Guest column
By Marina C. Bear, Ph.D.
Before beginning an analysis of the case involving [the principal] and her appointment to the position of Principal of the [School], let me clarify what it is an ethicist does. Unlike a lawyer, who works with facts of the case and such elements of the law as are, or might turn out to be, relevant, and whose aim is to bring about a successful outcome for his or her client, an ethicist brings together the facts of the case and the morals of the relevant society. By examining those, an ethicist aims to bring about as clear as possible a view of where things went wrong and what might be done both to rectify the situation and to make it less likely that things will go wrong in the same way in the future. In addition, the hope is to leave all parties concerned with an understanding of the consequences which have, or most probably will, result from the case.
Our ethics are an expression of the society in which we live. Diverse as that society is, there are basic ethical principles which we hold in common, although how those principles are applied may vary.
Societies are be divided into subgroups, based on ethnicity, profession, special interests, and so forth. There are codes of ethics which guide the participants of those subgroups in their common activities. They identify what is expected of us and what we may reasonably expect of others, as well as identifying how breaches in the moral fabric may be mended. Sometimes those codes are written down. Professional societies often publish them and their members display them as information whose very presence proclaims the moral character of the professional.
But many areas of human endeavor are not covered by such codes. Nonetheless, by appealing to more general principles widely held to be important for the health of our society, we can usually figure out the right thing to do using reason and common sense.
In the case of [the principal], it is clear that there was some wrongdoing, but it is worthwhile to take a moment to figure out exactly what the wrong was, and to whom the wrong was done.
As parents and citizens, we know that we want teachers of good character working with our children. Although many of us are unaware of the exact process by which teachers are hired, we place a certain amount of trust in those administrative bodies, which often include elected School Boards, to see that teachers support the highest ethical standards in their classrooms, promoting such values as honesty and fairness, in addition to fostering a love of learning and conveying specific information. We even expect that school administrators will behave with personal discretion, if not exemplary ethical behavior, in all aspects of their lives which may come into public view. And we have all heard of the high school counselor with unfortunate bouts of occasional kleptomania, or the School Superintendent whose personal life challenges community standards. Often they are simply strongly encouraged to leave public service and find employment in less sensitive areas, and that is the end of it.
One of the most basic of ethical principles is justice. That means that the rules apply to all concerned, and that there is a dependable regularity to their application. It means that you and I are to be treated the same unless there is a clear and relevant difference between us which justifies differential treatment.
The [City] Area Schools and [City] Area Schools Administrators Association published a document entitled Labor Agreement1998-1999 & 1999-2000 in which the qualifications for a Principal were listed (in a section called Professional Standards). To meet that basic definition of justice, those qualifications should have been asked of anyone applying for the position. Meeting those requirements would have been a necessary, although not sufficient, criterion for further consideration. Choosing someone to lead an enterprise always involves judging the candidates' personal talents and skills and trying to predict the dynamic of the new working unit. It would seem, from the letter of support for [the principal], that she had a good working relationship with members of the staff. Had the selection committee been free to hire without considering this Section, it may well have been that [the principal] would have been the obvious choice based on experience and the already-present support of a number of her co-workers and, we may assume, some satisfied parents of children in her classes.
Nonetheless, the Section was there, and it was ignored. By doing so, the selection committee and any confirming body (School Board, Trustees, or other) were unjust, not only to all other candidates for the position who presented the technically minimum requirements for the job, but also to other potentially interested members of the public who also did not hold accredited Master's Degrees but might have wished to be considered.
One of the most blatant and damaging forms of discrimination occurs when those responsible for hiring come to the process with unstated criteria which will narrow the field in ways the applicants for the job cannot predict and address. The most obvious example of this is the formality-interview process, where the main criterion for the position is that the candidate be the one the group has already agreed, openly or tacitly, will get the job.
It is usually impossible to determine whether this has gone on, since people often discover their consciences after committing an ethical blunder, and rarely does such behavior issue from groups with a strong moral fiber running through them that would lead to public confessions of inappropriate action.
What we do know in this situation, is that the schools and the administrators' association set the standards, but somewhere along the line they were not followed.
How were these standards compromised, and what did this come to mean?
Here comes some of the common sense mentioned earlier. A job listing appears. If it looks interesting to me, I read the fine print. What do they say they want done? How much does it pay? What are the listed qualifications?
