Education

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 →

And Speaking of Grading Ethics…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

.

Grrrrrrrrr!

Grrrrrrrrr!

..I am reminded of a grading traumatic experience of my own, involving a famous professor whose curve was the opposite of Prof. Frölich’s.

But first, an aside. Many readers have asked my views on the weird story of  Megan Thode, the grad student who sued to have her C+ grade changed, alleging that it was the result of bias and will cost her 1.3 million dollars in lost income. The judge was understandably annoyed at having to decide the case, and has suggested a compromise between the parties to relieve him of the responsibility of perhaps having to change the grade himself. There was no good result possible here. If the school really had a bias against Megan and she could prove it, then the law suite was valid. She shouldn’t have her career disrupted because of unfair grading. If, on the other hand, her grade was within the range of proper discretion, the law suit was a threat to the education system, and had to be be fought until the last dog died. Nor should the school compromise, as it would create a system in which grades have no integrity and where anyone could buy an inflated grade by threatening court action. Ultimately, the judge decided that the grade had to stand. What I see here is an educational system on all levels collapsing from a toxic combination of warped objectives (education for monetary payoffs, not for its own sake) and a dearth of trust in the competence and integrity of the educators.

Now the story of my own disputed C+, starring the renowned Chester James Antieau. Continue reading →

The Red Caboose On The Penn State Ethics Train Wreck Arrives: The Paterno Family’s Report

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

1-train-wreck-kari-tirrell

To understand what the Joe Paterno’s family’s report (released on Feb. 10) regarding the late Penn State football coach’s culpability in the Jerry Sandusky child abuse cover-up means, one has to understand what lawyers do, and why it is completely ethical for them to do so, as long as their role isn’t misrepresented by them or their clients.

Lawyers exist to allow non-lawyers to have access to a legal system that is (needlessly) complicated and technical, and to provide their legal training, analytical skills and advocacy abilities to their clients’ legal and legitimate needs and objectives. A lawyer who interposes his or her own opinions, judgments and desires on the client without being asked to do so is, in most cases, behaving unprofessionally and unethically. This is an essential principle to grasp, and yet the vast majority of the public do not grasp it. Nonetheless, without the partisanship a lawyer brings to the attorney-client relationship, regardless of whether a client is rich or poor, altruistic or venal, kind or cruel, we would all be slaves to the laws we supposedly create ourselves, through the machinery of a republic.

An independent investigation of the Penn State administration’s failure to stop serial child molester Jerry Sandusky from harming young children found that iconic football coach Joe Paterno was at the center of the school’s misconduct and the catalyst for it. The investigation was performed by Louis Freeh, a lawyer, a former prosecutor, a former federal judge, and once the head of the F.B.I.  His charge was to find out what happened and who was at fault—not to nail Paterno or anyone else.  It was an independent investigation, with no dictated result. Don Van Natta, a sportswriter whom I supposed should not be expected to understand such distinctions, writes,

“If the Freeh report was a prosecutor’s relentless opening statement that delivered devastating, far-reaching consequences, the Paternos’ rebuttal is a defense attorney’s closing argument brimming with outrage and fury.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The Freeh report was not a work of advocacy in an adversarial setting, but akin to a judge’s objective decision after reviewing the relevant and available facts. The Paterno family report, in contrast, is a work of advocacy, like a brief arguing an appeal to overturn a judicial decision against a lawyer’s client. The charge given to Freeh in his investigation was to find out what went wrong and why. (It began with the assumption that something did go wrong, which was reasonable, since a child predator had somehow managed to roam the Penn State campus for decades, including a ten-year period after he had been seen sexually assaulting a child in a Penn State shower.) Freeh was not told to get Penn State off the hook, or to pin as much as possible on Joe Paterno. The authors of the Paterno family report, however, were charged with the task of rebutting and discrediting Freeh’s report in order to rescue Joe Paterno’s reputation and legacy. It is an advocacy memorandum, like the torture memos and the recent Justice Department justification of the killer drone program. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Professor, the Plot, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 110 Comments
Prisoner's Dilemma

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Professor Peter Frölich teaches “Intermediate Programming,” “Computer Science Fundamentals,” and “Introduction to Programming for Scientists and Engineers” at Johns Hopkins University. He uses a grading system in which the top score in any exam defines an A, and all other scores are graded down from that point (I like that system, by the way).

