It’s one of the premises of the anti-fizzy-drinks campaign (and presumably, after that, the anti-coffee and tea campaigns): when your kids drink Coke or Pepsi, they’re ingesting (shudder) a drug. Is it being taken seriously? Well, caffeine is now turning up as a prohibited substance in school zero-tolerance policies. (van Bakel, May 26). Can suspensions for possession of Dr. Pepper be far behind?
Posts Tagged ‘schools’
Calif. diploma exam
“No one will be hurt if we get our diploma”
Updating our Feb. 22 report: “A judge Friday suspended California’s high school exit exam, finding it discriminatory in a ruling that could allow thousands of students who failed the test to get their diplomas anyway.” Alameda County Superior Court Judge Robert Freedman “agreed with the plaintiffs that the exam discriminates against poor students and those who are learning English. ‘There is evidence in the record that shows that students in economically challenged communities have not had an equal opportunity to learn the materials tested,’ Freedman wrote.” It would appear that from now on a high school diploma is meant to signify not a student’s actual mastery of a certain body of material, but rather the mastery he or she would have attained had the breaks of life been fairer. Employers, and all others who rely on California high school diplomas in evaluating talent, would be well advised to adjust their expectations accordingly.
“Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell said the state would immediately appeal the ruling, which he said creates ‘chaos’ for more than 1,100 high schools that are completing graduation preparations.” However, plaintiff Mayra Ibanez was gratified:
“It is hard to be poor. It is hard to grow up in a place where there is a lot of crime,” said the 18-year-old, a Mexican immigrant who attends school in the working-class San Francisco Bay area city of Richmond. “No one will be hurt if we get our diploma.”
(Juliet Williams, “Ruling Blocks Calif. High School Exit Exam”, AP/Forbes, May 12).
“Is litigation taking the ‘play’ out of kids’ playgrounds?”
This time the dateline is Portland, Ore., where the school system has removed all swing sets from elementary school playgrounds. Another casualty: tube slides. (Susan Harding, KATU, May 8). See Jul. 18, 2005, etc.
Banzhaf’s Sue-O-Matic
Such a collegial guy to have around a faculty, that Prof. Banzhaf:
Students at the George Washington University may now be able to sue administrators individually for perceived wrong-doings rather than attempt legal action against the University as a whole, with the help of a new legal tactic suggested by maverick GW Law professor John Banzhaf.
Using the District of Columbia’s Human Rights Act as support, Banzhaf created a website, banzhaf.net/fightback, to educate students on how they can sue individual GW administrators and professors without the institutional legal protection the University typically provides. …
“If you could download a simple complaint (form) from the Internet and go after not the University but the individual administrator who made the decision, I think you’ve got leverage,” said Banzhaf.
(Christine Grimaldi and Emily Metz, “Prof: students can sue individual administrators”, Daily Colonial, Apr. 17). Last week, administrators at GWU announced that they were reversing an earlier stand and capitulating to a demand by Banzhaf and various students to post signs discouraging persons from smoking near entrances to the university’s campus in an urbanized section of Washington, D.C. (Katie Rooney, “GW to post signs asking smokers to back off from buildings”, GW Hatchet, Apr. 24). Banzhaf naturally takes credit:
“It was only after I initially threatened to sue him [college director of risk management and insurance Fitzroy Smith] personally and sent a draft complaint to University lawyers, did they agree to revise signs over all the campus buildings,” said Banzhaf…
If appropriate signs are not up by the beginning of the Fall 2006 semester, Banzhaf and his law students “will file the complaint, which would make Mr. Smith liable for tens of thousands of dollars plus my attorney fees,” said Banzhaf in a letter released on Friday.
Banzhaf plans to seek $100 for every student exposed to second-hand smoke while entering University buildings from January until the signs are up….
“At this point I hope they do it right,” said Banzhaf. “I’m not kidding around.”
(Brittany Levine, “GW concedes to smoking ban petition”, Daily Colonial, Apr. 24).
For more on Prof. Banzhaf, whose activities regularly furnish material for this site, see Feb. 28 and links from there. An absurdly laudatory editorial about him in the university newspaper states: “As a professor of public interest law here at GW, Banzhaf has become most notable for his class on ‘Legal Activism,’ also informally known as ‘suing for credit.’ His class teaches students to become public interest lawyers while giving them real experience.” (“GW’s own legal powerhouse”, Apr. 20).
“Abstinence education”: bait and switch?
The Bush Administration recently issued regulations that tighten the definition of what must be preached in federally funded “abstinence education” school programs. At Volokh Conspiracy, Dale Carpenter relays some thoughts I had about the process by which “abstinence” has turned out to mean “Biblical sex only”. Others picking up the story include Glenn Reynolds, Mark Kleiman, and Kevin Drum, while Three Years of Hell thinks the assumptions I find objectionable have been implicit in the program since it began (with the assent of Bill Clinton, of all people) in 1996. Planned Parenthood and ThinkProgress have more on the regulation changes.
P.S. Most important, of course, is Prof. Carpenter’s description of me as someone “who runs a terrific website about litigation abuse“.
Lott v. Levitt IV
David Glenn, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, has the definitive MSM reporting on the affair. (Permanent link here after Apr. 24.) He finds a mixture of scholars who agree and disagree with Lott on the “replicate” question. And, most notably, he does the first incisive investigation into the “peer-refereed” claim in the second count of the complaint—and makes it seem that Lott might not win that dollar after all. To top it all of it, he’s found a prescient quote from the now-late Otis Dudley Duncan:
“There is no excuse,” he wrote, “for continuing the practice of labeling critics or defenders of Lott’s work with offensive epithets and imputing motives to them. This kind of rhetoric simply obscures or distorts the plain evidence of the public record. Maybe it would help if all parties would imagine themselves in a court, serving as witnesses or attorneys. They would quickly be called down for any ad hominem remarks.”
Separately, Tim Lambert recaps my previous post. See if you can spot the subtle differences.
Lott v. Levitt III
A commenter writes: “In the context of refereed economics journals, ‘replicate’ has one meaning only: The use of an author’s data and model to ensure that falsification of findings is not an issue.” Is this so? Here are some more data points, emphasis added in each case:
“Chicago Schools Sue Over Breakup of League”
“Two predominantly black school districts are suing over the breakup of a suburban Chicago athletic league, saying racism led more than two dozen high schools to pull out and create their own, predominantly white leagues.” But an “attorney for several of the school districts leaving [the South Inter-Conference Association] said any charge that the breakup was racially motivated is ‘utter nonsense.’ He said the move was based on geography and school rivalries and had been discussed for several years. … ‘We are being deprived the opportunity to compete against other children and other different ethnicities,’ said Thornwood High School student Constance Stanley, who said her suburban Chicago speech team won’t have the same breadth of competition now.” (Mike Colias, AP/Washington Post, Apr. 21).
Oz: discrimination law vs. free speech
In Australia, a professor faces punishment for politically unacceptable speech:
Academic Andrew Fraser will defy the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission by not apologising to the Sudanese community for his study linking African refugees to high crime rates.
In a landmark ruling that raises fresh questions about the limits to which academics can engage in public debate, HREOC chairman John von Doussa has found Professor Fraser’s comments were unlawful because they amounted to a “sweeping generalisation” that was not backed by research.Professor Fraser was suspended last year from teaching at Sydney’s Macquarie University over his comments about Sudanese refugees in Australia.
(Greg Roberts, “Academic still links Africans to crime”, The Australian, Apr. 4)(via David Bernstein).