students

Here It Is, The Ethics Exception You’ve Been Waiting For: When The Naked Teacher Principle Doesn’t Apply

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The Naked Teacher Principle: The Principle states that a secondary school teacher or administrator (or other role model for children) who allows pictures of himself or herself to be widely publicized, as on the web, showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses, cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result.

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Ms. Webb, NYC school guidance counselor, circa 1995. Va-va-voom.

Tiffany Webb is, or was, a 37 year-old  guidance counselor in the  New York City public schools. She had excelled at her job for 12 years until photos she posed for as a 20-year-old lingerie model turned up on the internet.  When a student showed  photos of Webb that he had found online to her principal, it was recommended that she be fired. After an investigation, an Education Department committee voted 2-1 to do just that, concluding, ‘The inappropriate photos were accessible to impressionable adolescents. That behavior has a potentially adverse influence on her ability to counsel students and be regarded as a role model.”

Her firing came as she was scheduled to gain tenure. Naturally, she’s suing.  I hope she wins, because while the committee’s rhetoric is in line with the sound reasoning behind the Naked Teacher Principle, the facts dictate that this is the point—and all rules have such a point point— where “ethics incompleteness” occurs and the rule, however valid it is the vast majority of the time, accomplishes unethical rather than ethical ends.

The Naked Teacher Principle doesn’t apply to Tiffany Webb because:

1. She is not naked, though the photos doesn’t leave much to the imagination, either. OK, forget #1. Continue reading →

The Breast-Feeding Professor

/ Jack Marshall / 73 Comments

“Uh, Captain? Captain? We really need you up in the plane, now—we’re under attack…”

This story reads as if it were invented just to cause arguments on Ethics Alarms.

Adrienne Pine, a professor at American University, was faced with a choice: stay home and care for her baby, who had a fever, or take the child to class. She chose to take the infant to the first meeting of her “Sex, Gender and Culture” course, where the child spent her lecture alternately on her mother’s back or crawling around the room, or, at one point, being breast-fed by the professor. Pine’s Full Mommy breast-feeding act was commented upon by the school newspaper, and Prof. Pine responded to inquiries by a student reporter with a dismissive, “…the baby got hungry, so I had to feed it during the lecture. End of story,” and a defensive and defiant  blog entry. She sees nothing wrong with her conduct, and regards the controversy as proof that ” a feminist anthropology course is necessary at AU.”

That’s playing the ol’ Mommy Card with gusto, Professor Pine.

She is dead wrong, as a matter of professional ethics. As a college professor,Pine has limited demands on her time, and the one thing that she is required to do is to devote full attention to her students in class. With an infant, an ill infant at that, in her care, she could not do that. She had a pure and unresolvable conflict of interest, and it was a breach of her duty to her child (at one point a student had to tell her that the baby had a paper clip in her mouth) and a breach of duty to her students (if they were watching the baby, and later that breast-feeding exhibition, they were not able to give full attention to her lecture). She had a choice to make: do one job or the other, because it is impossible to do them both at the same time. Continue reading →

Disturbing Ethics Quote of the Week: Terri Miller

/ Jack Marshall / 52 Comments

“It is very common for the teachers of the year, the championship coaches and the vanguards of education to be perpetrators…They will put on this mask of an exemplary teacher to look the same as a true exemplary teacher.”

—Terri Miller, president of the national organization Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation.

Erica Depalo (right): Teacher of the Year, vanguard, child-molester

Miller’s quote was prompted by the recent arrest of West Orange High School English teacher Erica DePalo, 33,  who is accused of having a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old male student she taught in her honor’s English class. Prosecutors charged DePalo with first-degree aggravated sexual assault, second-degree sexual assault and endangering the welfare of a child. DePalo, who teaches Honors English to ninth and tenth-graders and is also the school’s junior varsity tennis coach, was honored as Essex County’s top teacher for 2011-2012  as part of the state Department of Education’s “New Jersey Teacher of the Year” program. Accepting her award, she said, “I am merely a representative of all the hardworking dedicated teachers, especially those with whom I work at West Orange High School … teachers who are committed to their students, who consistently advocate for their students, and who exceedingly go above and beyond their everyday duties and job descriptions.”

Yes, I’d say having sex with 15-year-old student qualifies as going above and beyond their everyday duties and job descriptions. Or perhaps below and beyond. Continue reading →

An Ethics Riddle: What Do You Get When You Cross The Oklahoma Valedictorian Flap With The Delta T-Shirt Controversy?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Give up?

Pure evil.

The answer is that you get kindergarten student Cooper Barton of Oklahoma City being forced by his teacher and principal to turn his T-shirt inside out under threat of discipline because it celebrated the University of Michigan, and the city’s Soviet dress code requires that school children may only wear apparel supporting Oklahoma colleges, such as Oklahoma University or Oklahoma State University.  Cooper’s mother told the news media that her son had to hide behind a tree to turn his shirt inside-out, and that he was embarrassed by the affair. “They should really worry about academics. It wasn’t offensive. He’s five,” she said.

