Ethics Newsline®

How Much Do You Tell the Teacher?

Apr 28th, 2008 • Posted in: Commentary

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Is it ever right to tell only half a truth?

Ordinarily, Lara would be the first to say no. As a manager of global information technologies for a Fortune 500 multinational, Lara (not her real name) has seen too many occasions where half-truths and spin have muddied the waters and damaged careers.

But then her son Troy turned 11.

When he was seven, Lara told me, he was diagnosed with a mild case of attention deficit disorder (ADD). After she and her husband consulted a doctor, they decided to put him on the drug Ritalin. It “took the edge off,” she recalls, “and helped him to concentrate.”

Over the next four years, his schooling progressed well. His energy and zest never seemed anything more than the typical rambunctious creativity of young boys. As a result, Lara and her husband saw no reason to change the original dosage, even as his body grew. So after four years, and with a doctor’s guidance, they took him off the drug entirely for one summer. He was fine.

As fall approached, Lara faced a tough choice. It wasn’t about whether to go back to the drug; she felt sure that was behind them. It was about what to say about Troy’s prior use of it. He was heading into a new school where nobody knew his past. Should she let the staff know about his medical history?

On the one hand, she felt she had an obligation to tell. She and her husband strongly believed that “when you are dealing with people who are educating your children, they need to understand your child” so that they can “create environments where kids learn really well.” For her, schooling is “a two-way street.” As parents, she says, “we have to work with our kids to make sure they’re getting their homework done so that the teachers can be successful.”

On the other hand, she had fought hard to help Troy avoid being labeled. She was keen to protect his identity as a healthy, vigorous individual rather than a child with ADD. “You read about people whose kids get labeled,” she says, “and you say, ‘I can’t believe that happened so fast!’ But children do get labeled pretty fast.” She felt Troy had made significant progress and that he needed to be able to prove himself without any preconceptions.

For Lara, it was a right-versus-right decision. She knew it was right to honor the community of educators, but it also was right to defend the individuality of her son. She saw the arguments for truth telling so clearly that, she admits, she felt deeply guilty about misleading the school. Yet her loyalty and responsibility to Troy made her want to protect him from the unwitting condemnation that had produced such harmful effects on other ADD children. With truth pitted against loyalty and with the rights of the individual conflicting with the needs of the community, there were powerful moral arguments stacked up on each side — and she couldn’t choose both at once.

Finally, after weighing both sides of this dilemma, she and her husband made a “conscious decision” to withhold the full story about their son. They said nothing about the ADD.

Shortly after the school year started, Lara went to her first parent-teacher conference — and was delighted by the “glowing results” she heard from the teacher. Troy was doing well in class, said the teacher, “his grades are good, and we love having him here.” Lara was so pleased, she said, that she admitted to the teacher that they had taken Troy off Ritalin that summer.

And with that, everything changed. The teacher “shook her head and said, ‘Oh, now I understand why I’m having so many problems with your son!’” From that point forward, Lara says, he was “immediately labeled. I kept receiving notices as to his performance issues, and everything went downhill.”

To this day, Lara says, “I’m convinced that she just decided to label him. It didn’t matter whether he was just being a typical kid. In her mind he wasn’t being typical, he was ‘that kid with ADD who needs to get on his medication again.’”

Troy is now 14, and he’s changed schools once again. Since that time, Lara admits, “I

have not told the school system a thing.” Troy is aware of his challenge and occasionally tells his mom that he’s had a tough time concentrating, and they talk about it. But she says he’s learning to handle it without drugs. “It was a tough fight going forward,” she concludes.

But was it an ethical fight? Was this a wise defense of his dignity — or a willful disobedience of regulations? That depends on how you see the moral arguments on both sides. Some would say that Lara did what every parent should do: take a firm stand against the all-too-human tendency, even among well-meaning educators, to see stereotypes instead of individuals. Others would say that every parent must share all such details with teachers — and that ethics depends less on how you see things turn out (fine, in this case) than on the principle (in this case, full disclosure) you’d like to see everyone follow.

Did Lara do the right thing? I’m eager to hear in your views. Email me your thoughts and your reasoning, which I’ll share in a future column.