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The other night, unpacking some books, I came upon my old school report cards, lovingly filed away by my mother.

The cards from high school were little more than grids, neatly penned in with letter grades. No teachers were mentioned. Aside from my name on the front, the only other signs of human engagement were the signatures of my parents and the printed names of the superintendent and principal. Even so, those letter grades cast some light on the adolescence of a literary career: One year I blew it in art and later landed a D in something called “Word Shop.”

More intriguing were the verbal comments from elementary school. Restricted to a few sentences on a now-yellowed card (politely called “The Record of Progress”), they chart my teachers’ perceptions of my development through the four periods of a year. In those days, clearly, the focus of basic education — at least in New England — was on character as much as knowledge. To be sure, there were sporadic comments about arithmetic, reading, and science — or even, as Mrs. Carkhuff in second grade archly noted, social studies, which to her surprise “he seems to like.” On academics she was a martinet (a word I later learned in high-school English). Yet, even for her, the real issue lay in the habits of social integration. “He requires constant attention and reminding concerning behavior,” she glowered in her Third Period comment that year.

That came as no surprise to me, of course, nor should it have to her. Her predecessor, the aunt-like Mrs. Doran, had sized me up adroitly the year before. In her neatly printed green ink, she commented that I had “boundless energy,” that “sitting down was one of the hardest things he has to do,” and that “he likes to visit with his neighbors too much at present.”

But what intrigued me was the fact that two teachers, presumably acting independently, had nailed me on the same charge. In third grade, the irresistible Miss Power observed that “when Rush works, he works very well but he would rather sit and play with rulers and such” — a theme picked up by the edgy Miss Barrows the next year, who declared that I was “a good student” who “wastes time playing with rulers.” The formidable Mrs. Johnson in fifth grade put it more charitably when she noted in her spidery cursive that I had “many interests” that kept me from “doing my best.”

Reading those old reports, I was reminded of some conversations last month in Washington with a group of character educators from around the nation. They are worried about the current educational emphasis on testing and assessing student progress at every turn. They admit we need to test: It won’t do to graduate students who can’t read, write, or compute. And they’re committed to measuring the impacts of character education. Yet they were struggling with a fundamental inconsistency, which is that while character and ethics belong to the humanities, the assessment of student character must finally be reduced to numbers and letters on a grid.

And then a friend who is a longtime Scottish educator nailed the problem. “We’ve virtually lost the capacity,” he said, talking about the global educational establishment, “to consider evidence that arises from discernment rather than measurement.”

That’s a most helpful distinction. He’s not urging us to turn away from evidence-based assessments. He’s simply questioning whether the best evidence might be neither a letter grade nor a number followed by a percent sign. The real marker of progress may be a handful of discerning words about habits and some observations about aspirations — or even an anecdote.

I think my grade-school teachers knew that. But this is not a call for turning back the clock. In recent years, we’ve learned more about testing in diverse cultures than the rural homogeneity of my New England schooling ever could have taught us. Instead, it’s a call for respecting words as much as percentages, ideas as much as grades, humanity as much as numeration.

Yes, that can lead to problems — subjectivity, bias, even favoritism. And yes, it’s easier to score tests with a machine than to write thoughtful evaluative comments. But I sense, in the admittedly anecdotal evidence from this one career, that the few words of my early teachers distilled me more accurately than all those later years of letters and numbers ever did. Machines measure. Educated characters discern. And the building of discernment has got to be education’s abiding purpose.

©2004 Institute for Global Ethics

“Our story is man bites dog. Everybody, including our magazine, has been harping on the erosion of privacy and the fears of a database nation. It is a totally legit fear. But they make our lives unbelievably easier as well, in terms of commercial transactions, credit, you name it.”

– Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of Reason, discussing his magazine’s use of database technology to customize the covers of 40,000 copies of the magazine’s June issue — putting a satellite photograph of each subscriber’s neighborhood on their cover, with their home circled in red. Observers say the stunt highlights the loss of privacy and invasiveness of modern technology while also hinting at a future filled with customized publishing that fills your magazines with ads and articles geared to your specific interests. (“Putting 40,000 Readers, One by One, on a Cover,” New York Times, Apr. 5)

HOUSTON
Saying he would not allow his hands to be tied by a plea-bargain agreement, a federal judge last week effectively killed the government’s deal with the wife of the former Enron finance chief.

The judge’s refusal to abide by the plea bargain of Lea Fastow may in turn endanger the plan to secure her husband’s help in tracing the path of corruption through Enron’s executive ranks.

Adopting a reportedly combative attitude, U.S. District Judge David Hittner said he would not honor last January’s plea deal, which would have put Lea Fastow in prison for five months, followed by five months of home confinement.

“I’m exercising the absolute right of a federal judge to say I am not going to be bound by the agreement reached between the government and the defense as to what you think is appropriate,” Hittner said.

