The Daily Parker

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Dumb school administrators: the continuing story

Ah, the Peter Principle rears its ugly head once again, in its purest form.

MSNBC is reporting that a Costa Mesa, Calif., middle school has suspended students for viewing a Web page. They're also trying to expel the student who put up the page (internal links mine):

A middle school student faces expulsion for allegedly posting graphic threats against a classmate on the popular myspace.com Web site, and 20 of his classmates were suspended for viewing the posting, school officials said.
Police are investigating the boy's comments about his classmate at TeWinkle Middle School as a possible hate crime, and the district is trying to expel him.
According to three parents of the suspended students, the invitation to join the boy's MySpace group gave no indication of the alleged threat. They said the MySpace social group name's was "I hate (girl's name)" and included an expletive and an anti-Semitic reference.
... "With what the students can get into using the technology we are all concerned about it," Bob Metz, the district assistant superintendent of secondary education, said Wednesday.

Putting aside the somewhat complicated question about whether or how the school district should discipline the page's author, what are they thinking disciplining the kids who just viewed the posting? One of two things seems to be happening here: either MSNBC's reporting is sloppy (e.g., the kids didn't just view the posting, they committed an affirmative act endorsing it), or Metz is just not a very smart man. (As one snarky friend once put it, he Can't Understand New Technology.)

I'm thinking, it's a little of both. This comes not too long after a kid got expelled for a doodle in McHenry, Ill. The similarity is that a kid is getting disciplined harshly for expressing something. Now, it seems like this could be a valuable "teachable moment" for the kids involved, but it also seems like expulsion won't teach them anything helpful.

What is it about school administrators? Getting tough on free speech isn't exactly an American value.

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