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For some reason, everybody's been ragging on various
metro-area school districts for their zero-tolerance
policies.
A girl accidentally puts a paring knife in her lunchbox.
The school has a zero tolerance
policy for
weapons,
so she gets suspended.
Some kids go on a field trip to a civilized country
where it's perfectly legal for them to enjoy a spot of wine
with dinner. They also have parental permission. The
school has a zero tolerance
policy for alcohol
consumption in any activity related to the school, however
remotely and on whatever continent. They get in trouble,
and so does their teacher.
A child in Colorado Springs offers a friend a lemon
drop, an act which used to be praised as sharing.
The War on Drugs means that all matter, however harmless,
is contraband, and that all actions, however decent or
polite, are potential transfers of controlled substances .
Zero tolerance and all that, and thus suspension.
And so this goes, on and on, with Colorado's public school officials displaying the rigor of Prussian drillmasters and the intelligence of Russian oxen.
Little wonder that home-schooling continues to grow -- as far as I'm concerned, it should be criminal child abuse to entrust your offspring to the care and tutelage of any adult who can't tell a paring knife from a switchblade. Or French wine at dinner from Mad Dog 20 in an alley. Or a lemon drop from a white cross.
But I don't think the problem is Zero Tolerance
in and of itself. Instead, they're applying a worthy
principle to the wrong problems.
For instance, suppose a school district adopted a Zero Tolerance policy toward the inflation of job-titles.
As it is, janitors become custodians. Librarians turn into multi-media resource center managers. The shop teacher prefers to be known as a mentor in woodworking technology. The coach, not satisfied with mere sadism toward fat boys who wear glasses, wants to be called an aerobic lifestyle training role model.
Some schoolmarms have written me in the past, claiming
that the word is somehow demeaning, even though my maternal
grandmother, who was in charge of various one-room
eight-grade classrooms in Converse County, Wyoming, proudly
identified her occupation as schoolmarm.
Recently I received some material from a school district
undergoing something called school governance policy
revision.
Amid the revisions are that it no longer has
a superintendent; it has a Chief Executive Officer, or CEO
-- who can refuse requests by board members for records
that by state law are supposed to be available to any
citizen.
Now, some would argue that job-title inflation is
harmless. What difference does it make if I'm Ed
Quillen, unemployed mountain riff-raff
or E. Kenneth
Quillen, III, published author, chief operating officer of
Central Colorado Publishing Company, frequent contributor
to many magazines, many of them reputable, and regular
columnist for the newspaper which leads the nation in
real-estate advertising
?
But suppose it's budget time, and they're handing out your tax money. A mere superintendent of schools might be lucky to hustle $75,000 a year. But a district CEO can point out that the average American CEO makes something like $800,000 a year, and your school district would be most fortunate to get a CEO's services for a mere $200,000.
A policy of Zero Tolerance toward job-title inflation, especially in public schools, would save tax money.
But that's not the only place that the right Zero Tolerance policies would improve our schools.
Suppose there was a Zero Tolerance policy of scientific ignorance, so that immediate dismal would have loomed for the teacher that told my fourth-grade daughter that water boils at the same temperature here as at sea level.
Or Zero Tolerance of sexual harassment, so that the
teacher who told my 10th-grade daughter that you'd be
cute if you just did your hair differently
spent the
rest of his life pumping gas?
Or Zero Tolerance of bad spelling and syntax, so that
the elementary principal who issued the lunchroom rule that
Consideration of the rights of others will always be
considered during conservation [sic]
would find his
certification jerked that afternoon while they were
replacing the locks to his office so that his keys wouldn't
work any more.
Add some Zero Tolerance for Educanto, a dialect designed
for obfuscation rather than communication. Make an example
-- a month in public stocks on Denver's 16th Street Mall
should do it -- of the first educrat to refer to a
classroom as an affective-domain modification
module,
or to lay-offs as reductions in
force.
As you can see, there's nothing wrong with Zero Tolerance. Indeed, Zero Tolerance could produce substantial improvements in our public schools. But make sure we find the right stuff not to tolerate.
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