Lawyers for both sides were rebuffed by Judge Hittner, who behaved testily and refused to explain his specific reasons for rejecting the plea arrangement, according to a report from the Washington Post.

Hittner has impeded previous settlement efforts in the case against Lea Fastow, who last week withdrew her offer and now faces a June trial on six felony counts that could carry a sentence of several years in prison.

“I think we’ll see efforts to … work out another plea,” Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor following the case, told the Houston Chronicle. “Mrs. Fastow has too much to lose and the government has too much to protect to not still try to resolve this.”

Lea Fastow’s plea deal reportedly was pivotal to securing a similar guilty plea from her husband, former Enron chief financial officer Andrew Fastow, reported the Associated Press.

Facing nearly 100 counts, including fraud, money laundering, and insider trading, Andrew Fastow agreed earlier this year to plead guilty to only 10 charges and help the government in its case against other Enron executives.

The Fastows reportedly agreed to plead guilty partly because of prosecutors’ pledges to help make sure they were not both behind bars while their young children were growing up, reported the Post.

Now with Lea Fastow’s deal derailed by Judge Hittner’s decision, observers note that Andrew Fastow, while still obligated to honor his deal, may not be as forthcoming as previously hoped.

“Being obligated to tell the truth and being an enthusiastic team player are two different things,” Washington lawyer Preston Burton noted to the Post.

NEW YORK
Three former executives at Computer Associates last week were hit with criminal and civil charges stemming from years of alleged fraud at the software firm.

Last week’s action broke down into two separate efforts: criminal charges from the Justice Department and civil charges from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), reported the Reuters news agency.

Former chief finance officer Ira Zar was hit hardest by the Justice Department, pleading guilty to conspiracy, securities fraud, and obstruction. He faces us to 20 years in prison.

Former finance vice presidents David Kaplan and David Rivard both pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and obstruction, and could face up to 10 years in prison each, reported Reuters.

The charges center on allegations that the men were involved in bookkeeping fraud designed to inflate Computer Associates’ sales and earning figures to meet Wall Street expectations in the late 1990s.

Executives at Computer Associates allegedly backdated contracts and concocted the “35-day month,” extending fiscal quarters by a few days to count late-breaking contracts and boost figures.

Faced with increased public scrutiny, Computer Associates changed the way it reported sales beginning in October 2000. Since then, its reported sales have dropped 50 percent, noted the New York Times.

“I should have quit,” Rivard said last week at the arraignment, reported Reuters. “I knew at the time that what I was doing was wrong and I should have walked away.”

Responding to last week’s civil charges from the SEC, Rivard and the others each agreed to be barred permanently from holding company officer and director positions.

Computer Associates still faces an internal investigation as well as possible further charges, fines, penalties, suspensions, and debarment from government contracts.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

MONTREAL
Air Canada, the national airline of Canada, which is currently in bankruptcy proceedings, last week launched a $3.8 million lawsuit against upstart rival airline WestJet, alleging that it surreptitiously broke into an Air Canada Web site.

Air Canada alleges that WestJet accessed the site to examine confidential information about load factors and number of seats sold on flights of Air Canada and its Zip subsidiary.

Air Canada is asserting that a former employee hired by WestJet used his ability to access his former employer’s Web site, allowing other WestJet employees to access the confidential information.

WestJet last week said it was suspicious of the Air Canada claims, but will conduct “a thorough investigation … which may serve to portray a more accurate representation of the facts.”

In the meantime, WestJet has put two executives named in the suit — strategic planning vice president and founding shareholder Mark Hill and financial analyst Jeffrey Lafond — on paid leave, reported the Globe & Mail.

WASHINGTON
Continental Airlines last week agreed to spend more than $500,000 on civil-rights training for its staff to settle charges that the airline discriminated against certain passengers in the weeks after 9/11.

Continental was accused of barring passengers from flights or otherwise treating them differently because they appeared to be of Arab, Middle Eastern, or South Asian descent, reported the Associated Press.

Four flyers filed complaints with the federal government while an undisclosed number filed other complaints with the airline itself.

Continental last week continued to deny any wrongdoing, insisting in a statement that the “incidents at issue in this investigation were not the result of discrimination.”

Nevertheless, the firm agreed to pay at least $500,000 for civil-rights training for its pilots and airline staff over the next two years. The settlement does not cover lawsuits filed privately by passengers, noted the Houston Chronicle.

American Airlines settled similar charges in February, while United Airlines settled allegations last year, according to the AP.

WASHINGTON
The U.S. Justice Department last week fought against a damages award to veterans from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, arguing that while the men may have been tortured, they have no claim to frozen Iraqi funds.

The government made its case at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where a three-judge panel last week heard arguments over the nearly $1 billion in damages.

