To honor or not

Like clock work, four times a year, honor rolls, merit lists, principal’s lists and dean’s lists from grade schools, middle schools, junior highs, high schools and colleges inundate the News-Times mail box, fax machine and e-mail. The list of the academic achievers piles up as we scramble to get all the names published before the next onslaught.
After many years of being the primary person responsible for the lists, my enthusiasm for recognizing academic achievement has waned.
This is not to say, however, that I have not forgotten the tingle of pride when my children’s names made the list or the glow of pride on a friend’s face when I say, “I saw your child’s name.”
So while my enthusiasm has waned, I remain quite empathetic with the idea.
Not everyone is empathetic. A few disgruntled parents in Nashville, Tenn., fear their unlisted children’s self-esteem will be damaged with embarrassment once others realize they did not make the grades.
Principal Steven Baum at Julia Green Elementary in Nashville, disapproves of the lists because, “They just don’t fit my world view of what a school should be,” he said in an Associated Press story.
When the few murmured that their unlisted children might be ridiculed, Nashville school attorneys jumped.
They warned that a 1970’s Tennessee state privacy law forbids releasing any academic information – good or bad – without permission. Rushing to forestall any potential law suit, some Tennessee schools asked parents to sign waiver forms allowing their children’s names to be published.
While elimination of honor rolls would save me a bit of work and open up space for more hard news on a few days, it would eliminate an important vehicle for emphasizing the importance of educational achievement.
While most states and schools follow federal student privacy guidelines that allow the release of honor rolls, Tennessee stands alone in considering publication of honor rolls a problem. Nashville school lawyers have left educators uneasy and the fastidiously, fearful few also want the schools to reconsider anything which publicly grades a child’s intellectual abilities – even if it means doing away with spelling bees and other academic contests. The quest to achieve a homogeneous academic environment has even left some school administrators and teachers wondering whether they can post outstanding work on a hall bulletin board.
In their quest to not obliquely ridicule the students who did not make the honor roll, Nashville educators have targeted nimble-minded students who earned their 15 minutes of fame through academic achievement.
However, not one Nashville educator, parent or lawyer has said a thing about all the kids left behind when a select few nimble-bodied students made the cut to play football or soccer and were listed as athletic achievers.
While the few seek to enshroud the achievement of students who edged above the rest, most parents are enraged with the new rules or consider it silly. “Spend your time doing other things,” parents have reportedly told Teresa Dannis, principal at Percy Priest Elementary School in Nashville – other things like teaching instead of handing out, collecting and filing yet another set of permission slips for yet another layer of educational bureaucracy.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)