His students in all three courses hatched an ambitious conspiracy to ensure A’s for everyone.  They all agreed to refuse to enter the exam rooms, so the top score, and only score, anyone could get would be zero. Since the grading curve would have to start with that, they reasoned, everyone would have to get the top grade. The students stringently enforced their plot, apparently, and nobody broke ranks. Continue reading →

The Arlington, Texas School District Flunks Accountability

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments
The latest in teaching aids in Arlington, Texas

The latest in teaching aids in Arlington, Texas

If a Walmart worker poured pencil shavings down the throat of a customer, he would be fired. If the CEO of Boeing poured pencil shaving down the throat of a company accountant, he’d be out the door before he could utter the word, “Seconds?” If a pediatrician poured pencil shavings down the throat of a patient, she’d lose her license, and if a veterinarian poured pencil shavings down the throat of a kitten, he’d be arrested.

Yet in the Arlington, Texas, School District, the teacher who poured pencil shavings into the mouth of unsuspecting Marquis Jay, a 13-year-old eighth-grader at Boles Junior High School, is back on the job after less than a month’s suspension. She apologized, you see. She said that she wasn’t thinking right.

Yes, I’d say that’s a fair description of her actions. But I’d also say that a teacher prone to harming her students in those periodic moments when she is “not thinking right” is a continuing risk to the children. If fact, I’ll confidently state not only that a teacher who attacks a child in this manner—and an attack is what it is—has to be fired, if a parent of a child attending the school involved is to have any justified faith that the school is properly concerned with the welfare of its students, isn’t recruiting instructors from the violent ward at the local Home for the Bewildered, and, in short, doesn’t have an administration staffed by moonlighting Hell’s Angels members. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Have We Achieved The Ultimate No-Tolerance Insanity At Last?

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

Starch AdStarch Ad

Wow, were kids sick back then, or what!

Wow, were kids sick back then, or what!

Could it be? Is it possible? Has school administrator incompetence, fearfulness, power abuse and cruelty finally reached its apotheosis?

In Loveland, Colorado, 7-year-old Mary Blair Elementary School student Alex Watkins was suspended by the Thompson School District for going through the motions of throwing an imaginary hand grenade at an equally imaginary box that contained “something evil,” with the admirable purpose of saving the world, doing so on what is anachronistically called a “school playground.” The imaginary grenade caused the imaginary box to be vaporized in an imaginary explosion.

The Horror.

The imaginary minds of one or more teachers who witnessed this carnage ignited in fear and anger. Of course, an overly-broad, incompetently drafted, utterly stupid no-tolerance rule was involved: Mary Blair Elementary School bans imaginary fighting and imaginary weaponry. The only bright side of this disgraceful abuse of an innocent child and blatant attempt at thought-control is that it might finally provide the absolute end point on the spectrum of school administration no-tolerance incompetence. Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz question for today is..

Is it? Continue reading →

Carla McKinney, Proud “Naked Teacher,” A.K.A. Ethics Dunce

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments
This isn't Carla. But it's not far off, either...

This isn’t Carla. But it’s not far off, either…

The ever popular “Naked Teacher Principle” category is almost completely filled with school instructors who either placed their naughty bits online before teaching became their calling, had others do so without their knowledge or permission, or took some measures to ensure their embrace of questionable modesty and conduct would not come to the attention of their students. Not 23-year-old math teacher Carla McKinney, though! The Overland High School (in Aurora, Colorado) role model is a wild child and proud of it. Her Twitter page contained half-naked photos, and her tweets were filled with sexual innuendo, approving comments about drug use ( “Naked. Wet. Stoned”),  and even a boast that she had pot with her on school grounds.

“Watching a drug bust go down in the parking lot. It’s funny cuz I have weed in my car in the staff parking lot,” she tweeted happily. Another tweet reported that McKinney was high while grading her students’ class work. Yes, she is an idiot, and one who lacks the common sense, responsibility and character to train terriers, much less children.

The school has placed her on administrative leave, and if she isn’t fired, the administrators there fit my description of McKinney.

