EDINBURGH

Is education a public benefit? The answer seems obvious. What other institution does so much to ensure a nation’s decent present and promising future?

But is private education a public benefit? The United States long ago settled that question, providing substantial tax deductions to any contributor giving money to independent schools and colleges. History validates that decision, reminding us that countless numbers of America’s finest leaders emerged from institutions funded by philanthropy.

Here in Scotland, however, that question once again is in the air. The Charities and Trustee Investment Act of 2005, which is slowly being implemented, asks nonprofits to pass two tests. The first, appropriately, asks every organization claiming tax-exempt status to prove that it’s organized for charitable purposes. If it’s found to be merely the playground for a few wealthy donors — who, say, define charity as providing jobs for their own family members — it rightly fails that test.

The second test asks whether the organization provides a public benefit, and here’s where things start getting strange. As the new law begins to be applied to independent schools, it curiously assumes that education itself has no inherent public benefit. Instead, each school must prove that in some special way — well beyond the provision of education — it improves society. In the law’s eyes, simply saying, “We educate extremely well,” is not a sufficient proof.

This second test has nothing to do with educational quality. In Scotland as in most other countries, any school found to be incompetent, unprofessional, or operating as a front for some other purpose is shuttered not by the taxman but by the education authorities. Now, however, the taxman also can, in principle, shut down even the finest educational institution unless it can prove its worth.

How is worth measured? In Scotland — and in England and Wales under a similar law shortly to be implemented — the answer is unclear. Indicators appear to center on such things as providing scholarships for poor students, opening playing fields to community groups, or creating partnerships between well-off privates and inner-city state schools. Many here see the new law as less educational than political, reflecting the ideology of the Labour Party and its newly installed prime minister, Gordon Brown. The law reflects two central tenets of Labour’s ideology: that elitism should yield to egalitarianism, and that freedom of parental choice should yield to governmental dictate.

In a nation as small as Scotland, this experiment — with only 31,000 independent school children, representing 4 percent of the school-going population — may seem tiny, but it has global ramifications. Any country thinking of moving in this direction needs to ask why so many parents choose private education in the first place. What causes them to shell out the equivalent of thousands of dollars for something they otherwise can get for free? What do they think they’re getting for their money? Only by knowing those answers will state schools know what gaps they must fill in the (admittedly unlikely) event that the new law succeeds in stifling the private sector.

Data from the Scottish Council of Independent Schools provides insight into those gaps. When parents enroll children in one of the Council’s 72 member schools, they’re asked why they’ve chosen independent education. The three answers you might expect to predominate — ensuring success on exams, getting better facilities, or giving children wider access to sports and extracurricular activities — are not at the top of the list. Nor are parents principally trying to attain social advantage for their children, avoid bad state schools, or follow in the footsteps of friends and relatives who also attended private schools — three reasons at the very bottom. In fact, the top three reasons were:

1. “Realization of child’s potential” — the effort to educate the whole child, not merely the cognitive side

2. “Small classes/individual attention” — a strategy for working with each child’s unique wholeness

3. “Good discipline/clearly defined values” — a conscious attempt to instill ethics and character, and the creation of learning environments where integrity (which also means wholeness) is predominant

What parents want, then, is unsurprising: Treat my children as unique individuals, and help them build character and live by their values in a disciplined environment. Help them, in other words, be whole.

Those who would challenge the benefit of independent education need to get that message. What parents most want is in fact the very thing that will provide enormous benefit to society: education in character and ethics. In that arena, private schools — perhaps because they are often smaller, freer, more nimble, and more experimental — continue to lead the way. The greatest benefit such schools can provide in the twenty-first century is to recognize values and character as their principal selling point, enshrine it at the very top of their mission, learn how to do it extraordinarily well, and share everything they’ve learned with the public sector. Until state schools are equally capable of providing that kind of education, the question of whether independent schools provide public benefit will continue to seem odd indeed.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

Several readers wrote in reaction to Rushworth Kidder’s commentary last week about how the new digital information infrastructure was confounding attempts by the repressive government of Myanmar, formerly Burma, to keep secret its brutal suppression of dissent. One reader drew a parallel between the commentary and the article that followed — about rights in the United States and the balance of constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure and security concerns addressed by the Patriot Act:

The astonishing care and concern for adherence to our Constitution stands out as a hallmark of our society. Few nations if any transcend us in the time and effort spent on such deliberations. And Burma is certainly not one of those.
But the due deliberation we employ must also be accompanied by a careful consideration of how we apply our Constitution in light of our advanced society —

a society that could not have been forecast in 1776. The threats we face today are unparalleled in recent history….
If we are unable to update our national understanding of [the Fourth Amendment], if we are unable to fold such updated understanding into the fabric of our decision making, then our national decision process will find us slowly losing our grasp on our freedoms….
We could indeed be doomed to a Machiavellian decline from our democratic “form” of government, to the rancorous displays now beginning to be apparent in our leadership which could lead to anarchy, then to become the “spoils of the victor” which could have us looking like present day Burma: Tyranny!
But, of course, that could never happen here, could it?

