Ethics Newsline®

VARIOUS DATELINES
Ethics and education intersected in three news items this week:

• The New York Times profiles Austin Lampros, who resigned his high-school teaching position after his principal overrode his decision to fail a student who had missed dozens of classes, repeatedly ignored warnings, and did not show up for the final exam. The principal, Anne Geiger, refused to comment other than to say that allowing the student to take a make-up final exam were “standard procedure” to encourage “teachers to support students’ efforts to achieve academic success.” The Times notes that even after the principal’s intersession, the student failed Lampros’s class with an average grade below 65. Geiger again intervened, giving the student a pass. The paper notes that Geiger’s behavior could be symptomatic of a drive to increase graduation rates. Lampros told the Times, “It’s almost as if you stick to your morals and your ethics, you’ll end up without a job.”
• The July 31 Washington Post, in a dispatch from Maureen Fan in Zhengzhou, China, examines the rising popularity of the ancient ethics system of Confucianism. “Confucianism is enjoying a resurgence in this country, as more and more Chinese … seek ways to adapt to a culture in which corruption has spread and materialism has become a driving value,” Fan writes. “For many Chinese, a system of ethical teachings that stresses the importance of avoiding conflict and respecting hierarchy makes perfect sense, even if it was first in vogue centuries ago.”
• A Government Accountability Office (GAO) study has blasted the U.S. Education Department for lax oversight of legal and ethical problems involving the student loan industry. The trade publication Inside Higher Ed reports that the GAO concluded that the Education Department had not provided guidance on what incentives might be proper or improper, and provided no “proactive” oversight of possible “illegal inducements” from lenders to colleges.