From the people who brought you slavery …

You can always count on the folks in Mississippi to try to drag the country back into the Dark Ages (or, in their case, maintain the status quo). A rural school district in the Jackson area has canceled the prom at Itawamba County Agricultural High School because a lesbian student wanted to wear a tuxedo and bring her girlfriend. The cowardly school board wouldn’t even admit the reason for its decision, saying only that the action was in response to “recent distractions.” But Constance McMillen, shown above, is certain that the board was targeting her for trying to upset the apple cart. McMillen told The Clarion-Register newspaper that “a bunch of kids at school are really going to hate me for this, so in a way it’s really retaliation.” The district issued a statement expressing its hope that “private citizens” will organize a prom. It didn’t mention whether the district hoped that those private citizens will harbor a deep and abiding hatred for gay people and keep them from mingling with the "normal" kids. We'll just have to read between the lines. I'm also guessing they have no objection to banjo-plucking inbreds coming to the prom together. First cousins? Fine and dandy. Brother and sister? That's just family togetherness. But gay people? No freakin' way. What’s sad is that most of Constance’s fellow students probably couldn’t care less whether she brings a female date. It's the adults who are making a mess of this. It’s like canceling recess for the whole class because one kid spoke without raising his hand. The district statement said board members made their ruling after “taking into consideration the education, safety and well-being of our students.” Say what? Education? Are they afraid that the students might learn that not everyone in the world is exactly like them? Safety and well-being? Are they afraid Constance or her date are going to pull a gun and force everyone to listen to Indigo Girls CDs and ditch their heels for more sensible shoes? Constance said the district told her that she and her girlfriend could not arrive at the prom together, that she couldn’t sport a tuxedo and that the couple might be asked to vacate the premises if their attendance at the prom made any other kids “uncomfortable.” What about students who might be uncomfortable with bigotry? I guess that’s not a concern.

Cleaning house

An AP story in today’s O-R notes that some teachers unions are now getting on board with what Timothy Knowles, director of the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute, calls “more aggressive interventions in failing schools.” In other words, the unions are becoming more willing to participate in things like merit pay and cutting ties with underperforming teachers. While cleaning house might seem like a natural step in places like the Philly school referenced in the story (more than 90 percent of the high school’s 11th-graders last year couldn’t read or do math at grade level), there is the question of who will replace the fired educators. Raising salaries to attract better instructors might work to some degree, as might the prospect of merit pay, but the effort in Philly also involves making the school day longer, adding some Saturday sessions and holding classes in July. Those aren't selling points for most prospective employees. And let’s be honest. If you’re a top-notch teacher and have the choice of working harder in an inner-city school or plying you trade in a leafy suburb, which job are you going to take? There was another story that moved on the AP wire today about an impoverished school district near Providence, R.I., that has decided to fire every teacher, guidance counselor and principal at Central Falls High School, where only about half of the students graduate and only 7 percent of 11th-graders were meeting basic math standards last year. The union there says it is pondering its legal options. The union might have a point. Surely, there's at least one teacher there who doesn't deserve to be canned. But at the same time, when your school is a total disaster, bold moves are necessary. It will be interesting to see if this move toward accountability takes hold in our region, which is a staunch union area. We might have gotten an indication recently when not a single school district in Washington and Greene counties met the eligibility standards for grants that could have brought in six-figure checks. In many cases, the reason was that teachers unions refused to sign off on the proposal. One of the concerns was that student assessment data would be used in teacher evaluations. In fairness, there also were worries about what would happen if the federal money dried up. But it’s been pretty clear to me that unions have little interest in tying evaluations of teachers’ performances to the achievements of students. Teaching is a tough profession. Dealing with kids can be a pain, and dealing with their parents, especially those who don't give a damn, can be even worse. But the pay these days is pretty damn good, and teachers tend to have Cadillac health-care plans, wonderful pensions and, yes, plenty of time off in the summer. Back in the olden days, when I went to school, I had some excellent teachers who made learning fun and knew how to get information across. But I had others who couldn't teach a fish to swim. They shouldn't have been allowed to feed at the public trough for 30 years while failing their students. Every workplace – from newspapers to schools to factories – has its weak links. When private companies are involved, it's up to the managers and owners to weed them out. When those weak links are being paid with tax dollars, the public should have the right to expect they'll be removed.

