good deed goes unpunished.

I’m not sure who the school’s talking head in the TV spot link might be: system spokesperson Jore Quintana, perhaps? Whoever he is, he was tasked with defending the indefensible. A reporter asks, “Isn’t that telling them that you’re doing the right thing by reporting it, but you’re still going to be punished?” His self-righteous response: “That is telling other students that we are trying to keep their school safe, and that we’re trying to keep them safe at school.”

I’m going to say this once: No. It. Freaking. Isn’t.

What this absurd enforcement of an absurd zero-tolerance policy (call it what you will, that’s precisely what it is, and it’s fully as reprehensible as all the others—more so, probably, because of the craven denial of reality), students learn the following:

• if you make a mistake, whatever you do, don’t admit it. We didn’t admit ours, and we punished a 13-year-old for admitting his.

• exercise of discretion or thought is expressly forbidden.

• when you’ve made a really stupid decision, make sure that no one knows it was you. Send a minion out to take the heat.

• if you have a “weapon,” make sure it stays concealed.

• never trust a person in authority to do the right thing, just because you did.

Forgive me for not applauding the fact that the status quo, unlike the previous policy, allows for discretion. Discretion only matters when it’s applied.

Two Stories about High School Wrestling

I came of age in a small city in upstate New York that produced more than its share of excellent high school wrestlers. Even in years when the team wasn’t outstanding, there were always a couple of individuals who were in contention for conference or even state honors. My wife was the statistician for a state championship team in Ohio. We lived for several years in eastern Iowa, where the tiny high school where my wife directed the plays after her day job produced not only multiple state titles, but more than one NCAA champion and Olympian.

So if high school wrestling has ever had a moment in the last generation when it attracted a national spotlight, I suspect we’d have paid more attention than would the average couple. Once in a while, there’s a story of marginal interest. I can’t ever recall a time when there were two significant stories happening at once. Now there are. Both have to do with the essential nature of the sport and the problems associated with, well, grabbing someone else.

The first story is from the great state of California, where the father of an unidentified freshman at Buchanan High is apparently suing the Clovis Unified School District over an incident last summer at wrestling practice in which a senior teammate allegedly rammed two fingers up the boy’s anus in a maneuver called the “butt-drag” (only the classiest of terminology for you, gentle reader). By the way, if you follow the links, you’ll find out the senior’s name, which figures prominently in virtually all of the reporting; on the chance that he’s innocent, I’m not going to actively contribute to the vilification of a minor. The freshman boy’s name has not been released because he is the alleged victim of a sex crime, but his father has made statements to the press and is identified by name in those stories: unless that father has multiple freshman sons on the wrestling team, I’m willing to bet that everyone at school has pretty well figured it out by now.

The alleged back-story in this case was that the senior was bullying the freshman over the younger boy’s water bottle. According to the New York Times (yes, they had an article on this case),

On July 15… according to the younger boy’s account, he refused to hand his water over, prompting threats from [the senior], including menacing gestures. The police report states that at a practice that evening, [the senior] purposefully stood near the younger boy during a wrestling exercise and, when the coach whistled for wrestling to begin, threw the younger boy down, pinned him to the mat and performed an invasive “butt drag” maneuver.

The senior claims the move consisted only of, and again I’m just quoting newspaper accounts, grabbing the freshman’s “butt cheek” in a move he’d been taught by a middle school coach. If the reporting of the Fresno Bee is to be believed, the incident took place in “a crowded gym during practice in front of parents and coaches.” Yet there appear to be no witnesses.

I’m not putting implicit faith in Jane Jamison of UNCOVERAGE.net, especially when her editorial piece is cross-linked to something called “Right-Wing News.” That said, I have seen no contradiction of the following:

The “victim,” a freshman, made no complaint about the move in practice, and in fact, was joking and having a good time and never even mentioned the incident, according to witnesses and the coach. It wasn’t until sometime later, that the younger wrestler said something to his step-mother and then to his father. The father is a former counselor for a local child-abuse agency.

The “victim” was taken to a doctor, who found slight redness in the victim’s anal area. The fingers, if they did go in or near the anus, were OVER the victim’s work-out clothes, it was not a “skin-on-skin” allegation.

Moreover, the “butt-drag” does indeed appear to be a standard wrestling move. It does not, by design, involve anal penetration of any description, but mistakes happen in sports. I was watching a basketball game last night, and an Oklahoma State player elbowed a Kansas player in the face. It was clear from the replay that there was no intent to do so; it was equally clear that the incident had indeed occurred.

It is impossible to conclude definitively what happened last July. According to an AP report, the older boy’s attorney asserts that a police investigation “found no evidence on the boy's underwear or gym shorts to support his account.” First off, there’s an investigation I’m glad I didn’t have to conduct. More to the point, the implicit suggestion here is that such a search would of necessity have been carried out very shortly after the incident itself, thereby calling into question the claim that the younger boy waited for a substantial period of time to file a complaint.

