Posted on 10/24/2006 7:39:58 AM PDT by Cagey
TAMPA - There are few issues in American education as widely discussed as the achievement gap, the racial divide that separates the academic performance of white and minority students.
But not at Hillsborough High School, where the principal pulled an article detailing the school's achievement gap from the student newspaper.
Principal William Orr called the content inappropriate, even though it focused on data the federal government publicizes under the No Child Left Behind Act.
Instead of a story and chart, students found a gaping hole Monday in the Red & Black, the school newspaper.
"If it's something that has a potential to hurt students' self-esteem, then I have an obligation not to let that happen," he said. "I don't think it's the job of the school newspaper to embarrass the students."
Editor-in-chief Emily Matras wrote the article, which included a chart breaking down Hillsborough High student test scores as reported on the state Education Department's Web site. She wanted to let classmates know what the school administration was doing to address the divide, including a schoolwide reading push.
Instead, she learned this lesson:
"High school is not the real world," said Matras, a junior. She understood the decision, but doesn't fully agree with it. "I think that we could have made a case that the story could have run, but we thought not to because we respect Dr. Orr."
Students stayed at school until 8 p.m. Friday cutting the article out of Page 3 in the October edition. It was replaced by a stapled note explaining that the administration offered to reprint the edition, but the newspaper's staff didn't want to delay publication.
Students were told not to talk about the article. The St. Petersburg Times contacted several after learning what happened.
"It did not condone anything immoral. It didn't talk of drug use or pregnancy or teen violence," said Simone Kallett, the newspaper's features editor and a sophomore. "It was a very fact-based article, and we don't understand why it was pulled."
Orr allowed a Times reporter to read the article briefly in his office, but not to quote it.
The Red & Black's faculty adviser, Joe Humphrey, declined to answer questions about the article when they came up around campus.
"We were told not to publish, and by word of mouth or otherwise we have not published it," he said. "Our primary goal when this happened was to still get the newspaper out."
Humphrey, formerly a reporter at the Tampa Tribune and a onetime intern at the Times, said the newspaper staff talked a little about legal ramifications.
In explaining his decision to remove the article, Orr cited a U.S. Supreme Court case giving school administrators broad power to censor student newspapers. But it's not absolute.
Mike Hiestand, a lawyer and consultant to the Student Press Law Center, thought the students at Hillsborough High could win a court case. He said they should be able to cover pertinent issues in public education.
"If it's a problem, it needs to be solved by addressing it accurately and openly, and it sounds like that's what the students tried to do," he said. "You don't fix a problem simply by putting your head in the sand."
The Red & Black is known as one of the more aggressive student newspapers in Hillsborough County. The latest edition features a front-page article about a junior arrested for bringing an unloaded gun to school.
Orr noted that it was only the second time in more than 20 years as a school administrator that he removed an article from a student newspaper. He had two other school administrators review it.
"If it had appeared in the Tampa Tribune or St. Petersburg Times, we wouldn't have thought anything of it," said Bertha Baker, assistant principal for administration. "But a student newspaper has to be a little more sensitive to the feelings of the students."
Wow...that's scary.
Welcome to the U.S.S.A. sheesh.
The test results per pupil should be private. As long as there were no names listed with the test scores, I don't have a problem with them being published. The kids have a right to know how the school did compared to the national average. Maybe, it's just be enough to shame some of these kids into trying harder instead of being fat, dumb and happy about their non-acheivement.
More likely censored to be more sensitive to school officials.
Maybe to protect the administrators job....not the self esteem of the students.
The school administration is right. School is not the real world, and student newspapers are published under the oversight of school administrations. In this case, one wonders what purpose the principal thought he was achieving by suppressing publicly available data, however, in too many cases, liberal students have tried to highjack school newspapers to promote their agendas vs. the school administration.
The students should be appreciative.Afterall Principal Orr is just preparing the kids for college.sarc
Commies.
I really don't have a big problem with this. Categorizing student performance seems to be something that would not produce anything positive. I'll tell you what I am in favor of doing:
Not worrying about "what the school administration was doing to address the divide". Provide a safe, quality environment for education, and don't pass kids just to get them out of your face.
In a way I can understand the administration's actions, but I really think it may be an over-reaction on their part. If your school's scores really suck, why shouldn't the students there know it, AND PERHAPS STUDY MORE? Looks as though they need to learn how to make lemonaid out of lemons, instead of putting their head in the sand and saying "go away!" Typical b.s. on the part of the school's administration.
Here's the charts, right on the very public Florida Dept. of Education site, that were so harmful to the widdle children:
http://schoolgrades.fldoe.org/pdf/0506/schlGrds_06_master_final_ADApdf.pdf
Thanks for linking that.
I suspect the principal's real motives were to prevent a race riot, which would inevitably happen as soon as a student of one race called a student of another "stupid".
And you know they would.
The bottom line for school administrators is not "justice", it is "maintaining good order and discipline", which I might add is the same justification used in the UCMJ for soldiers.
As far as the "rights" of students go, in truth, minors do not have full civil rights, they only have an extrapolation of their parents' rights. That is, if their parents wish to confine them in an institution, the children have no right to assert habeus corpus before a judge.
In the case of a school, which operates "in loco parentis", or "in place of a parent", in many ways, *its* prerogatives generally outweigh the students' rights. This changes when a parent enters the fight to assert the parents' rights, and the only thing left that the school can do it to say "either they do it our way, or they go to another school."
However, because these cases have been heard continually around the country, there have been many bad judicial decisions based on a flawed understanding of the law, usually forcing schools to respect some contrived "right" a student has to do something disruptive or potentially so.
It was really hard to find, not. It was the first link when I did a search for "Florida Department of Education" so it's not as if parents couldn't have found it just as easily. Our school mails the state's "School Report Card" to each students' parents. It shows how our district schools rate against similar schools in the area and across the state, and gives our grades broken down into socio-economic and other groupings.
The Feds will be sending down Armstrong Williams free of charge for counseling. He will be paid by Big Brother to tell them all how well their school is doing in providing an education.
Just like the old USSR.
I see the self esteem problem: the students are required to call their principal 'doctor'.
There is another option, an external to the school website. There they would be perfectly free to cover stories the princpal would rather they did not, have postings etc. All beyond the legal reach of the school.
Some schools have tried to suppress this in the past. The result has been lawsuits which the schools universally lose. However unofficial retribution is harder to prove so not declaring who maintains the website on the masthead is always a good idea.
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