–J. Peter Rushworth
Roswell, Georgia

Another reader compared the situation in Myanmar with the changing information landscape of the 1980s:

I have for some time held the view that the most important factor behind the downfall of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc was the free flow of information, not all the arms races and saber rattling that took place as part of the Cold War. It was not communism per se that fell, it was the totalitarianism that was exercised, including the control of information, that could no longer succeed. At one time, controlling the flow of information was possible, at least for a considerable length of time. It no longer is. Perhaps the most effective ”weapon” of the twentieth century is the transistor, not the bomb! History will be the judge.

– Bruce Balfe
Valparaiso, Indiana

“Howard can fire you. It would affect your ability to get another job.”

– Excerpt from a letter detailing alleged threats made by aides to State Department inspector general Howard Krongard against special investigators asked to cooperate with a congressional probe into alleged wrongdoing by Krongard’s office. Special agent Ronald Militana told McClatchy Newspapers that the quoted threat, detailed in a letter drafted by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), is accurate.

Krongard and his office are accused of a wide range of abuses, including threatening employees like Militana and impeding “investigations into alleged arms smuggling by employees of the private security firm Blackwater and into faulty construction of the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad,” notes McClatchy. Krongard said his office is cooperating.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.
Olympic gold medalist Marion Jones, who for years adamantly denied steroid use and publicly chided critics, last week pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about doping.

Jones, who won five medals at the 2000 Olympics, confessed that she took banned steroids before the event. In an emotional press conference after entering her plea, Jones said, “I want to you know I have been dishonest, and you have the right to be angry with me.”

She also announced that her track career is over, UPI reports.

She was linked to the current wave of steroid allegations sweeping through the sports world by her connection to BALCO, a San Francisco-area laboratory raided by law enforcement in 2003, according to Newsweek. Her name was on a client list seized by investigators, and she was one of dozens of top athletes, including home run king Barry Bonds, who was summoned to testify before a federal grand jury investigating BALCO’s alleged connection to doping.

According to an analysis from National Public Radio’s Deborah Tedford, Jones’s admission was stunning because she had denied so unequivocally that she cheated her way to her three gold and two bronze medals.

“She went on the offensive in 2004, launching a high-profile public relations campaign when the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency began investigating her,” Tedford writes. “She also filed a $25 million lawsuit against the owner of BALCO, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, who admitted during a grand jury probe that he provided Jones with steroids. That case was later settled.”

Jones reportedly returned her five medals on Monday, though the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said it could not verify the surrender. The IOC last week said it would move swiftly to strip her of the medals, according to USA Today.

After entering her plea in a White Plains, New York, courthouse, Jones was released on her own recognizance and ordered to appear for sentencing on January 11. She also faces sentencing on an unrelated fraud case that became linked to the steroid probe when she admitted lying to a federal agent about it.

Jones, who lives in Texas, has agreed to testify against others in the case. Prosecutors have indicated they would consider a relatively light sentence — in the three-to-six-month range — reports the Houston Chronicle. The sentencing judge is not bound by that recommendation.

WASHINGTON
One of the most persistent ethics issues related to the emergence of the global fight against terrorism resurfaced last week as President Bush denied that the United States tortures terrorism suspects.

Bush was reacting to press reports about a series of secret administrative opinions issued by the Justice Department that endorsed the legality of a variety of aggressive interrogation tactics, including sleep deprivation, head slapping, and simulated drowning, reports the International Herald Tribune.

“This government does not torture people,” Bush said in a statement from the Oval Office, Bloomberg reports. “We stick to U.S. law and our international obligations.”

The President did not address specific interrogation techniques.

Congressional leaders are demanding to see any Justice memoranda about interrogation techniques, and the issue is expected to be front and center during the upcoming confirmation hearings of Justice Department attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey, according to a report from the Chicago Tribune.

Meanwhile, reports the Financial Times, Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the president of “playing games” over the torture issue, saying the administration “refused to disclose the program to the full committee for five years, and they have refused to turn over key legal documents since day one.”

WASHINGTON
Corruption in Iraq is widespread and its tentacles reach into the government of prime minister Nuri al-Maliki, according to testimony form an Iraqi judge who appeared before Congress last week.

Judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, appointed by the United States in 2004 to head the Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity, said his agency estimated that corruption has cost the Iraqi government up to $18 billion, according to a report from the Reuters news agency.

He also accused the prime minister of protecting corrupt employees and of attempting to “eradicate or control” the commission, reports the Jurist, a weekly news analysis from the University of Pittsburgh Law School.

