Education

Comment of the Day: “More School Abuse of Students and Culture: The Deadly Cupcake Caper”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Kids playing soldiers

Karl Penny adds some useful perspective on children’s war games, which were referenced in my post about the school that deemed tiny toy World War II soldiers like the ones featured in “Toy Story” a threat to student peace and safety. Here is his Comment of the Day to the post, More School Abuse of Students and Culture: The Deadly Cupcake Caper:

“My friends and I used to organize war games, armed with toy guns, with which we would industriously go about “killing” each other. Today, of course, we are all psychopathic, gun-obsessed, would-be killers, just waiting for the trigger event that will send us off to wreak the next massacre at someplace where people gather.

“If I had uttered the preceding sarcasm at any sort of school function, I’d shortly be explaining to the police that no, officer, I’d never dream of shooting up anyplace, and I just spoke carelessly, and I’ll never do it again, and please don’t take me to jail…. For heavens sake. Continue reading →

More School Abuse of Students and Culture: The Deadly Cupcake Caper

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
Wait...these are bad guys now?

Wait…these are bad guys now?

In Michigan, Schall Elementary School principal Susan Wright defended the latest example of attempted public school thought-control prompted by Sandy Hook hysteria, the seizing of 30 plastic toy soldiers (you’ll recall them as among the heroes in “Toy Story”) that the mother of a 9-year-old boy had placed on his home-made birthday cupcakes. She said in a statement,

“These are toys that were commonplace in the past. However, some parents prohibit all guns as toys. In light of that difference, the school offered to replace the soldiers with another item and the soldiers were returned home with the student. Living in a democratic society entails respect for opposing opinions. In the climate of recent events in schools we walk a delicate balance in teaching non-violence in our buildings and trying to ensure a safe, peaceful atmosphere.”

I will come to the point with uncharacteristic economy. Ms. Wright is a disgrace to her profession, a fearful, compliant, incompetent fool who is a danger to the development of the young minds placed in her charge. Let’s consider her outrageous “defense”: Continue reading →

Georgetown Law Center and The Case Of The Double-Crossed Donor

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments
Sometimes those naming deals backfire, you know?

Sometimes those naming deals backfire, you know?

Scott K.  Ginsburg, a media mogul who got a J.D. from Georgetown Law Center in 1978, had been wooed by the school’s development team for a major gift when he was riding high, amassing billions in the 1990s. He agreed to contribute some pocket change–five million bucks—to build a new fitness center that would bear his name. The deal was put into writing, and the University issued a cheerful press release. Then, in 1999, shortly after the agreement was reached,  the Securities and Exchange Commission filed suit against Ginsburg, accusing him of passing along inside information to his father and brother. A jury agreed with the SEC, and he was orderedto pay $1 million in fines. After a flurry of appeals, the verdict stuck. (NOTE: In the first version of this post, I implied that this was a criminal case. It wasn’t: this was a regulatory lawsuit, and a civil verdict. A dumb error on my part, and I apologize to readers and Mt. Ginsburg for the misinformation.)

While all of this was going on, the Law Center, understandably, got nervous. Although Ginsburg was not a practicing attorney at the time, law schools don’t like having facilities named after grads who have been found to have violated laws or regulations in high-profile cases. In 2002, then-Georgetown Law Center Dean Judith Areen sent Ginsburg a letter thanking him for his support but also asking to revise the agreement, eliminating the promise of naming rights.  Areen said the school would find some way to “honor your gift without generating negative media coverage.”  Ginsburg, however, refused to sign on. As the years went by and the school continued to promote his gift as enticement to other donors as well as hitting him up for more money, he assumed the Scott K. Ginsburg Health and Fitness Center was under construction. There’s a fitness center, all right, on the GULC campus, but Ginsburg’s name isn’t on it. Now he is suing the Law Center, alleging that it reneged on the deal. Continue reading →

Is “Double-Dipping” Unethical? How?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments
"Throw one scoop away, you greedy, unethical bastard!"

“Throw one scoop away, you greedy, unethical bastard!”

Over at Trust Across America, Barbara Kimmel has painted a scarlet “U” on the interim superintendent of the Mahwah School District, who has a $167,000 contract as well as an $131,000 annual pension. She finds the woman’s justification for her extravagant enrichment at taxpayer expense through the practice of “double-dipping,” unethical, and is rankled by the woman’s justification, when she says, “I think it’s the way the system is set up. Greater people than me made that decision, I took advantage of it. ”  This is the epitome of unethical reasoning, Kimmel writes:

“As the Commander in Chief of a school district you are responsible for the “culture of the corporation.” Just remember what you said the next time a student shows up in your office and uses the excuse that “everyone else was doing it,” or when one of your faculty members chooses to use all their days off, leaving a classroom full of kids with no teacher.  After all, it’s the way the system is set up. And the NJ taxpayers- apparently they don’t factor in to your ethical barometer at all. You just “took advantage of it (them).”

The executive director of Trust Across America also finds this to be the perfect example of conduct that is legal but not ethical. Is it? I’m dubious, and I’m not comfortable condemning the interim superintendent’s conduct or even her words, though she could have stated her situation a bit less smugly.

Exactly what is unethical here? Is it… Continue reading →

Our Sick, Sick, Untrustworthy Schools

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
And you thought Hogwarts was dangerous...