So we are faced with a wide range of possibilities. Perhaps the older boy actually threatened and then assaulted a younger, smaller teammate. Or the freshman (or his father) made the whole story up, whether for attention or hoping for a payout in a nuisance lawsuit or whatever. It’s also possible that there was an honest misinterpretation about the alleged threats, and/or that the anal penetration happened, but purely accidentally. Whatever the actual facts of the case, the senior was arrested on a charge of sexual battery (the charges were later dropped) and first suspended, then expelled, from school.

The school, of course, has one of those ridiculous “zero tolerance” policies, and I do wish I could blame it for the brouhaha. Unfortunately, I can’t. The question here isn’t whether a student ought to be suspended for getting highlights put in her hair. This allegation is indeed serious. If a bully committed a sexual assault on school property, of course he should be thrown out of school. The question isn’t whether the punishment meets the crime, it’s whether there was a crime.

The only people I’m confident aren’t at fault in this case are the school officials. Whereas one or the other of those boys is guilty of a crime, whether of assault (at least) or of filing a false report (at least), there is no allegation that I’ve seen suggesting the younger boy complained prior to the alleged incident that he was being bullied. The school apparently acted swiftly to suspend the older boy as soon as they heard of the allegation. That not all their decisions were unanimous suggests only that the facts of the case are open to more than one interpretation. All of which says that the younger boy’s father is an unethical ass for suing the school (but not the other boy?), whether his son’s claims are legitimate or not.

The other wrestling story is from Iowa, where a boy named Joel Northrup defaulted his class 3-A state tournament match rather than having to wrestle a girl, Cassy Herkelman of Cedar Falls. (It’s important that he defaulted rather than forfeited, as that allowed him to continue in the consolation round.) Northrup is home-schooled, but wrestles for Linn-Mar High School, just down the road from where we used to live. His rationale:

Wrestling is a combat sport and it can get violent at times. As a matter of conscience and my faith, I do not believe that it is appropriate for a boy to engage a girl in this manner. It is unfortunate that I have been placed in a situation not seen in most other high school sports in Iowa.

Whereas the California story is about two different versions of what happened, with little disagreement about what should happen if we could be sure of the facts, this one is about whether what everyone agrees happened should have. A lot of folks in Iowa and elsewhere gave young Northrup a lot of credit for making this very difficult decision, and indeed for being disappointed but not whining about circumstances. (There’s no lawsuit forthcoming here.) Others, of course, smirked that he was afraid of losing to a girl. Maybe. But I suspect not.

What I know for certain is that ESPN.com’s Rick Reilly is, as usual, full of crap. There was, needless to say, a vulturous swirl of reporters surrounding Herkelman, to the point where she “couldn’t get focused” and her coach took away her cell phone and denied her internet access in a vain attempt to allow her to concentrate on wrestling. All this, in Reilly’s world, is Northrup’s fault, apparently because jackasses like Reilly can’t be expected not to unnecessarily harass 14-year-old girls. It’s all the kid’s fault, because, you see, he didn’t say his unwillingness to grab a girl by the breasts or between the legs had something to do with sexuality or sexual mores. Bullshit. He’s 16, and apparently a devout (and probably somewhat cloistered) Christian. Of course it does, whether or not he may be a little embarrassed to cite it as a reason.

We’ll never know how many of the 20 boys Herkelman defeated on the mat were less aggressive than they would have been with a male opponent, were just that split-second later than they would otherwise have been to wrap up an opponent from behind, or hesitated ever so slightly before attempting to sling her to the mat, giving her just enough time to re-establish her balance. Or, conversely, whether they were so concerned about the possibility of losing to a girl that they were too aggressive, taking chances they otherwise wouldn’t have. Maybe—consummation devoutly to be wished—none of them did, and they’d certainly all deny it. But there will always be the suspicion. That said, the last thing I want to do is to suggest the Herkelman didn’t deserve her spot in the state tournament. Certainly treating Herkelman differently than any other competitor would be the truly insulting course of action.

Reilly, of course, presumes to lecture an adolescent boy on both ethics and religion: “Does any wrong-headed decision suddenly become right when defended with religious conviction? In this age, don't we know better? If my God told me to poke the elderly with sharp sticks, would that make it morally acceptable to others?” Reilly is, of course, too arrogant to notice that his flair for the hypothetical could readily be turned around. His entire argument is founded on the idea that Ms. Herkelman is entering into this competition willingly, knowing the risks. She’s 14, remember, too young to be responsible for other decisions regarding the mutual touching of boys and girls (the age of consent in Iowa is 16). But even if she were of age, would we be criticizing Northrup for not screwing her under the bleachers just because, hypothetically, she didn’t object?

