Number 2 Pencil

An obscene lack of judgment

I keep trying to find time to post either a bunch of links on recent testing-related news, or a nice in-depth discussion of the tests our students now face, or an amusing discursion on NCLB.

But not only do I not have enough time, I keep getting distracted by tales of adults, left in charge of children, who just don't have the common sense that God gave a jar of mayonnaise:

Marsha Ann Williams, 45, posted a $1,000 bond Saturday after her arrest last Friday. She is under investigation for contributing to the delinquency of minors, according to police. Williams is a former coach at Mitchell High School.

About 10 girls between the ages of 14 and 16 attended the Jan. 21 part at Williams' Colorado Springs home, according to an arrest affidavit. According to Detective Brian Steckler, Williams made sexual party favors, including penis-shaped suckers, and a cake shaped like male genitalia.

At least one of the teens used a camera cell phone to photograph some of the girls performing simulated sexual acts on the party favors, according to the affidavit.

Is this child pornography? I would say no, especially given that there was no nudity or actual sex, the photographic images were most likely created by a teen who didn't understand the legal ramifications of such photos, and penis-shaped cakes are possibly far too stupid to be considered pornographic objects.

But was this an incredibly dumb move for someone who was left in charge of a bunch of teenage girls for an evening? Yes, yes it was. What in the name of Jeebus could have made this woman think that it was suitable for an adult, at what sounds like was a party related to a school team or function, to supply sex-related food and toys for girls who were under the age of consent? Did she think it was okay because they were all just being "girlish" together? Did she not realize how easy it is to take photos and beam them to the Internet these days?

It never fails to amaze me how many adults these days assume that sex jokes are proper fun and games and always good for a laugh, even around impressionable, modest or mortified young teenagers that, by the way, aren't their young teenagers.

Getting badder by the day

This is one way in which girls shouldn't aspire to be the equal of boys:

Cops are grappling with escalating girl-on-girl violence in Boston as fights have become so intense that the 'fair'' sex is even caking faces with Vaseline to give attackers' nails the slip. Four flare-ups between female youths at two stations on the Red and Orange lines were doused on Sept. 26 alone, according to an internal memo the Herald obtained from the MBTA. Transit police are now sending a Female Intervention Team into schools... Suffolk Law School's Juvenile Justice Center has teamed with the Operation Stop Watch partnership of Transit, Boston and school police and Suffolk juvenile probation officers to understand how and why female youths, typically ages 13 to 17, express anger.

"We've learned, as we suspected, that there is a definite spike in female youth problems, arrests and incarceration,'' said Transit Police Lt. Mark Gillespie, whose department has arrested a half-dozen teenage girls since the start of the school year for brawling in MBTA stations.

Patricia Pearson's When She Was Bad is one of the better books I've read lately on female violence. I haven't read Odd Girl Out, but it's gotten good reviews for its description of how ugly behavior rears its head quite early among young girls.

Sending the wrong message

Wizbang notes that gangbangers in Boston have used a marketing approach to scare the public into keeping quiet. Now that their "Stop Snitching" t-shirts have gone public, I think their plan is about to backfire.

A teenage City Hall day-care worker who wore a gangbanger "Stop Snitching'' T-shirt to work yesterday has the district attorney seeing red and Hub officials vowing to re-educate its summer employees. "We've had too many cases in this city in recent years that go unsolved because people are unwilling to cooperate,'' said Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley. "This is the type of wardrobe I'd recommend employees in City Hall or anywhere in society stop wearing.''

The teenager is a summer hire working at the city-run day-care center. He was spotted with the controversial T-shirt while accompanying his little charges on a trip to the New England Aquarium.

In Boston last year, the mother of one gang member accused of gunning down 10-year-old Trina Persad made "Stop Snitching'' T-shirts for spectators to wear at her son's trial. Authorities have said they consider the shirts a gang intimidation tactic.

No kidding. Talk about trying to instill some seriously warped values into your child.

A policy for butter knives, but not for death threats

What's the opposite of the overzealous school principal expelling a student for possessing a butter knife? A student left dead because the school "bungled" a genuine death threat:

In the days preceding John Jasmer's Aug. 21, 2003, slaying, at least one school-district employee was aware of a murder plot, according to Seattle police. An independent school-district investigation revealed that two days before the slaying a parent told a district employee that members of the Roosevelt High's football team planned to kill Jasmer. On the day she received this information, the employee called a Roosevelt vice principal but only left a voice-mail message. The parent who brought the information forth also left a message for the vice principal, according to the school-district investigation. The vice principal said he didn't receive either message.

The district inquiry failed to provide solid answers on whether school officials followed threat policies upon learning about the murder plot. After Jasmer's slaying, a former district spokeswoman summed up the threat-notification policy as saying that all credible threats of violence or harm against a student, employee or public-school property should be promptly and appropriately addressed.

Sound Politics notes the other aspects to the story, but thinks this is evidence that the school district is going straight to hell.

Attacking "a category of kid" vs. just "a kid"

At what point does bullying a kid become bullying a "category of kid," i.e., a hate crime?

Ever since he was 12, Daniel Romano has cut a noticeable figure around Middle Village, a working class part of Queens. Mr. Romano, 20, who calls himself a Satanist, stands out, with his blue-tinted bouffant hairdo, his black clothing and fingernails, and the prominent crucifix, worn upside down. Mr. Romano has long been teased for dressing like a "gothic kid" or simply a "goth"...

But in recent weeks, two local teenagers began fixating on Mr. Romano, calling him names including "Satan worshiper," "baby sacrificer" and "hooker killer," the authorities say. On Sunday the verbal harassment turned into violence.

Violence that included blunt objects as weapons, and resulted in 12 stitches for Mr. Romano. The Queens DA has decided to prosecute this as a hate crime:

Prosecutors say they attacked Mr. Romano because of his religious beliefs: They thought he worshiped Satan. They were arraigned yesterday on charges of second-degree assault as a hate crime, possession of a weapon and aggravated harassment. The charges could carry prison terms of up to 15 years...

"The kid is gothic with blue hair: He falls into a category of kid," Mr. McNicholas said. "At worst, this is a simple dispute between kids, not an attack on a minority. If the accusation was that he was black or Asian or Latino or Jewish, it's one thing...They see this as a religious practice. It's a dispute between kids, the same way you have the nerds, the jocks, the artsy kids and the teacher's pets. What's next? Someone being accused of attacking a preppie, or a nerd?"

This type of argument underscores the problem with "hate crime" legislation, I think, and that is: Where do you draw the line? Certainly, other hate crimes have involved religious practices; an attack on a synagogue would certainly fall under current hate crime boundaries.

I'm certainly not in favor of anyone attacking goths (or Satanists, for that matter). But I'm not in favor of hate crime legislation either, for three reasons. One, because of the difficulty in trying to establish state of mind at the time of the crime. Two, because of the preposterousness of focusing on whether the attackers were viewing the victim as a member of a hated group, rather than focusing on whether the attackers premeditated their crime and expected to cause as much harm as they did. And three, because of the potential abuse of such laws to ultimately punish people who only display hatred of a certain group, but who break no laws in doing so (I'm thinking of oppressive campus speech codes here).