“Harrison Bergeron”
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General…
It’s time Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” becomes required reading. It’s short and simple enough, so school district “leaders” should be able to handle it.
Anjali Datta, the offending Smart Girl who won’t get a scholarship because the school district is run by idiots.
Grapevine student with top grades won’t be valedictorian
Grapevine High School senior Anjali Datta holds the highest grade-point average of the 471 students graduating from Grapevine High School this year. In fact, Grapevine-Colleyville ISD officials believe her GPA of 5.898 may be the highest in the high school’s history.
It’s still not enough to make her the valedictorian, which brings a one-year college scholarship from the state. Her closest competitor’s GPA is 5.64. No one disputes that she’s the top student in her class numerically. The problem rests with another number entirely.
Anjali rocketed through high school in only three years.
But a school district policy states: “The valedictorian shall be the eligible student with the highest weighted grade-point average for four years of high school.” […]
[A district spokeswoman] said the district researched the decision for months.
“There was a lot of thought involved in this. There is no perfect answer,” she said. [My God, the inmates really have taken over the asylum].
Anjali says she and her parents are baffled.
“I have not heard of any educational institution penalizing a student for excellence – for completing a demanding set of classes ‘too quickly,’ ” said her father, Deepak Datta. “Anjali’s experience will surely send a strong negative signal to other talented students trying to excel.
I really, in one of the very rare moments, don’t even know what to say.
They’ve got one thing right. . . their answer certainly wasn’t perfect! Heck, it wasn’t even close.
I’d be happy to contribute to a scholarship fund for Anjali, but there’s nothing I can do about the valedictorian part of the deal!
This Texas school district is not too terribly far from my district. It is this kind of “thinking” that gives the enemies of public education–and they are, unfortunately, legion–wonderful, powerful ammunition. There are consistently two groups of people whose pronouncement leave me shaking my head and muttering “what kind of person would even think that sort of thing?”: Liberal politicians, and school administrators.
I took my undergraduate degree with a near 4.0 GPA in only 2.5 years. Does that mean that someone who took five years to graduate with a similar GPA would be more capable than me?
Look in the dictionary under “blithering idiocy,” and you’ll find photos of this district’s administrators. Hopefully this extraordinary young lady will take some solace in the knowledge that she is already far more intelligent than those who pass judgement on her in this case. And perhaps the publicity surrounding this situation will encourage a worthy, intelligent college to offer this young lady the substantial scholarship such effort and ability deserves.
I’ve witnessed a similar philosophy in my local school district. There’s one relatively successful school, and several failing schools. The school board’s inclination has been to divert resources away from the school that’s producing results and towards the lousy schools, on the theory that the working school can take care of itself, whereas the failures need help. This would be fine if it worked, but the practical result is to drag down the working school while not particularly benefitting anybody else. But at least we get closer to the divine goal of “equality”.
This is the email that the High School’s website lists for the principal, Jerry Hollingsworth:
[email protected]
Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot!?!
What was this intelligent young woman to do, put her feet up and sleep through a year of school just to meet their idiotic rules?
So let me understand this. The CALENDAR became more important in the school board’s decision as opposed to the CONTENT of the course of study that led to matriculation?
Now for those of us with educations and not living in a rural California backwater farm community can we say….
IGNORANT.
By completing a four year course of study in three years, one should have aproaced the process in one of two ways:
1) Most obvious is to assert that the work was completed and the time fram is irrelavent because it’s the student’s comprehension of the course of study that was being measured, or
2) In absence of that most logical conclusion, to take the the board could have then assumed that based on past experience, had the student been able to continue beyond matriculation so as to complete 4 full years of parking their ass in a chair, the trend would have been to achieve at least an average GPA in the final year as in the previous three. I am guessing that even assuming a GPA of her worst year or her worst five classes would have netted her a substantially higher final GPA over the apparently all important calendar period than the next highest student.
Apparently awards are for the nearly hardest working gifted and not the most hard working gifted of students.
Regardless, in no case should the student be penalized for excellence and that is precisely what the school board cup dribblers did.
My son’s school has an interesting solution here. They don’t have a valedictorian. They have 29! Everybody wins! Everyone with better than a 4.0 average gets to be one. Of course they don’t have a speech, that eliminates the icky possibility that one may thank God or something like that.
This is kind of crazy, but the valedictorian isn’t necessarily the smartest student. It is also the student that has given most to the school which can include athletics, extracurricular activities, etc. A lot of districts only give it to students graduating in 4 years because they have the most opportunity to give back to the high school. As long as she wasn’t denied scholarships and what not, I don’t think its that big of a deal. There’s a reason many schools stopped naming a Valedictorian and it’s because it’s too hard to judge just how much time and effort one has put into school, sports, activities, etc.
Discrimination against intelligence comes easily and naturally to the equality of outcome crowd. “It’s not fair” is their mantra.
She goes to my school and used to be in my grade.
The principal decided to make her valedictorian- 3 year. This was a great idea. You see, in Texas, the valedictorian receives some amount of scholarship money (I’m not sure how much it is). Because Anjali is beyond an average intelligence level (even receiving a perfect score on the ACT), the principal knew that she would receive plenty of other scholarship opportunities.
She received a full ride to the University of Texas at Austin, a very prestigious school, among many other offers. If she accepts will be one of the top students at UT, which is a top honor. While it is not fair that her title does not hold the same status as the normal valedictorian, it proves to be a better situation because the 4 year graduate valedictorian wouldn’t of been able to get a substantial amount of scholarship money anywhere else.