Larry Neace Update

There's aren't many new developments in the saga of Larry Neace, who was fired after 23 years at Dacula High School in Gwinnett County, Georgia. However, I received many superb emails from readers, some of which I note below. Thanks to all who took the time to write. Reader reaction was overwhelmingly in support of Neace.

As I noted yesterday, in a story that made its way around the web and, earlier, Atlanta talk radio, Neace marked down the grade on an assignment turned in by a football player because the student violated Neace's decade-long policy against "wasting time" in class, which in this case meant sleeping. He was later ordered to raise the grade, as the county prohibits using academic performance as a means of discipline.

Today's AJC has a story that recaps yesterday's news, although it quotes a chastised Neace as saying he'll watch his step in any new job.

Neace had a practice of reducing the grades of students who wasted time or slept in class. His course syllabus warned that wasting class time could "earn a zero for a student on assignments or labs." Neace said he never sought guidance from his principal regarding his grading policy, an omission that he said Friday was a mistake on his part.

The teacher also said he was aware that using grades to discipline students was against school board policy. But he said he thought sleeping in class was an academic problem, not a disciplinary problem.

Neace said if he gets another teaching job, he will continue to make students responsible for their class participation. However, he said he will seek guidance from his principal before he labels sleeping as an academic rather than disciplinary issue.

"If I was asked by an employer what I might do differently, I would tell them I would try to set up my discipline and grading parameters to satisfy whatever the principal wanted me to do," Neace said.

In other words, he's saying, I'm not a trouble-maker, and I don't make a habit of violating official policies. Not that anyone should assume otherwise, since he'd taugh high school physics for 26 years! It would be unlikely, at best, that anyone with a record of mistreating students or colleagues would last so long without earning a reputation as someone to avoid. With 23 years under his belt at a single school, that clearly wasn't the case.

The AJC article quotes a few educrats who, predictably, have circled the wagons to show right cause for Neace's termination. Now if only we can figure out a way to hold men like Donnie Nutt, Neace's principal, Gary Walker, director of the Professional Standards Commission, and J. Alvin Wilbanks, Gwinnett County Board of Education Superintendant, responsible for their determination not to let past performance, academic standards, student support, or simple decency stand in the way of crushing a veteran teacher who ran afoul of the education bureaucracy. Any county with 700,000 people in it can surely do better than this.

On the email front, it would difficult to beat this one, from Lou in Arizona:

Bravo! As a recently retired school teacher who taught in a district with somewhat the same cowardly policy (although I can't imagine anyone being fired for what Mr. Neace did-the administrators here would just arbitrarily change the grade) as Dacula, Georgia, I appreciate your article bringing this outrage to light. The things that are going on in our public schools today, even elementary schools, are driving the best teachers out only to be replaced by silly, unqualified, little boys and girls who grew up in the same type of anti-intellectually chaotic classrooms. They are now perpetuating the same, and these schools are now thriving all over the country. We see teachers being sworn at, physically attacked, and treated with total contempt, and there is no support from the principals and no consequences at all to the perpetrators.

An interesting point was made by Steve, who wrote:

Excellent post. One angle on this that I didn't see you touch on is related to this student being a football player. Can you imagine, given the nature and culture of serious football, how this student would be treated by his football coach should he be observed "wasting time"? I suspect a lot less delicately than having his grade halved.

Ed in Arizona thinks sports, for all the good they can do, must be subservient to academics. Hope Ed isn't planning on applying for a teaching job in Gwinnett.

Damned good article. The school Super down there does not seem to have an e-mail address so I guess a card or phone call will have to suffice. And judging from the attention the story is getting in the blogosphere, The super is going to get an earful.

I think what many people, especially school team boosters, fail to realize is how little the time spent on school sports is likely to help ones child get ahead. Teamwork builds charecter and all that. That aspect is certainly useful to develop. But I am thinking that the students who stay awake and attentive in Mr. Neace's class are probobly going to be work successful in lfe than a sleeping jock.

Finally, Trevor Boothwell, writing at his blog The Right Report, has spent some time in the classroom, which makes his reaction all the more entertaining:

When I taught a college writing course in Fall 2001, a percentage of the students' grade was based on classroom participation -- namely, showing up for class in the first place. But when I taught fourth grade years ago, if a student had the temerity to fall asleep in my class I'd merely grab the "Bothwell Bell" -- the metal trash can and a couple adjoining yardsticks -- and pay a visit to his or her desk. No doubt I would have eventually gotten fired for that "mean-spiritedness" had I not resigned for a plethora of other reasons first.

There's no telling how many good teachers have been run out of the classroom not by students, but by educrats for whom teaching is not so much a lost art as an impediment to an efficient bureaucracy that proves to the statehouse that, indeed, all the children are above average.