As [the principal] had been Acting Principal of the [School}, she probably had a better idea than most applicants of the tasks the job entailed.
The second question is not as simple as it looks at first glance. [The principal] was well aware of the fact that salaries in school positions are based on a formula that usually includes experience and level of certification, including the highest degree completed. Two teachers may instruct the same subject at the same grade level, but receive widely-different salaries for so doing if one has a Master's Degree in the relevant field and the other does not.
In fact, the second and third questions were interlinking, in this case. To get the job, the candidate was supposed to present a Master's Degree from an accredited college or university; the salary was keyed to the presumption of that degree. It was not wrong of [the principal] to aspire to hold such a position, but it was wrong for her to claim it without holding the degree, unless some special accommodation had been made on her behalf. We'll get to that in the "What could they have done?" portion of this report.
[The principal] presents herself, in her deposition, as acting on her own in this situation, and I will presume that whether she received advice from anyone else while working through the application process, she wishes to be held responsible for her actions. This is admirable and appropriate.
Nonetheless, I must suggest that if she is to be seen as innocent of any wrongdoing, she is guilty of a surprising level of ignorance regarding academic matters. That ignorance alone might bring one to question her fitness to operate as a school administrator, except that it is hard to imagine the situation in which damage could be done to students by her ignorance of how the world of higher education really works. An elementary school principal probably has little call to counsel people concerning university life. On the other hand, by presenting a phony credential, she may well jeopardize the accreditation of her school in the eyes of whatever larger body is charged with reviewing its policies and procedures.
In gathering information for this report, I visited the website of the "university" from which [the principal] received her Master's Degree. One line was sufficient to throw into doubt the validity of the institution. They claim "a proprietary method of awarding equivalencies of work experience as substitutions for formal education requirements." This is like suggesting that one can set up a private, proprietary way of issuing change for your hundred dollar bills. Would you send them in? The only way equivalencies make sense is if most other relevant institutions will accept them as equivalent banks will recognize and accept the "change" you get back; reputable universities will accept the "credits." Otherwise, you're in the same position as someone who sends in his hundred dollar bill and gets back 11 homemade ten dollar bills. $110 for a $100 bill. Sounds like a good deal, but the chance that you could use them in the marketplace is small, and if you did, you'd be setting yourself up for serious trouble.
In [the principal]'s case, she appears from her deposition, to have simply e-mailed [the "university"] a form which gave details of "qualifications, your experience that you encountered, what you have done, what impact you make on your community, that type of stuff" and her fees.
First of all, anyone who believes that everything done on the Internet is legitimate and aboveboard suffers from that surprising level of ignorance mentioned above. Anyone who reads a newspaper or listens to the evening news has heard stories of scams involving the offer of items for sale which are never delivered or, if they are, turn out to be other than promised. Why do scams work? Because they seem to offer a good deal. The ["university"] degree sounds a lot like the "brand-name merchandise" for sale at bargain rates on street corners in many major cities. Vuitton suitcase for $20? No problem.
Let us invoke another basic principle, common to every system of ethical thought: Do no harm. To be good people, we are expected to keep in mind the idea that in the light of the seeming capriciousness of fate, the power of nature, and the undependability of strangers, each one of us still has the capacity for advancing the good by, at the very least, not initiating harmful actions wherever possible. Each time we further an unjust cause by colluding with it to our temporary advantage, we do wrong. [The principal] would probably not buy a shiny new car from someone who approached her in a parking lot and offered it to her for $2,000 no questions asked. Even if the car came with a legitimate-seeming bill of sale and registration, the very fact of its price and the way it was presented would suggest "Hot Car" and all the potential trouble that implies. And she'd probably agree that buying stolen merchandise put the buyer in the position of supporting the business of thievery.
[The principal]'s situation is all too common, even if her search for a "good deal" may have less to do with money than with two other valuable commodities: time and pride. She needed the degree in a timely manner to appear to have the basic qualifications for the position of Principal. No legitimate college or university can work as fast as the diploma mills. The ["university"] didn't even need to examine her transcript. Why should she spend months applying to universities, having her qualifications evaluated by them, engaging in lengthy negotiations to get the most credit recognized for the courses she had already taken? The ["university"] just takes your word for it.
