Thursday, January 17, 2008
Small-minded bureaucratic idiocy strikes again
There is no class of bureaucrat pettier or more rigid than monopoly public school bureaucrats. This, for example, strikes me as idiocy on stilts:
A high school track star has been disqualified from a meet because officials said the custom-made outfit she wears to conform to her Muslim faith violated competition rules.
Juashaunna Kelly, a senior at the District of Columbia's Theodore Roosevelt High School, has the fastest mile and 2-mile times of any girl runner in the city this winter. She was disqualified from Saturday's Montgomery Invitational indoor track and field meet.
Kelly was wearing the same uniform she has worn for three seasons while running for Theodore Roosevelt's cross-country and track teams. The custom-made, one-piece blue and orange unitard covers her head, arms, torso and legs. Over the unitard, she wears the same orange and blue T-shirt and shorts as her teammates.
The outfit allows her to compete while adhering to her Muslim faith, which forbids displaying any skin other than her face and hands.
"It's not special," Kelly said. "It doesn't make me perform better."
But meet director Tom Rogers said Kelly's uniform violated rules of the National Federation of State High School Associations, which sanctioned the event. Uniforms are required to be "a single-solid color and unadorned, except for a single school name or insignia no more than 2 1/4 inches," he said.
Now, regular readers know that I am extremely willing to criticize Islam, its practitioners, and people who argue that such criticism ought to be off limits because Islam is a religion rather than a secular philosophy. I think that "multiculturalism," as a construct for assessing rights and wrongs, is asinine in most of its manifestations. That said, the decision to bar Juashaunna Kelly's uniform strikes me as narrow-minded, uncreative, and petty. In other words, exactly what we expect out of public school administrators.
C'mon. These are not the Olympics. This is a high school track meet. What have we come to that we take scholastic sports so damned seriously that we cannot make basic judgments about fairness with compassion instead of technical fealty to a rule book? Educators are supposed to care about their students, but increasingly live for process. Is there any respect in which this decision reflects the real and original purpose of school sports?
5 Comments:
By 
, at
Thu Jan 17, 01:05:00 PM:
And people wonder why I support vouchers.
By 
Larry Sheldon, at
Thu Jan 17, 02:11:00 PM:
By , at
Thu Jan 17, 03:51:00 PM:
Having encountered more than a few education majors in my time teaching at a land grant university, I am convinced that the people in whom we entrust the education of the next generation are among the most poorly prepared and poorly equipped to fulfill that task.
The decaying underpinnings of the public education in the USA is causing it to collapse under its own weight.
And no one seems to care.
By , at
Thu Jan 17, 06:11:00 PM:
George,
I'm sorry to say that you hit the nail on the head. Especially, the part about "and nobody seems to care".
Heartbreaking.
NP
By , at
Fri Jan 18, 12:49:00 AM:
Buricratic stupdidy it just never ends