Quite an embarrassment

Four people are facing charges and more could be in trouble after police review videotapes from a melee Friday night at a Wash High-Monessen boys basketball game in Monessen. Police say the incident, which Washington schools superintendent Roberta DiLorenzo described as a "riot," apparently began when a girl from Wash High and a female student from Monessen started "fighting over a male basketball player." The incident escalated, with some adults reportedly joining students in the fray. One person needed hospital treatment after the brawl, and police had to use Tasers on as many as four people to subdue them. The gym was cleared of fans before the game was allowed to continue. Two adults and a teen from Washington, along with a Monessen teen, were cited by police. It's bad enough that kids were acting like idiots, but it's shameful that so-called adults joined in. And now the superintendents of the two schools are displaying considerable gall by questioning how police handled the mess. For the record, four off-duty Monessen police officers had been hired to work the game. That right there tells me all I need to know about the atmosphere at Monessen games. If you need four cops at a high school baskeball game, you've got problems. And as it turns out, those four policemen weren't even enough to handle the mess that developed. They had to call for backup from neighboring police departments. But DiLorenzo and Monessen superintendent Cynthia Chelen are suggesting that police went overboard, questioning their use of Tasers to get the miscreants under control. Said Chelen, "Looking at the video (from TV), I'm not sure a Taser was necessary, but I was not there." So, the superintendent admittedly wasn't even at the game, yet she seems to think she knows what level of force was required to restore order. I guess Ms. Chelen would have no problem if the Monessen police chief comes to her and says, "You know, I just watched two minutes of classroom video, and I'm not sure you're doing a good job preparing your students for the PSSA tests." When it comes to how police handled this "riot," to use DiLorenzo's term, the superintendents need to put a sock in it. When severely outnumbered police officers are facing a situation where a brawl could conceivably escalate to involve dozens of people, they should do what they need to do to keep that from happening. I seem to recall that the City League in Pittsburgh used to play its football and basketball games in empty stadiums and gyms because of a legitimate, experience-based fear of violence by students and fans from the league schools. Perhaps the folks who run high school sports in Western Pennsylvania should take the same approach at places where students, parents and other fans have gained a reputation for not knowing how to act.

Protecting the children from words

George Carlin, in his famous comedy bit about the seven words you can't say on television (all of which have since been said on television, with the advent of cable), opined that there really are no bad words, just bad thoughts and bad intentions. I tend to agree with that. A parent in a California school district doesn't agree with that assessment, and the district has gone absolutely nuts in response. According to blogger Judy Molland on the www.care2.com site, the mother demanded that the district ban the 10th edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary after her kid came across the term "oral sex" in one of the books. School officials, unbelievably, folded like a cheap suit and pulled the dictionaries from every school in the district. And now, in true bureaucratic fashion, they've formed a committee to determine whether the ban should be made permanent. Apparently, in Menefee Union School District, a book filled with words used in the English language presents a clear and present danger to youngsters who are supposed to be learning. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water.

For a truly funny example of unnecessary censorship, check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCxgmPEt7Y4