Again invoking and paraphrasing the immortal words of Faber College’s Dean Wormer, I say, “Naked, wet and stoned is no way to go through life, Carla.” But if that’s your choice, you have to do it as something other than a teacher.

_________________________

Facts: Daily Caller

If Self-Plagiarism in Editorial Cartoons Is Bad, How About NY Times Editorials?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Times recycledA couple of weeks ago, Ethics Alarms gave political cartoonist Ted Rall an Ethics Hero designation for calling out his own profession for the practice of lifting the work of other cartoonists, as well recycling their previous cartoons as new. I hadn’t been aware of the problem, but apparently Rall wasn’t the first in his field to condemn it. Now James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal blog “Best of the Web” has found evidence of self-plagiarism in actual editorials…those of the New York Times! Taranto, who has been on a real roll lately, reveals of the Times editors…

“In a Jan. 8 editorial in praise of Hagel’s nomination, they wrote:

“On national security policy, there is much to like about Mr. Hagel, one of a fading breed of sensible moderate Republicans.”

“In a  Feb. 1 editorial after the hearings, they had a slightly different take:

“There is much to like about the approach to national security policy taken by this decorated Vietnam veteran and former senator who is among a fading breed of sensible, moderate Republicans.”

“The Jan. 8 editorial also included this trenchant observation:

“The opponents are worried that Mr. Hagel will not be sufficiently in lock step with the current Israeli government and cannot be counted on to go to war against Iran over its nuclear program if it comes to that.”

“And here’s what they said after the hearing:

“Mr. Hagel’s opponents fret that he will not be sufficiently in lock step with the current Israeli government and cannot be counted on to go to war over Iran’s nuclear program if it comes to that.” Continue reading →

When “No Tolerance” Meets Anti-Gun Hysteria: How Silly Can School Administrators Get?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I have this sinking feeling that we have not yet seen the worst.

Phil? Is that you?

Phil? Is that you?

In Woody Allen’s oddball satiric masterpiece “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?”, the hero, a dim-bulb Japanese version of James Bond named “Phil Moskowitz,” is being briefed on his quary, a Chinese super-villain named Wing Fat. Pointing to a map, the secret agent’s boss tel’s him, “This is the home of Wing Fat!” “You mean he lives in that little piece of paper?”the agent exclaims.

I always wondered what happened to Phil, considering his, ah, handicap. I should have guessed. He became a school administrator in Tan Valley, Arizona,.

Daniel McClaine, Jr., a freshman at Poston Butte High School there, made a web photo of an AK 47 against an American flag backdrop  as the desktop background on his school-issued computer and was suspended as a result.

NO, Phil, the piece of paper isn’t the real gun! Won’t you ever learn? Continue reading →

Be Very Afraid: Why Fake Statistics Become “True”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
"Those nachos were COLD!!!"

“Those nachos were COLD!!!”

Last week, I wrote about how fake statistics become “true,” after Gabriella Giffords’ husband Mark Kelly asserted as fact that “85% of all children killed by gunfire worldwide die in the U.S.” while ABC’s Diane Sawyer tut-tutted approvingly. Credible advocate, shocking statistic, passive, lazy and biased journalist, politically correct objective—all the elements were in place. We will hear this lie for decades now, probably in a future Presidential debate.

Now the perceptive and watchful James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal has found a smoky gun that tells us much about why we get so many bad statistics, and why the media supports them. A U.S. World and News Report article combined the recent passage of  the Violence Against Women Act with the upcoming Super Bowl, to get this:

“Urban myths rarely have a useful purpose other than to confound, outrage, and frighten people into passing them along. But there’s a silver lining to this one—the idea that Super Bowl Sunday is linked to the highest incidences of domestic abuse in the country. While experts in the field dismiss that theory, they value the increased attention paid to domestic violence on the occasion.

“‘The Super Bowl does not cause domestic violence, and it doesn’t increase domestic violence, but it does increase the public’s awareness of the issue, which will help victims learn about help and resources,” says Cindy Southworth, vice president of development and innovation at the National Network to End Domestic Violence.'”

Oh. Well then the lie is all right then! Continue reading →