Wrestling, unlike any other interscholastic sport, is specifically about grabbing the opponent, sometimes in what Reilly calls “awkward places.” That’s going to be more than a little weird for a fair number of adolescents if the opposition happens to be of the other sex. (Like puberty isn’t difficult enough already, right?) And it’s also one of few sports in which boys and girls compete against each other. There are separate teams in golf and track and tennis, none of which involve touching the opponent at all, but there aren’t enough girls to field a separate wrestling team, so we get co-ed competition in the sport that is in social (as opposed to athletic) terms the most problematic. And, especially at the lower weight classes, there will be some girls whose quickness and athleticism will overcome a relative deficit in upper-body strength. In other words, I’m not surprised that a girl could reach state at 112 pounds, although I doubt that a). it would happen at one of the higher weight classes, or b). she’d actually win the tournament.

I have no problem with Ms. Herkelman; with the authorities who allowed her to compete; with her father, who encouraged her to do so; or with the boys who decided to wrestle her. But neither of the two girls who qualified for the state tournament condemns Northrup. Nor does Herkelman’s father. Nor do I. No, that is left to the national sports reporter who just happened to be in the neighborhood. Because if he went to Cedar Falls intentionally, it would have to have been because he considers Herkelman unlike any other wrestler who went to state but didn’t win. And that would make him a raging hypocrite. Oh, wait… Rick Reilly… yeah, old news. Sorry.

Confucius, You've Still Got It

I have, at several occasions in my blogging life, invoked the name of Confucius (here, for example), the great Chinese philosopher whose wisdom I have come to appreciate even more now than I did in those halcyon days when I taught a couple sections of Eastern Civ per semester for the year between getting my PhD and landing my current job.

I got to think about, and talk about, Confucius again today in Asian Theatre class. One of the central tenets of Confucian thought is the avoidance of lengthy and complicated rules structures. Every situation is different, and one can never anticipate all the possible permutations. Confucius’s solution is not to try. He advocates placing authority in the hands of a junzi (gentleman) who is sufficiently endowed with both wisdom and ethical sensibility to be able to adjudicate disputes.

As an example of where Confucian principles might help out in today’s society, I cited the recent case of Stephanie Plato, the 12-year-old girl recently suspended from school in Houston because she (gasp!) got red and blonde highlights put in her hair. Seriously. I mean, clearly everything is going so well with the educational system in this state that school officials have time to worry about stupid shit like this, right? I mean, what’s not to like about being 43rd in the country in graduation rates? The idiot principal who pointed to the student handbook as if it had been divinely inspired, and who was unsurprisingly too cowardly to even face the press would have been lucky to have been laughed out of Confucius’s presence. More likely, we’d have found out the ancient Chinese word for “bitch-slap.”

Ultimately, I can’t improve much on the commentary of Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms, who tersely and accurately observes that such episodes “teach students that the concept of adult intelligence and wisdom is a myth, and that they are under the thumbs of foolish, power-abusing, inconsiderate, child-loathing fools who deserve little respect and only whatever obedience that is necessary to avoid their desire to bully, insult, and harm.” (C’mon, Jack, don’t sugar-coat it. How do you really feel?)

Unfortunately, such cases are not uncommon. I mentioned the boy who was denied high school graduation a couple of years ago because he wanted to honor his Cherokee heritage by wearing a bolo tie instead of a standard necktie, and the girl who was suspended from school for giving a Midol to a friend. I looked straight ahead, to where one of my best students executed a perfect face-palm. To my left, two other students shared a look and one confided they’d both “gone to that high school”—not literally, but to other institutions where administrators hide behind rules so they don’t have to think. Indeed, thought—theirs, their teachers’, their students’—seems to be the last thing on these people’s minds. I wish I could blame this directly on the teach-to-the-test idiocy that runs rampant through American schools in general and Texas schools in particular. But they really are manifestations of the same impulse: memorization and obedience, good; thought and curiosity, bad.

Alas, the afternoon’s revelations were not yet complete. From my right came the testimony of another student, who had been suspended from school for a month because, while suffering an asthma attack, she took her inhaler out of her purse and used it, rather than scurrying across campus while unable to breathe so that the nurse could administer the medication. Somehow the assistant principal in California who sent kids home for wearing American flag insignias last Cinco de Mayo looks almost sane.

Needless to say, a lot of students founder a little in my freshman-level classes. They get glassy-eyed stares when I refuse to tell them whether Biff or Willy is the protagonist in Death of a Salesman, mutter about unfairness when receiving less than full credit for a plausible conclusion unsupported by argumentation, panic when I disagree with an opinion expressed by the textbook author or a high school English teacher (who got a C from me in this very class a few years ago). They can't think, in other words. The more cynical among you might suspect that I play devil’s advocate from time to time, just to see if a given student really has the stuff of scholarship. To this accusation, of course, I indignantly respond, “Moi?”.

What is clear is that the educational system, indeed the body politic, could use a healthy dose of Confucius, whom I described in class today as “the anti-moron” and as “an ethical Rahm Emanuel or Karl Rove, whichever one you think unethical. [sotto voce] Both.” Confucius was no anarchist; he insisted on following ritual and obeying the Emperor. But he understood the need to question, to consider, even to defy authority. (N.B. “Authority” is used here in the sense of power; Confucius would never challenge authority in the sense of expertise.)

When They Make Me Tsar™, the Analects will be required reading of all college students. And high school principals.