Lately I’ve been thinking: If I had a nickel for all the bonehead things done out of good intentions at public schools across the nation, I’d be a millionaire. A female vice principal at one high school in Poway, Calif., orders all women going to the prom to raise their skirts in front of her to make sure they’re not wearing thongs. Nine-year-olds across the nation are being removed from school when they, in the same spirit of children since time immemorial, play “cowboys” or “cops and robbers” on the playground and point at another student as if they had a gun. A high-school junior in Fort Worth, Texas, is nearly expelled because he forgot to remove a bread knife from his truck after helping take some of his grandmother’s belongings to Goodwill.
Now there is yet another addition to my “nickels from numbnuts” account. District C, a sub-school district of the Los Angeles Unified, has enacted a new policy, which again was made with the best of intentions. They have said that from now on, if students in high schools in Van Nuys, Woodland Hills and parts of the San Fernando Valley want to participate in their graduation ceremony, they must declare that they’re going on to college, trade school or the military.

This is social engineering, pure and simple. In effect, District C is saying: “If you’re not going to college, you are less of a person than those who are, and even if you are the valedictorian of your class, you’re not worthy to participate in commencement.”
This is not subtle, nor is it encouragement. This is punishing students because they’re not acceding to the wishes of the administrators who wrote up this policy. I find this sort of manipulation, even for such a worthy cause, unacceptable. Telling students that they won’t be able to celebrate one of the seminal moments of their lives with friends and family if they don’t “play ball” is horrendous.
Look at it this way: Let’s say the voluntary eco-responsibility pledge here at the University goes ahead. So far, everything’s kosher. But let’s say a few years down the road, the college says either students sign the pledge, or they don’t participate in commencement. If you don’t care too much about the pledge, wouldn’t you feel angry about being denied your day just because you exercised your freedom of choice?
District C would like to point to the results: Before the policy, only about half the students in the district were going to college. Now, they brag that 95 percent have decided to go. My, the way they advertise this you’d almost think they were gunning for some sort of special bonus for having large amounts of students go to college. All this shows is that the administrators manipulate well, and doesn’t show how many students actually wanted to go to college instead of being goaded into it.
I think this bespeaks to a problem in education more than any triumph. Students don’t care about education in this country, and nobody is showing them why they should care. Jocks are routinely “waved through” classes with good grades at the insistence of coaches who want to win the season. Parents are often MIA, either too busy or indifferent to help their
children succeed.
If District C really wanted to make an impact, maybe it, and every other school across the nation, ought to make sure that all high school graduates can read before trying to ramrod them all into college.