An old-man rant

If you've heard this before (and if you're a longtime reader of this blog, you have), please bear with me. I'm going to climb back up on my soapbox to bemoan the drop-of-a-hat frequency with which school districts either order school delays or call off classes entirely. As early as Sunday night, school districts in Western Pennsylvania already were posting two-hour delays for Monday’s classes. By Monday morning, a lot of them were changing those delays to cancellations, apparently because of the inch of snow we received. I'm all for keeping our children safe, but has anyone calculated the amount of instruction time lost when all those two-hour delays are added up? At the risk of being labeled an angry old man (I am one), I have a tale to spin for those who grew up any time after the 1980s. Back in the dark ages, 30 or 40 years ago, kids went to school in the winter, waiting outside at bus stops, if necessary, unless there was a "real" snowfall. And by real, I mean something along the lines of five or six inches of snow. We had a lady who drove our school bus along the snowy ridges out back of Taylorstown and Claysville, and I'm guessing it never occurred to her to check the radio or television for a delay or cancellation when a couple of inches of snow fell from the sky. And if someone had suggested that school be delayed because it was COLD IN THE WINTER, they'd have been looked at as if they were nuts. But today, little Suzie and little Bobby can't possibly be expected to stand outside in cold weather, even if they'd just spend the weekend playing outside for even longer periods. When I was a youngster, I never once remember one of my classmates having to go for treatment at the nurse’s office for a case of frostbite after standing at a bus stop. And while I'm ranting about how soft we've become, I'd also like to discuss, and get your thoughts, on the goings-on at Texas Tech, where the coach was run out of town after it was found that he had made a player sit in a dark tool shed a couple of times. The player in question was Adam James, son of college football legend and current TV sports analyst Craig James. The facts in this case are about as solid as butterscotch pudding, but it seems that the younger James indicated to coaches that he thought he had suffered a concussion, so the response of Coach Mike Leach was to have him sequestered in a dark equipment shed. After complaints from James' famous daddy, Leach was gone. Perhaps the coach wasn't overly sensitive in shaming a possibly injured player in front of his teammates, but from most accounts, this wasn't an instance of a tough-as-nails, hard-working player being reprimanded for a singular incident. Sources say Adam James wasn't well-acquainted with the terms "dedication" and "work ethic." In fact, acting offensive coordinator Lincoln Riley, in an e-mail to university administrators, called James "unusually lazy and entitled." That's not surprising in this day and age, when outstanding athletes, especially those from prominent families, are coddled from an early age and told they're the greatest thing since sliced bread. Texas Tech fans weren't exactly lining up to support James. An Associated Press story about the Red Raiders' Alamo Bowl victory on Saturday night said that James was booed so loudly as he left the field at halftime that it drowned out the marching band that was on the field. And Leach isn't the only coach to lose his job for being less than charming. Kansas recently ran off football coach Mark Mangino, whose crime reportedly was being mean to his players. All of this makes me wish that players like Adam James and the ones who whined about Mangino could spend a couple of weeks with Bear Bryant. They'd last less than five minutes before running home to Mommy.

Go ahead and protest, but think a little, too

As I was driving to the grocery store after work Wednesday, I noticed some young folks who I assume were W&J students protesting at the corners of Lincoln and Beau in Washington. It appeared they are not pleased with the president and were taking considerable pains to point out that unemployment is currently very, very high. The impetus for the protest, I assume, was the first anniversary of President Obama's election. Yet, it's been only about nine months since Obama took office, and blaming him for the country's high unemployment rate is shortsighted and rather thoughtless. Certainly, the jobless rate is painfully high and will, no doubt, creep higher in the coming months. At the same time, however, it should be noted that other economic signs are trending in a better direction. We've recently seen encouraging reports about housing. The national economy actually grew in the last quarter. And just today, there was positive news about retail sales, giving businesses hope that this holiday sales season won't be a huge downer. Also today, there was even a report that the number of new jobless claims was lower than expected. The overall unemployment rate is expected to hit 10.5 percent in the coming months, but analysts expect that to start improving by next summer. A little history, semi-ancient and recent, might be in order for the campus protesters. The jobless rate was close to 11 percent during the first term of Ronald Reagan, but I doubt anyone who currently is pillorying Obama wants to be reminded of that black mark on the record of the hero of modern conservatism. To Reagan's credit, the rate got better. Under Obama, it's likely to do the same. I'd also remind the demonstrators that when George W. Bush took office, the rate was 4.2 percent. At the beginning of 2008, it was still only 4.9 percent, but it was 7.6 percent when Bush left office and already well on its climb to where we sit today. I have to confess that when I saw the protesters Wednesday evening, I wondered to myself how many of them come from wealthy homes from which Mommy and Daddy dispense checks for more than $40,000 annually so that they can enjoy college life at a top-notch school. I also wondered how many of them had heard their parents griping that Obama wants to tax them into the poorhouse. Young people are very impressionable. But at the same time, this group apparently was paying no attention during the previous eight years when "W" took a strong economy and ran it right into the ground, in part thanks to his "war of choice" in Iraq. No one could fix in 10 short months the economic devastation that Obama faced on the day he took office. He deserves more time to see if his policies can help to lift us from our current mess. If he fails, those protesters at W&J will have plenty of company in voting Obama out of office in 2012. Bottom line, I'm glad that the young demonstrators were taking an interest in our government and exercising their freedom of speech, but it's a shame that they seem to be taking their marching orders from Fox News.

