The Florida election debacle in the 2000 presidential race provided a naked view of political power.  After a machine recount didn't change the outcome, the Democrat spin machine shifted into high gear.  We heard protests that Bush was stealing the election.  All he did was win a count of the correctly punched ballots.  That wasn't fair.  Justice demanded the rules be changed.  The Palm Beach ballot was confusing, Democrats asserted, hoping no one would notice that one of their own designed it.  Hordes of ballots throughout the state had no one selected for president and should be hand-scrutinized for pregnancy to discern voter intent.

Gore went crying all the way to the Florida Supreme Court, who took him in with open arms.  Out went the rules people voted under and in came the new ones to try to fix things the way he wanted.

Almost a year later, Christine Pelton, a young biology teacher at Piper High School in Piper, Kansas, assigned her classes a major project due at the end of the semester.  Students had to collect 20 leaves, write two paragraphs on each, and give an oral presentation.  They were expected to do their own work.  When she found evidence that 28 of them had plagiarized, she flunked them.

That's when the trouble began.

Several parents complained to the school board, which met secretly last Dec. 11th to review the matter, though minutes of their meeting have no trace of the discussion.  They decided to pull a Gore and change the rules.  It was wrong to give plagiarizers no credit for the whole project.  They instructed Pelton to assign them a zero grade only for the written part, which was 40 percent of the total.  Also, they told her the assignment would only count for 30 percent of their final grade, not 50 percent.

They did not consult with Pelton on the matter.  They made a ruling and issued orders.  When she returned to the classroom after the rule change, the kids wouldn't let her teach.  They had seen firsthand how any rule could be bent if you had enough power.  "We don't have to listen to you anymore," they told her, between whoops and howls.

As it turns out, she didn't have to teach anymore, either.  She quit on Dec. 12th to start a day-care business.

That's when the trouble got worse.

District Superintendent Michael Rooney asked her to stay.  She told him she couldn't work for a school board that didn't support her.  Rooney and principal Mike Adams said they stood by the teacher, yet in the next breath said they didn't think the board had done anything wrong.  According to the student handbook, which the board approved, students caught cheating are to receive no credit for the assignment.  Rooney said the handbook didn't specifically mention plagiarism.

Is this public educator trying to suggest plagiarism is not a form of cheating?

Most of the parents told Rooney their kids didn't plagiarize, of if they did it was unintentional.  Then they blamed the school for doing a lousy job teaching their kids about plagiarism.  Sounds like the Gore defense team.

When Piper students went to out-of-town basketball games, they were greeted brazenly with chants of "Cheaters!" and "Plagiarists!"  Wherever they went they heard, "Oh, you're from PIPER!"

Adams and his assistant principal are planning to resign.  At least one other teacher has quit over the dispute, and more are thinking about it. The local district attorney filed a civil petition against the board for meeting in secret.  School employees talked openly about how the board ought to resign, and a parent started a drive to have the board recalled.

It's all about numbers, cowardice, and flexible standards.  The board penalized an honest teacher.  Why?  Because when the number of cheaters reached critical mass, it ceased to be an infraction and became a scandal instead.  Unable to tolerate the disgrace or deal with the outraged parents, it decided to punish the students less harshly, which allowed many of them to pass.  It robbed Pelton of all authority in the classroom and brought her career at Piper High School to an end.  The board capitulated to a gang of intellectual thieves--because it didn't have the courage to stand up to so many of them.

If only the board could've seen beyond the end of the day.  Now the whole country knows about Piper.  People so often believe the moral and the practical are at odds.  But imagine how much better off Piper would be today if its board had had the courage to stand by their teacher and stand up to dishonesty.

Al Gore is hoping we all forget by 2004.

March 26, 2002