And you thought Hogwarts was dangerous…

The easiest place to render oneself disconsolate regarding the pit of warped values we must send our public school children into every day is Fark.com, which cheerily documents the child predators in the teaching ranks and their exploits. Let’s see, I haven’t checked in a while…I wonder what the tally is for February? Hey, February’s a light month! I have to go all the way back to the 19th to find the first, LaShawn Simmons, a 41-year-old former Pasadena middle-school math teacher who had sex with four students. She’s charged with sexual assault of a child, two counts of improper relationship between an educator and a student, online solicitation of a minor and possession of child pornography.

Actually, February was a terrible month to go to school, just not one with a bumper crop of child-molesting teachers. For example, in Port St. Lucie, Florida, we had a female teacher who didn’t have sex with a male student, she only purchased drugs from him and went drinking with him. It would be hard to top the teacher who poured pencil shavings in the special ed student’s mouth (and who wasn’t fired), but I think the Linden, California gym teacher who was caught on video stealing money from her students’ backpacks gets the prize. She was caught when a suspicious student and aspiring Nancy Drew hid in a locker to see if she could solve a string of thefts, and recorded the teacher’s larceny on her phone. It gets worse: when she brought the video to the attention of the principal, he told her to destroy the evidence. Luckily, she had already sent the video to her father. Continue reading →

Classroom Indoctrination Again: Enough! I Propose No-Tolerance

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments
"Now class, I'm not going to say this again---no essays about evil guns, or you'll be sorry."

“Now class, I’m not going to say this again—no essays about evil guns, or you’ll be sorry.”

Dewey Christian is an English teacher at Denton High School in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and on the evidence of this incident, one more example of how our children are being warped by arrogant bullies and fools under the pretense of public education. The teacher told students to write a few sentences about whatever topic they chose—“a fun experience,” one student said.  However, when two seniors turned in papers that referenced guns—the Horror!— Christian scolded and humiliated them in front of the class, and told them that they would receive zeros unless they chose a different topic.

Fired, that’s all—that’s what this teacher should and must be. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Columbia University

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

A Columbia professor charged with teaching his students the bewildering topic of quantum physics chose to employ performance art to send the message that conventional assumptions would be an impediment to their learning. Using projections, music, and himself as a performer (he stripped to his boxers and ate a banana before curling into a fetal position), Professor Emlyn Hughes got his students’ attention and tried an innovative approach to teaching. Now the university says it is “reviewing” his methods, with a spokesman saying that “Universities should have a climate of academic freedom though classes should stick to the subject matter.”

Translation: “Columbia gives lip service to ‘academic freedom,’ but it is perfectly happy to do what it can to discourage creative and controversial teaching experiments by publicly announcing an investigation whenever that likes of Gawker starts making fun of us, and the university certainly is hyper-sensitive to breaches of political correctness, since Professor Hughes employed gratuitous violence in his performance by having Ninjas impale stuffed animals.” Continue reading →

When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Unethical, As A School Board Ponders The Profits of Child Labor

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

child laborWe learn about how seriously our institutions take their ethics when money gets scarce. States suddenly decided that ol’ devil gambling wasn’t so bad after all, once they realized that lots and lots of poor, desperate people without a lot of mathematical skills would fork over billions they needed to buy food with or save to move out of the ghetto in the hope of becoming a tycoon. I’m sure as soon as states realize that their legislators don’t have the guts to make the wealthy and powerful pay for lousy schools, more and more of them will get into the drug dealing business, like Colorado, and let the lives, families and businesses destroyed by the inevitable results of legal pot and cocaine become collateral damage.

Somewhere in between those irresponsible and cynical policy decisions way come ideas like this one, from the Prince George’s County Board of Education (in Maryland.) There is a new proposed policy in the perpetually corrupt Washington D.C. neighbor to make all work products created by teachers or students the intellectual property of the County, not the individual who created it: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Everybody Connected With This Ridiculous Story

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

 

"Just remove that offensive bumper sticker, sir, and they'll be no trouble."

“Just remove that offensive bumper sticker, sir, and they’ll be no trouble.”

USA Today, NBC, Yahoo! and other news outlets are snickering as they report the story of an elderly couple pulled over by two police cars in Tennessee because a Buckeye leaf decal on their car, signifying their fealty to the Ohio State football team, was mistaken for a marijuana leaf by the men in blue. “What are you doing with a marijuana sticker on your bumper?” one of the cops asked the Jonas-Boggionis, the occupants of the vehicle. It was all a big misunderstanding! Boy, are those Tennessee cops dumb, not to be able to tell a Buckeye leaf from pot!

In classic “what’s wrong with this story?” fashion, not one of the news media reports, in their hilarity over the cops stopping the couple out of official botanical and sports ignorance, noted  that the police would have been just as wrong if the decal DID portray a marijuana leaf. It’s called the First Amendment, guys—perhaps you’ve heard of it? It’s the same Constitutional amendment that allows you media reporters to do the rotten, incompetent job you do covering the news without  being declared by law to be the menace to a free and informed society you are. You know, it might be helpful, when the police engage in a blatant First Amendment violation and abuse of state power, for reporters to recognize and explain it to the public as such, rather than make the news story about how the police stopped the Jonas-Boggionis for the “wrong reason.” Even if they had stopped it for what the stories say is the right reason, it would be the wrong reason. Continue reading →