Ethics Newsline®

On its face, it seems a small story. It begins when a student at Sunrise Mountain High School in Peoria, Arizona, fritters away her senior spring and is failing her English class. Her teacher, Elizabeth Joice, warns her she might not graduate with her class on May 23. No improvement.

So Ms. Joice sends failure notices home. No response. She phones the student’s father. No change. As graduation looms, Ms. Joice offers the student ways to improve her grade, which so far is based on unexcused absences, plagiarized work, and low test scores. No interest.

Finally, in mid-May, it dawns on the parents that their daughter might not graduate. So they retain Glendale lawyer Stan Massad. He writes a bludgeon-wielding letter to Ms. Joice, misspelling her name but threatening litigation unless the student graduates. He also utters dark promises to look into “all information regarding your background, your employment records, all of your class records, past and present” should the case go to court. Ms. Joice, a 17-year English teaching veteran, replies with an immediate, lengthy, articulate letter that dismantles his points one by one.

Case closed — or so one would have thought. But then, in an as-yet-unexplained collapse of moral courage, district assistant superintendent Dudley Butts sides with the parents, gives the student a make-up exam five hours prior to commencement, and slides her into graduation. Ms. Joice refuses to attend the ceremony.

After the case hits the headlines, public outrage builds. The Peoria Unified School District mumbles an apology, but only for causing a furor, not for letting the student graduate. More importantly, the Arizona State Bar Association launches an investigation of Mr. Massad for unethical conduct.

A small story? Yes, but touching larger trends of parental litigiousness and bullying. Remember Christine Pelton, the teacher in Piper, Kansas, who resigned last winter rather than bow to parental and school-board demands that she give passing grades to 28 students caught plagiarizing?

At stake here are two core values. One is responsibility. “It seems in our popular culture today,” Ms. Joice wrote in her response to the lawyer, “people, including a past president, are no longer willing to accept any responsibility or consequences for their actions or choices they make.” She’s put her finger on the get-away-with-it culture, where the driving purpose is to do as little as you can for as much reward as possible. That purpose is a bastard son of the productivity movement — where, of course, the object is precisely to minimize input and maximize output. In the corporate world, improving productivity is a valid objective. In the mental and moral realm, it’s a canard. The point of hard work in school, like learning of any sort, is not to get something (as you would from a production line) but to become someone. The saddest point, here, is the parents’ apparent conviction that getting things like diplomas is what life is all about.

The other value at stake here is fairness. “I would be remiss in my duties as a teacher,” Ms. Joice writes, “if I passed the student knowing that she did not complete the required work.” Powerful questions grow from this logic: What about other students who obeyed the regulations and passed — or those who failed and, without lawyers, are currently having to attend summer school?

If this still seems a small story, try some word substitution:

• “I would be remiss in my duties as an Arthur Andersen accountant if I gave this corporation a clean audit knowing that it did not meet the required standards.”
• “I would be remiss in my duties as a stockbroker if I gave one client inside tips on when to sell her ImClone stock that I didn’t give the public at large.”
• “I would be remiss in my duties as a CEO if I used my influence to avoid paying taxes on paintings I bought in New York by having them shipped to New Hampshire and then returned to my Manhattan flat.”

Fairness — whether in schools or in the above cases concerning Enron, Martha Stewart, or Tyco — is a core issue these days. When those who are supposed to be regulators (like accountants and superintendents) or to be self-regulated (like brokers, corporate leaders, and school boards) fail in their jobs, the results are the same, whether the stakes involve millions of invested dollars or hundreds of student futures.

Now, about this disdain for regulation, this disregard for fairness, this avoidance of responsibility: Where does it come from? People learn it. Where? In school. How? Not in the classroom, but through all those other signals that constitute the school climate. In Peoria, as the administration caved in, the signals got stronger. Unless that climate is reversed quickly and decisively — and it still could be — let’s steel ourselves for the results. And let’s not be surprised when we read about yet another corporate or political leader skidding into irresponsibility — and learn that he or she graduated, through parental coercion and educational cowardice, from a Sunrise Mountain High somewhere in America.

(c)2002 by the Institute for Global Ethics