“I want to thank the American people for trying to help my country. I want people to know that real corruption — from the highest to the lowest levels of government — is destroying my country. It is impossible to have both democracy and corruption at the same time,” al-Radhi told the House Committee on Oversight and Government reform, according to the McClatchy Newspaper Syndicate.

The issue has become part of a broader dispute between the administration and congressional critics over the State Department’s retroactive classification of memos about corruption that leaked out over the Internet, reports the Washington Post.

Oversight and Government Reform chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) accused secretary of State Condoleeza Rice of forcing a confrontation with Congress over what Waxman characterized as her “efforts to silence debate.”

WASHINGTON
The music industry, locked in a legal and ethical tussle over the rights of consumers to download songs over the Internet, last week scored a key victory in a civil trial.

The Agence France-Presse reports tha the first major U.S. trial to challenge the illegal downloading of music on the Internet concluded with a surprisingly harsh verdict: Jammie Thomas, a Native American single mother from Minnesota who works as a clerk in her tribal office, was ordered to pay more than $220,000 for sharing 24 songs online.

Thomas is one of thousands who were ued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and major music labels for downloading and sharing music. She was among the first to refuse to settle with the RIAA and take her case to trial.

According to a report from the technology news agency CNET, the case, which is expected to be the tee shot for many similar suits, involved tracing the woman’s Internet address after she had downloaded the songs and made them available on what is known as a “peer-to-peer” network, where downloaders can share music.

An important precedent was set in the case when the judge ruled that in order to prove damage from copyright infringement, the plaintiff must prove only that the downloader left the songs in a publicly available directory from which they could be shared, reported technology news service ZDNet.

The verdict immediately focused attention on the ethical implications of the music industry using a middle-class single mother with two children as test case in its fight against music piracy.

In an opinion piece published in the Los Angeles Times last Thursday, staff writer Ann Powers contended that the choice of songs, an eclectic collection spanning four decades and resembling a “playlist for a family party,” seems more like a harmless personal compilation than something that would endanger sales and royalties.

“True,” Powers writes, “Thomas could have burned a CD of these tracks from the vast record collection she claims to own. She could have purchased the songs again from iTunes. But what she probably really wanted to do was just hear them occasionally, the way you hear songs on the radio. She wanted a wide array of music, easily available. Radio, split into niche markets and limited by tiny, repetitive playlists, wasn’t giving her that.”

The music industry has argued that the ease with which digitally encoded songs can be copied and shared will cripple legitimate commerce in music if piracy is left unchecked.

VARIOUS DATELINES
Again this week, Asia was the focus of several news stories centering on ethics:

• After photos and video of its crackdown on dissenters streamed out to the world, the military government of Myanmar took an action that the New York Times reports was as “simple and uncomplicated as shooting demonstrators in the streets”: It simply “switched off the Internet.” The Times reports that other repressive governments, including those of Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, have restricted Internet access or shut down opposition websites in times of protest or during the run-up to elections. But the nature of evolving technologies makes throwing the switch a less-than-certain action, reports the Times, and the current situation in Myanmar will provide a test of how effectively a repressive government in a location already isolated from the rest of the world can keep a lid on digital communication.
• Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf last week agreed to a “reconciliation ordinance” that drops corruption charges against former premier Benazir Bhutto. CNN reports that the move may clear the way for a power-sharing arrangement with Bhutto, who remains popular in her home nation even while living abroad in exile. Musharraf has seen his support slip away after a failed attempt earlier this year to remove the Supreme Court’s chief justice in a tussle over election rules.
• In Thailand, premier Surayud Chulanont promised to clamp down on the practice of vote buying in order to keep the upcoming elections clean. The December election will be the first since last year’s military coup overthrew former leader Thaksin Shinawatra in the wake of public outrage over a deal that allowed him to sell his business tax-free. The Bangkok Post notes that Thailand has a long history of politicians bribing voters for their ballot, either explicitly or by making promises of future individual benefits, often illicit.

BOSTON
An ethics controversy in Boston last week drew attention to the boundaries of private and public information as autopsy findings for two firefighters killed in the line of duty were leaked to the press. The results reportedly show that both men had used alcohol or cocaine before responding to the fire.

The Boston Globe reports that sources familiar with the autopsies said that one firefighter killed while on the scene of a restaurant blaze had a blood alcohol level that made him legally drunk, and the other had cocaine in his system.

The Boston Firefighters Union expressed outrage over the leak, with union president Edward Kelley labeling the release “reckless and outrageous,” and charging that the incident exposes the firefighters’ families to additional trauma, reports the Associated Press.

Autopsy findings are not classified as public documents in Massachusetts.

Boston television station WCVB reports that the autopsy results open a new dimension to the already difficult investigation.