The $959 million award was earmarked for 17 veterans who had been taken prisoner and tortured by Saddam Hussein’s forces during the first war on Iraq. Some veterans’ family members were also named as plaintiffs.

The veterans won their case in July 2003, but any payments were blocked after the judge reluctantly agreed to heed Bush administration claims that the $1.7 billion in frozen Iraqi assets were off-limits, reported the Washington Post.

Those assets, frozen in 1990 but officially seized only last year, are categorized now by the government as part of a separate matter and promised to the new Iraqi government for rebuilding efforts.

“What is at stake in this case is the enforcement of an executive order by the president of the United States and his ability to conduct foreign policy,” Justice Department lawyer Gregory Katsas argued last week.

The administration insists that many people — U.S. POWs and Iraqi citizens alike — suffered at the hands of Saddam Hussein, making reparations a matter for the new Iraqi government, not U.S. courts.

The POWs say that while they are in no hurry to collect the reparations, they feel betrayed by the efforts and arguments of the U.S. government, for which they fought and suffered in Iraq.

They also say that they want their ruling upheld to hold their place in line — and international law — once foreign firms and others try to collect on debts owed by Iraq, noted the Post.

“French oil companies are going to walk in and say ‘I have a contract signed by Saddam Hussein and I want to be paid,’ and they’re going to have a claim that is recognized under international law,” plaintiffs’ attorney Stewart Baker said. “We think this is a debt incurred by Saddam Hussein that deserves much more priority than some French oil contract.”

SAN JOSE, California
Heeding environmental concerns, California-based Intel Corp. last week announced that its microprocessors and chipsets would be 95-percent lead free by the end of this year.

The move puts Intel among the tech firms leading the way in eliminating toxic metals from both their products and the environment, where toxins often are released after computers and monitors are discarded.

Lead exposure has been linked to behavioral disorders, brain damage, and death, especially in children, reported the Associated Press.

The move also may help Intel, the world’s leading chip maker, maintain its competitive edge as a new European Union directive banning lead products from the EU takes effect in July 2006, noted the AP.

National Semiconductor Corp., based in California, and Japan’s NEC Corp. also have announced lead-eliminating initiatives, according to press reports.

SAN FRANCISCO
Internet superpowers Google and Yahoo! last week yielded to government pressure, announcing that they would strip their popular search engines of ads for online casinos by the end of April.

The decision comes after a wave of grand jury subpoenas last year targeted U.S. broadcasters, publishers, and Web sites accused of “aiding and abetting” online gambling.

Federal prosecutors have prodded the firms to abandon ads for online gambling firms, saying the ads may be illegal under theories not yet tested in courts, reported the New York Times.

Last week, Yahoo! and its Overture subsidiary said they would no longer run such ads due to a “lack of clarity in the current environment.” Yahoo! said it will still run the ads in foreign markets.

Google said it also would adopt similar restrictions, but would extend its ban to foreign markets as well.

Last week’s move will also remove online gambling ads from Microsoft Corp.’s MSN site, which is powered by Overture, reported the Associated Press. Search engine Lycos also has dropped the ads over the past several months.

While abandoning the ads is not expected to hurt the search engines’ revenues, the same may not hold true for the online gaming industry, which has relied on traffic from the sites to boost business, noted the Times.

“There’s been a general message sent to publishers from various agencies in the government that the legality of this advertising is unclear,” Dakota Sullivan, vice president for marketing at California-based search engine LookSmart, told the Times.

“There’s been a general shift in the atmosphere,” he added, noting that his firm is reviewing its own policies. “There’s a question of whether it’s legal, and, beyond that, whether it’s right.”

JACKSON, Mississippi
The U.S. Marshal’s Service last week insisted that it did nothing wrong when it controversially seized two reporters’ recordings of a speech given by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in Mississippi.

Scalia was in Mississippi to give two speeches on the Constitution. While he usually allows reporters to attend and take notes, he routinely bars the visual or audio recording of his remarks.

After Scalia did not announce his normal ban on taping at the second of two speeches last week, two journalists — one from the Associated Press, one from a local newspaper — recorded his comments.

Afterwards, deputy federal marshal Melanie Rube demanded that the reporters erase the speech. When the AP reporter refused, Rube seized the recording and erased it — as she also did to the local reporter’s tape.

The U.S. Marshal’s Office last week defended its actions, saying it was simply upholding Scalia’s longstanding policy against allowing himself to be recorded, reported the Associated Press.

“Our reporter was strictly using a recorder to make sure she got what he [Scalia] had to say correct,” Ron Harrist, news editor of the AP’s Jackson bureau, told the Washington Post.

AP Mississippi bureau chief Frank Fisher said the government “crossed the line” by confiscating the journalists’ recordings when no ban was announced beforehand.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press last week released a letter asking for Rube to be disciplined for her actions, which the group said violated the U.S. Privacy Protection Act, which bans government officers from seizing materials headed for press, according to the AP.