Did a red flag go up in [the principal]'s mind over this detail? Apparently not. If she'd walked into the shopping mall after refusing to buy that new-looking car from the man in the parking lot and been confronted by a man in an academic robe who said to her, "Madam, you look like somebody in need of a Master's Degree. I can help. Tell me your qualifications." It's hard to imagine anyone reciting a list of college courses taken and life experience acquired. However, if she did, the man in the robe might then say, "Dear Lady, by virtue of the powers which we have invented, I will whack you on the head with this rolled-up sock and proclaim you a Master of Science. Congratulations, please proceed to that lady over there behind the card table and pay your fee. She'll give you your diploma." [The principal] did the Internet equivalent, but without benefit of the sock-whacking ceremony, and unfortunately her Internet degree is worth as much as the shopping mall degree.
There's a reason why pride was the first of the seven deadly sins.
Many people who fall into the hands of the proprietors of diploma mills know that they deserve that degree. They've done the equivalent work in fact, in many cases, they may have far more practical experience doing the very job for which the degree is a basic requirement than some young kid just out of college. They don't feel a need to present themselves to somebody in a university and ask for the rights and privileges that accrue from having that degree because they've already done the work. The advertisements, in the Internet and in the print media, feed right into that syndrome. "You may have already earned your degree. Isn't it time you reaped the benefits?" "Your hard work and life experience deserve recognition."
But there's another basic ethical truth by which we operate in this society: we have a responsibility to learn the laws and rules under which we live and a duty to follow them. We have a responsibility to learn the laws of the land we live in and a duty to follow them. We have a responsibility to know the basic laws of nature if we're going to take on the care of another living thing. And if we're going to present ourselves as ready to work in a particular environment, we have a responsibility to understand the rules of that organization and a duty to follow them. A cab driver needs to know the rules of the road and the policies of his company regarding fares, care of his vehicle, treatment of customers, and the basic licensing he has to have to be a driver. He doesn't need to understand how getting a college degree works and [the principal] didn't need to know how one becomes licensed to drive a vehicle which transports people. But we all know there are standard ways to get what you think you need and there are probably under-the-table ways to get the same thing and it's a good idea to know which is the right one and which is the one which may get you into more trouble than it's worth.
Someone operating in the field of education has a responsibility to know how it works at any level in which she's likely to become involved and to have the common sense to distinguish the real coin of her realm.
Did [the principal] do wrong in "falling for" the diploma mill scam on the Internet? Yes. She is not an innocent victim, because she had a responsibility to know how the world of higher education operates. She's not an innocent patient handing a prescription slip into a pharmacy and falling victim to the pharmacist's inattention or ignorance when she gets and takes the wrong medication. She may very well have heard the word "accreditation" during her tenure as a teacher. Most public schools, and many private ones as well, are subject to scrutiny by independent agencies to determine the standard of their operation from the cleanliness of their facility through the quality of their library as well as the evidence of learning which their students can demonstrate. Schools which fail such scrutiny may end up closing. Those who pass, display their resulting certification proudly. To be unaware of the importance of accreditation is to have slipped up in responsibility to know.
There is, however, an all-too-human tendency to hope that details will work themselves out. It's a degree. It's not an accredited degree. Maybe it doesn't matter. So we use the dairy products that drifted to back of the fridge and are long past their expiration date and hope that nothing happens. We make that u-turn when there's no endangering traffic even if there's a little sign that suggests it's not legal. We pay attention to the big stuff and hope that our overall goodness will count. Sometimes it works that way, sometimes it doesn't.
But what if the rule is wrong? If there's no traffic for blocks, shouldn't I be able to make that u-turn? Some cities try to accommodate variations: "No left turn between 7-9 am and 4-6 pm." But when there's no accommodation, you don't turn left unless you enjoy meeting your local law enforcement officers in adversarial situations.