Drive carefully this afternoon

Just wanted to give everyone a heads-up to drive with extra care this afternoon, because all the little schoolchildren who were hypnotized and brainwashed earlier today by President Svengali Obama will no doubt be wandering across streets with their minds fully focused only on turning the United States into a socialist nation. Just consider this a public service announcement.

Oh, say, can you see (how stupid our country is becoming)

There’s been an incredible – and ridiculous – controversy brewing over President Obama's plan to speak to the nation’s schoolchildren next week. There are school districts across the country that are actually deciding whether the president of the United States should be allowed to talk with the children of this country via video link, or whether to give children whose parents object the opportunity to opt out of the session. The White House says the speech is simply a means for the president to "challenge students to work hard, set educational goals and take responsibility for their learning." But to hear the opponents talk, what he really wants to do is hypnotize our youngsters so they will blindly follow him as he takes our guns, closes our churches and imposes his diabolical plot for a one-world government headed, of course, by Obama. Here were the remarks of one parent quoted in a Denver Post story. It pretty much says it all. "I don’t want that man talking to my children," said Christina Huff. "Look at other leaders who had socialistic policies and chose to talk to children. This would include Hitler, Stalin, Lenin and Castro. I will keep my kids home from school that day, and we will re-read the Declaration of Independence." Maybe the kids can help her with some of the bigger words.

Lewdy-ville

Consider this scenario: A married man with five children who works with young people, some as young as 17 or 18, has sex with a woman in a restaurant after a night of drinking and later antes up $3,000 so she can have an abortion. Do you think he'd be likely to lose his job? Not if he is ultra-successful Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino. The coach has admitted that he had sex at a restaurant table after hours with Karen Sypher, a woman now accused of trying to extort money from Pitino after the sordid affair. A couple of weeks later, she came to him, said she was pregnant, expressed an interest in getting an abortion but said she didn't have health insurance to cover the procedure. Pitino coughed up $3,000. At a news conference Wednesday, he said he wasn't specifically paying for an abortion, just for health coverage for Sypher. Riiiight. It was just a coincidence that the health insurance was used to abort an allegedly Pitino-fertilized egg. While some allegations might be debatable, and others may be in dispute, the image Pitino is projecting now is that of an alcohol-fueled, scheming, abortion-buying adulterer. Is this the person you want leading the young men on a college basketball team? At Lousville, based on the statements of college leaders, that answer is a resounding "Yes!" This despite the fact that Pitino's contract has a morals clause that allows dismissal if the coach is guilty of moral depravity or puts the school in a bad public light. He's lucky there's not a clause regarding hypocrisy, because Pitino has always portrayed himself as a devout Catholic who even took a priest friend along on road trips as a spiritual adviser. But the "good folks" at Louisville are turning a blind eye to the coach's transgressions and figuratively wiping their behinds with the page of Pitino's contract that involves morality and common decency. After all, he wins lots of games and brings in big money to the school. And in college basketball, where elite players are gone almost as quickly as they arrive on campus, big-name coaches are the stars. If this were a second-year coach with a so-so win-loss record, he'd be gone quicker than you could say Jack Robinson. It would be ever-so-convenient for the powers to be at Louisville to send an underachieving coach packing without having to pay the rest of his contract while wringing their hands and lamenting his unconscionable moral failings. In America, we typically believe in giving our fellow man second chances. But some actions, by some people, are not forgivable, or shouldn't be. If an apprentice carpenter crafts a bad window frame, he deserves another chance. If you're a bank teller, and your cash drawer comes up short $50 one day, you deserve another chance. But if you're a newspaper reporter who deliberately submits a false story, you should be canned immediately. If you’re a county treasurer who pockets tax money, you should be fired and put on trial. And if you're a married father of five, and you engage in morally repugnant behavior with a stranger after a night of drinking, and then pay thousands of dollars to "clean up" your little mess, you should no longer be leading young people. We all fall short of leading the lives we should be leading, but certain jobs carry expectations of a higher standard of integrity and upstanding behavior. There are lines that cannot be crossed, behaviors that cannot be forgiven. Pitino has failed miserably in meeting those standards. But we are now a nation in which egregious crimes against morality that once brought harsh indignation are met with a shrug.