Gee, ya think? Continue reading →

Teaching Racial Distrust in D.C.: “Trayvon Martin Day”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

“Now children , what does the fact that Trayvon Martin was carrying Skittles prove? That’s right! It proves he was racially profiled!”

Combine one of the worst school systems in the country with race bias and ignorance, and you get “Trayvon Martin Day.”

In Washington, D.C, Malcolm X Elementary in Southeast D.C. declared this Friday “Trayvon Martin Day.”  The nearly all-black school is using the case of Martin’s shooting death in his confrontation with George Zimmerman as part of its “Let’s Keep Our Children Safe” seminar, “to better educate students and their parents about race relations and social injustice,” and to help reduce the needless violence and bullying in the community, according the Principal J. Harrison Coleman.

That’s interesting. And how, exactly, does the death of a Florida teen in which the circumstances are still unknown and the facts have been polluted by race-baiting demagogues, news media sensationalism and a Congressional lynch mob warrant inclusion in a seminar with those lofty goals? Continue reading →

Lost: Our Incompetent, Arrogant, Unethical Public Schools

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

You know it’s time to homeschool when…the school nurse is named “Ratched.”

Today, blogger Glenn Reynolds wrote, “You know, I’m beginning to think that sending your kids to public schools is starting to look like parental malpractice.” On the way to the decision to home school my son, I reached the same conclusion years ago, and nearly every day brings more evidence to support the decision. Here, for example, are two recent news stories, one alarming, the other horrifying: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: New Jersey Department of Education

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“All right, children: Tell…us…everything!”

This year’s New Jersey ASK test, given to grade schoolers to assess their skills and knowledge, required some third graders to reveal a secret about their personal lives, and to explain why that secret is hard to keep. Surprisingly, many parents had a problem with this.

Here is what Dr. Richard Goldberg, a father of twin third grade boys told reporters:

“…To ask an 8-year-old, a 9-year-old to start revealing secrets in the middle of an exam  I thought was really inappropriate.  These children, they want to answer the question, they want to answer it correctly, they don’t want to get a bad grade. But at the same time, think about the things a child might know – about themselves or their family.”

Yes, let’s think about that: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: The Journalism Education Association and the National Scholastic Press Association

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Savage being Savage.

Now some of you will wonder, when a speaker addressing a national conference of high school journalists on the topic of anti-bullying measures starts a hateful rant against the Bible, religion, and any students in the audience who believe in either, why the speaker wouldn’t be the designated dunce. The speaker in this sorry case, however, was Dan Savage. Savage is a talented writer, a gay rights advocate, and a gifted humorist; he is also a very angry, self-righteous, arrogant gay man with a tendency to be unapologetically vicious. While it is true that angry, “take-no-prisoner” activists have their uses on the road to social change, lecturing about the evils of bullying is not one of them, because these people are themselves prone to bullying. No, the ethics dunces are the organizations that inflict such individuals on young, idealistic student journalists who didn’t travel to a conference to have a speaker call them “pansy-assed.”

That’s what the Journalism Education Association and the National Scholastic Press Association did when they irresponsibly invited Dan Savage to speak to the students, about 100 of whom walked out as Savage launched into an angry, but thoroughly Savage-like diatribe against Christians and Christianity. Continue reading →

Teacher Manuael Ernest Dillow: An Ethics Dunce, But, Of Course, An Aberration

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“THIS will teach you lousy kids not to disrupt class….KIDDING!!!”

We don’t have to belabor this one. Manuael Ernest Dillow, a welding teacher at a vocational school in Abingdon, Virginia, wanted to get the attention of his students, so he lined up twelve of them against a wall, took out a pistol, and fired at them multiple times. The gun was loaded with blanks.

Oh! Well that’s all right, then!

This idiot was arrested, and it looks like there is a good chance he’ll get serious jail time. Obviously he is an aberration in the great, essential and honored field of teaching. Continue reading →

A Journalist’s Integrity: “To Hell With Of Freedom of the Press— MY Interests Are At Risk!”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Andrea, in her alternate "news censorship is bad" persona

Earlier this year, Andrea McCarren, a reporter with D.C.’s WUSA Channel 9 News, did a controversial special report om under-age drinking in the upscale Washington suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, with special focus on how parents excused and facilitated the law-breaking. She was subjected to a deluge of hate mail and online attacks for her story, and her children, who go to a Bethesda high school, were mocked and harassed by other students. The incident and the uproar had finally calmed down, when the school paper at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High, where the McCarren children are enrolled, decided to publish a feature about the episode.

McCarren—journalist, champion of the public’s right to know and the dedicated defender of the First Amendment—called the school’s principal and persuaded her to confiscate issues of the paper that had not yet been distributed, and to demand that students who already had copies return them. Why? Was the story false, libelous, or misleading? No. Was it a legitimate news story with relevance to the school? Of course.

McCarren had the school paper censored because she had the power and influence to do it, and because she felt that the story could have inconvenient and unfortunate consequences for people she cared about. Continue reading →