Here we should take a moment to consider what a real school does that a diploma mill doesn't a distinction which [the principal] does not consider in her deposition, although she uses the word "Program" to describe what preceded the awarding of the ["university"] degree. A Master's program involves an array of learning experiences which are designed to produce in the student "mastery" of a body of knowledge. Almost all schools claim some right to administer a portion of that knowledge, since they believe that in awarding their degree they are giving the student the benefit of the school's prestige and reputation for the rest of that student's career, and that reputation in part rests in turn on their turning out students whose competence in their chosen field will bespeak the high standards of the school's instructional program. In fact, many schools insist on providing all the education at the graduate level. In such cases, a student who applies with a significant amount of graduate credit is awarded equivalency in credits, but not in classes, so that when the student arrives at a final project, a thesis or dissertation or other demonstration of achievement, the student can continue working independently without paying additional school fees until submitting the final work. Thus the school retains the right to educate the student, but allows the student some credit for time and work already accomplished.
Even when classes are accepted for transfer, most schools attempt to do so by finding actual equivalencies in their own program, since a graduate program is not just an accumulation of classes taken at random, but an array of related studies within a discipline designed to produce just that mastery of the field. And the primary criterion for transfer of credits to an accredited college or university is that the credits presented in turn were done at an accredited institution. This implies some scrutiny by an impartial body of the quality of educational programs offered by the institution.
There is no sense in which the ["university"] offered a "program" to [the principal].
Nonetheless, she may still feel that her qualifications should have been recognized under the rules of the schools and the administrators' association.
If a rule is wrong, obviously, we can try to change it. Here we come to the "What could we have done differently?" section of this paper. The school district and the administrators' association have demonstrated the capacity to accommodate in the very Section 12 to which we referred earlier. Each administrator in the instructional division was to obtain three graduate semester hours of credit every three years, however "The Superintendent or designee may waive or extend the time limit above referred to for good and sufficient cause on a case-by case basis without creating a precedent." If [the principal], or one of her supporters on the selection committee, had been able to bring before the relevant body a suggestion that a comparable sentence regarding the Master's Degree, a road would have been opened for [the principal] to propose a plan whereby she might meet the requirement in an honorable and acceptable way.
Perhaps the selection board was also suffering from "Ignore the Details and Hope they will Go Away" Syndrome. If so, that is unfortunate.
Or it may be the case that the current rules are set in stone and changing them is impossibly difficult. In that situation, we may be facing an unjust law. If [the principal] is, indeed, an example of an ideal candidate who cannot be hired because the regulations prohibit it and the regulations cannot be changed, a kind of courage not usually found in school boards and similar bodies is required.
We have no better teacher in the appropriate meeting of that situation than the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" stands as a model for the intelligent person of good conscience who confronts an impossible law. He said, "One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty." He wrote those words while suffering the penalty of imprisonment for breaking the segregation laws of the state of Alabama in 1963. In our case, the fact that [the principal] may well have been the best candidate for the position implies that the law is inappropriate even unjust to her and to those who would benefit from her service as Principal. But the fact that the breach of that law had to be called to public attention by someone who felt wronged in that breach means it was not done openly. And there is no evidence that [the principal] even accepts the fact of her participation in the breaking of the rule, so she does not have the dignity of Dr. King's position.
Wrong was done in the [City] Schools in the hiring of [the principal] to the position of Principal.
The selection committee acted unjustly in not applying the stated criteria, thus wronging the applicants, and probably some members of the public. [The principal] failed to exercise sufficiently reponsibility in determining the details of the requirements for the position and the appropriate way to meet the requirement for the Master's Degree. Presenting herself as holding a degree to which she is not entitled may endanger the reputation, and possibly the accreditation, of the institution which she leads.
It is often difficult to determine how to right ethical wrongs. It would be a shame if [the principal]'s successful career as a teacher, mentor of teachers, and acting administrator were to end in embarrassment and result in her quietly disappearing like the kleptomaniac counselor. It is entirely possible that she was the best candidate for the job, and her possession of an embarrassing Master's Degree is an obstacle which might be overcome by the relevant body in [City] granting her a period of time to research the acquisition of a legitimate, honorable degree in her field so that she may end her career in the way she, and her supporters, would prefer. This presumes the capacity for recognition of her part in the wrong-doing, and her willingness to take further action towards legitimizing her employment. It is probably too much to address the question of repaying the school district for the increment in salary retained during the time she served without appropriate credential, although that may come up.
It is to be hoped that the basic values of honesty, responsibility, and justice will be upheld in the ultimate resolution of this case. By doing so, we do the best we can as individuals to maintain the moral strength of our communities.