Stupid, stupid, stupid

I'm guessing that I'm not the only one who has noticed that some crazy, imbecilic stuff goes down in the state of California. Here's the latest: Two elementary schools in Chino had class schedules on Fridays during the past school year that were five to 10 minutes short of what is required under state law. School administrators, afraid they would lose $7 million in attendance funds, had to come up with a plan to make up for the time lost on those 34 short days. Their solution: Spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to reopen the schools this summer and require students to spend 34 more days in classes. Said Amy Nguyen-Hernandez, principal of one of the elementary schools, "We try to be rule followers here, so we'll try to do whatever needs to be done." What needs to be done is for somebody to go to the common sense store and buy some for these idiots. I did a little math (not one of my strong points) and determined that, based on each of the original days in question being, on average, 7.5 minutes short, the youngsters in the two elementary schools missed a total of 4 hours and 15 minutes of required schooling. A person with any grasp on reality would see that the obvious solution (aside from just forgetting about it, for gawd's sake) is to have the kids come in for another half day of classes, feed them lunch and send them on their way. But it seems that didn't occur to anyone in La-La Land. Their solution has proven to be an exercise in futility. One of the schools has a student population of 280, but just 40 to 60 are showing up for the make-up classes. The reason: Final report cards were issued June 7, so there's no way to enforce attendance. Also, the kids aren't exactly digging deeply into their textbooks. One kid told the AP that her class spent a whole week crafting paper airplanes in a study of aerodynamics. And now, state school officials, because of the lack of real classwork and the paltry attendance, are saying that the make-up days might not even count. But there is a lesson here for the kids: Whatever you do, don't grow up to be as stupid as the adults involved in this mess.

Why not waterboard them?

A bunch of seniors at a high school in eastern Pennsylvania were suspended for five days by the school district. Were they smoking dope on school grounds? Brawling, maybe? Peeking through a hole into the girls' locker room? No. They climbed over an outer wall at Southern Lehigh High School and camped overnight in an enclosed courtyard. Yeah, they camped out. An Associated Press story gives no indication that the 17 kids caused any trouble. As best as I can tell, there was no drinking, no property damage. But the district saw fit to bar them from a week of classes, and three of the students involved in the harmless prank were stripped of their membership in the National Honor Society. Well, of course we can't have scofflaw campers in the NHS. The next thing you know, these kids might play their car radios too loud. And the next step is anarchy. The district also suspended two students who had the audacity to e-mail The Morning Call newspaper in Allentown to complain about the punishment. The district later thought better of its attempt to trample the two students' free-speech rights, and those suspensions were rescinded. Students were planning a protest outside the school following Friday classes, and I don't blame them. Our entire society seems to be losing what remains of our collective sense of humor and sense of proportion. This is like the district that suspended a grade-schooler for bringing nail clippers to school. In the old days, a janitor would have found the kids camping and told them to clean up their stuff and move on. But, sadly, those days - the ones when people in positions of authority had a little basic common sense - seem to be behind us.

How about some goosedown pillows for their little chairs?