“It has to be looked into,” Kathy Notarianni, the head of the Department of Fire Engineering at nearby Worcester Polytechnic Institute, told WCVB. “As painful as it is for the families involved in this given situation, what would be even more tragic is the next time it happens.”

Boston’s mayor, while saying he was angered by the release of the autopsy results, promised a review of policies related to drug and alcohol testing of firefighters.

The Boston Herald notes that Boston’s drug testing program is less stringent than the random-testing regimes used in many other large U.S. cities. In Boston, firefighters can be tested only if there is a specific complaint or suspicion that they are impaired.

VARIOUS DATELINES
The intersection of ethics and business education was the venue for several stories this week. Among the top items:

• Business schools should require a course in ethics and infuse the subject throughout the curriculum, according to a report released last week by the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics. Institute director Dean Krehmeyer says integrating ethics throughout the curriculum is essential because “ethics issues don’t come packaged in neat little boxes that identify themselves as ethics issues.” The report also advises administrators of business programs to emphasize ethics in explicit statements and activities of the institution, according to a summary of the report from the Virginian-Pilot of Hampton Roads, Virginia. The Business Roundtable Institute is housed at the University of Virginia and represents a partnership between business executives and academics.
• An opinion piece in last week’s edition of Forbes calls for an increased emphasis on ethics in executive MBA programs. Author and academic Ken Blanchard writes: “In the wake of recent corporate scandals, such as Enron, leaders are now required to build an ethical, value-driven community that also makes an organization the provider of choice, employer of choice, and investment of choice…. Everyone realizes the credibility of a company depends on values-based leadership. When asked to assess executives on characteristics other than their professional qualifications, 97 percent of U.S. executives, 86 percent of U.K. executives, and 85 percent of German executives said ethical behavior was extremely or very important, according to a MarketWatch survey. For U.S. and U.K. executives, ethical behavior topped the list of key attributes for an executive, the survey reveals.”
• A new investigation in India cracks down on the ethics of business schools themselves: According to the Economic Times of India, the country’s monopoly watchdog agency has launched a nationwide probe into whether students actually get what they pay for. The sweep comes after a series of newspaper reports about unapproved, overcrowded, or misrepresented programs.

LONDON
An analysis from the BBC highlights an emerging ethics issue related to new trends in environmentalism: Is it ethical, asks author Maggie Ayre, to promote “green” biofuels derived from crops if widespread adoption of biofuels could lead to a food shortage?

Ayre writes: “Green groups and aid agencies cite biofuels as forming part of the ‘perfect storm’ of poor harvests, rising oil prices, and a surge in demand for food from China and India that are all pushing up the price of everything from pasta to a loaf of bread.”

But Ayre maintains that some reports of food shortages due to biofuels are misleading, saying that claims of corn shortages in Mexico stem not from diverting corn to biofuel production, but from the collapse of Mexico’s agriculture industry after years of dependence on cheap corn from the United States.

Ayre quotes a variety of spokespersons who argue that increased demand for biofuel products could in fact help developing nations because they could produce products that the energy-hungry West would be prepared to buy at a premium price.

From the Civility Initiative at the Johns Hopkins University and the Jacob France Institute of the University of Baltimore:

Popular primetime TV shows like “The Office” or “30 Rock” find humor in the rudeness and sarcasm of fictional employees, but in the real world, workplace boorishness is no laughing matter: Several forms of 9-to-5 incivility earned spots on the “Terrible Ten” list of rude behaviors, based on a new survey of 615 workers and others in Baltimore.

Discrimination at work tops the list of offenses, according to the survey by the Civility Initiative at The Johns Hopkins University and the Jacob France Institute of the University of Baltimore. Erratic or aggressive driving that endangers others — behavior typical of rush-hour commutes — and taking credit for someone else’s work round out the top three. Other working-world offenses on the list include treating service providers as inferiors and using cell phones during meetings to make calls or send text messages….

The complete list of “Terrible Ten” behaviors:

1. Discrimination in an employment situation.

2. Erratic/aggressive driving that endangers others.

3. Taking credit for someone else’s work.

4. Treating service providers as inferiors.

5. Jokes or remarks that mock another’s race/gender/age/disability/sexual preference or religion.

6. Children who behave aggressively or who bully others.

7. Littering (including trash, spitting, pet waste).

8. Misuse of handicapped privileges.

9. Smoking in non-smoking places or smoking in front of non-smokers without asking.

10. Using cell phones or text messaging in mid-conversation or during an appointment or meeting.

Categories of “rude” or “uncivil” behavior were derived from an informal survey, conducted online through Yahoo.com and Survey Monkey during a two-week period in May 2007….

“He who stops being better stops being good.”

– Oliver Cromwell (English military and political leader, 1599-1658)