A similar controversy occurred earlier that same day after Scalia ordered local TV reporters to leave a reception sponsored by William Carey College, where he had given a speech. A college official later overturned a Scalia-imposed ban on photos by news reporters after non-press guests started snapping shots themselves.

“I specifically asked for protocol and was told that the media would have access to Justice Scalia during the reception,” William Carey spokeswoman Jeanna Graves told the AP. Graves, who later sent an apology to the media, said she was “embarrassed and angry” over the incident.

SAN FRANCISCO
A wide range of education topics captured headlines last week, highlighting issues of grade inflation, university admissions, high-priced textbooks, and alleged censorship.

Among the developments:

• The undergraduate dean at Princeton University last week urged faculty members to adopt a motion later this month lowering the number of A grades awarded in each department from the current average of 46 percent to 35 percent. Fewer than 5 percent of Princeton’s class of 2002 earned a GPA below B-minus. Admitting that this would be only a first step, undergraduate dean Nancy Weiss Malkiel said she and others hoped that Princeton could use its prestige to leverage a national conversation on the subject of grade inflation. “In the main, the theme was that this was a national problem,” she told the New York Times, “and that it would be terrific if a university had the courage to take it on.”
• Former Princeton University president William Bowen called on the nation’s universities to give low-income students a boost during the admissions process, warning that the nation’s top colleges should be “engines of opportunity” instead of “bastions of privilege.” Bowen said poorer students should be given preferences such as those now given to minorities, athletes, and the children of alumni, reported the Times.
• California watchdog group CALPIRG last week squared off with the nation’s textbook publishers over what it says are excessive costs designed to gouge students already hard-hit by rising education fees. The Sacramento Bee profiles the problem, noting that the cost of textbooks and educational supplies has risen 238 percent over the last 20 years — more than four times faster than the price of consumer goods overall. The $7.8 billion college textbook industry says the market is so small and so technically demanding that the high prices are required.
• Backed by a handful of local teachers and prominent authors, including Stephen King, Salman Rushdie, and Dave Eggers, nearly 100 students last week protested alleged censorship at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where a student was expelled for writing a violent essay in a creative writing class last winter. The teacher of the class had her contract dropped and another teacher said the administration phoned his students and offered them refunds if they would drop his class. University vice president Sue Rowley told the San Francisco Chronicle that the school had behaved appropriately, saying the latter teacher had failed to submit a syllabus for his class, making administrators uneasy.

From AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons) and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights:

“On behalf of AARP and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), Gallup conducted its largest and most comprehensive race-relations survey of blacks, Hispanics, and whites to date and discovered among other key findings that over half of each group supports affirmative action for blacks and Hispanics and a majority of Americans approve of interracial marriage. The survey, entitled ‘Civil Rights and Race Relations,’ marks this year’s 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education — the Supreme Court decision that jumpstarted the American Civil Rights Movement and appears in the May-June issue of AARP The Magazine.

“The AARP/LCCR Gallup survey found astounding progress in two areas that hit close to home for most Americans: interracial relationships and the neighborhoods we live in. Eighty-six percent of blacks, 79 percent of Hispanics, and 66 percent of whites said they would not object to a child or grandchild marrying someone of another race.

“Further buttressing the idea that different races are increasingly comfortable living together was the finding that a majority of Americans prefer to live in mixed neighborhoods. Seventy-eight percent of blacks, 61 percent of Hispanics, and 57 percent of whites supported this notion. There was also widespread support for affirmative action, with the majority of Americans voicing their support for programs for blacks (57 percent) and Hispanics (57 percent).

“But there were vast gulfs between different groups’ perceptions of how minorities are treated today. Seventy-six percent of white respondents thought that blacks are treated very or somewhat fairly, while only 38 percent of blacks agreed with them. And while 61 percent of whites believed that blacks have achieved the same job opportunities as whites, just 12 percent of African-Americans concurred.

“‘The major finding in this survey is that individually, most people have come to accept and even celebrate the multiculturalism in this country,’ said AARP The Magazine editor Steve Slon. ‘But when you start addressing some of the major societal issues of the Civil Rights movement like fairness in front of the law and access to educational and professional opportunities, there are still gaps to be bridged. Whites tend to think that fairness has essentially been achieved, while most minorities still think it is very much a work in progress.’

“…The mixed results of this survey were reflected in questions that explored the future of American race relations. Sixty-three percent of respondents thought that ‘race relations will always be a problem in the U.S.’ However, when asked to consider the prediction that by 2050 the majority of Americans would be nonwhite, only about 13 percent of each group said this would be a bad thing; most Americans said it simply won’t matter….”

“Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that has been taught.”

– Lord Halifax (English statesman and diplomat, 1881-1959)