The photo above is of the 1921-22 class at the old East Buffalo Grade School. The teacher of the class was my Grandmother Mitchell, then Mary Durigg, who is sixth from the left in the top row. Somehow, she managed to educate all those children in one big room with none of the comforts we have today. The heat, as I recall her telling me, came from a coal stove and, believe it or not, there was no air-conditioning. Speaking of which, a group of parents recently approached McGuffey School Board to complain that their children’s education is being compromised because Joe Walker Elementary School does not have air-conditioning. They wanted the school district to spend thousands, probably tens of thousands, of dollars to retrofit the old school building so that their children and others are not overly warm. Fortunately, there was a stalemate on the board, and the proposal, at least at this point, has not been approved. The group of parents had the support of Joe Walker teachers and the principal, Sheryl Fleck, who said that on hotter days, the children are lethargic, have more behavior problems and find it difficult to stay "on task." Correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't think we lived in equatorial Africa. In fact, I did a little digging on the Internet and found that the average daily high temperature in our area in September, the month when the school year begins in earnest, is 74.2 degrees. In May, the last full month of the school year, the average daily high is 70.8 degrees. Certainly, there are days in early September and late May when the temperatures exceed those averages, but surely not to the extent that it requires an expensive project to install air-conditioning. Somehow, I made it through 13 grades of school (counting kindergarten) in the very same school district without ever having the benefit of learning in an air-conditioned environment. I don't know how we did it. One possibility that came to mind is the fact that when I was a youngster, most of the kids in McGuffey schools were from farming families. Pretty tough stock. Now, a lot of former city dwellers have moved into the area, and I'm thinking that the city folk and their progeny might be a bit more dainty than the natives. My advice to those who must endure the brutal conditions at Joe Walker: Think cool thoughts.

They're blinding us with science

A report out this week shows that nearly two-thirds of Pennsylvania's 11th-graders failed the state's new science test. My reaction to that is a lengthy yawn. For the vast majority of the students who fell short of the benchmarks - maybe all of them - this failure on a science test will have absolutely no effect on them later in life. When I was in junior high, I told my teachers, parents, heck, anybody who would listen, that I could pretty much guarantee that algebra, geometry and the like would be of absolutely no use to me in my adult life. I'm 50 now, and I'm still correct, despite the fact that my base of knowledge of geometry consists entirely of the ability to differentiate among circles, squares, triangles and rectangles. I'm not a math and science person, and a lot of young people aren't, either. Those who are will score well on standardized tests in those areas, and they may well pursue careers in which those segments of learning have some importance. State Education Secretary Gerald Zahorchak says the scores of the 11th-graders in the recent testing show that Pennsylvania needs to impose tougher graduation standards. Yeah, that's right, let's force more children out of school, prevent them from getting diplomas and perhaps cost them employment opportunities just because they didn't meet arbitrary standards in science. That's plain stupid. Here's my suggestion. Quit having your educators "teach to the test" and go back to the days (yes, the Dark Ages when I was in school) when we got a well-rounded education that put history, geography, civics and literature on the same level as math and science. A mind is, indeed, a terrible thing to waste, and with the No Child Left Behind-driven style of "education," we're wasting a lot of them.

Moronic Statement of the Week Award

We had a story in the paper the other day about the issue of merit pay for teachers. The concept sounds great: Reward the best teachers for the work they do while motivating the lesser lights in the faculty lounge to improve. The problem is that what sounds great in theory is hard as hell to put into practice. Who decides which teacher is doing a good job and which one is not? Of course, the teachers unions are against it. They would rather just get automatic raises, per their set-in-stone contracts and salary steps, without an in-depth review of their performance. As long as you don't get yourself fired, you're getting your raise. But, on the other hand, a merit-based pay system is very subjective. Base it on test scores, you say? Fort Cherry business manager Paul Sroka noted - correctly, in my opinion - that a class could do well on standardized tests because they're a smart bunch of kids, not because the teacher was great. The most ridiculous comment in the debate came from merit pay proponent Denise Kuhn, president of Ringgold School Board. She said, "You can ask a student, 'Who, in your opinion, goes over and above the call of duty?' They could tell you." Great plan. We'll allow a bunch of 13-year-olds to determine which teachers deserve raises. Could it be the one who lets students do what they want in the classroom? Maybe the one who shows movies all the time? The one who's pretty or handsome? The one who grades really easy? The one who doesn't give a lot of homework? Congratulations, Ms. Kuhn. You have won the "Moronic Statement of the Week Award." I believe that the majority of teachers do a good job, and I would never want to trade positions with them. However, there is always room for improvement. Maybe the real answer to getting better teachers is doing a better job of hiring them in the first place. Improve the process for screening the applicants. Conduct a better review of their educational background and how well they did in college and as a student teacher. Do a better job of interviewing the would-be educators. And, for heaven's sake, quit hiring people just because they're alumni of your school district or, even worse, because they're somebody's relative.