Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: The Porcelain Principle

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Mike Peterson Published: January 5, 2012 1 minute 1 comment

One of the things Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman always hear is that Zits opens conversations between parents and adolescents, whether that day's strip features Jeremy or his folks as the butt of the joke. That's probably why Zits is one of the top strips in terms of the number of papers that feature it, and is remembered for one of the biggest launches in comics history.

This one opened me up to digging out a column I wrote almost exactly 16 years ago; It ran in the Press-Republican of Plattsburgh, NY on January 7, 1996 (and I suppose they own the copyright).

It's only become more relevant in the intervening years.

Assessing Our Schools: The Porcelain Principle

The Pataki Administration's promises of change at State Ed leave many teachers and administrators scratching their heads. How much is going to really change? Is the Board of Regents on or off? Is the New Compact dead? Are they going to change the number of villages it takes to raise a child?

Most of all, educators want to know about assessment. Not tax assessment, but the kind of assessment that tells educators how well they are doing and how well their students are doing.

Assessment is a hot buzz word in education, and with Albany in a bit of flux, this is a good time to propose a new standard for assessing the quality of an entire school.

Here's my assessment tool: bathrooms.

Boys' rooms. Girls' rooms. Washrooms. Call it the Porcelain Principle.

Recently, a reader demanded to know how many area schools I had visited in the course of my ruminations on education, so I stopped to add them up and discovered I have visited schools in 18 of the 22 public school districts in our distribution area, as well as several parochial schools.

Now, I didn't happen to visit the bathrooms in each of those schools, but I've seen a lot of public porcelain in my travels, and I am convinced that, if you want to learn about a school, that's where to start.

Oh, you can tour the school and have the principal tell you what a great place it is, and you'll see all kinds of plaques and trophies and self-congratulatory messages posted around the place.

But break away from the official tour and duck into the bathroom if you want to see what's really going on.

Never mind the inevitable mess 350 kids generate by the end of a busy day. There are far more interesting stories in the condition of the bathrooms at your local school than a mere traffic count.

But take graffiti: Any wall can get written on, and four-letter words and racial epithets do appear.

But, while you can't wipe out racism with steel wool or a fresh coat of paint, a school's policy of either wiping out offensive graffiti or letting it stand sends a message to students that isn't hard to figure out.

When you see a half-dozen back-and-forth exchanges on a topic, that's not one or two days' innocent neglect. That's a sign that, while profanity and racism are officially forbidden, the administration can't be bothered to read the handwriting on the wall, and you need to wonder what else is going on in that school that the administration doesn't know about.

Smashed towel dispensers and torn-down partitions are, admittedly, more expensive to remedy than graffiti, but why did it happen in the first place? "A few bad apples?"

Maybe. But the schools where students are divided into "good kids" and "bad apples" seem to be the ones with the trashed bathrooms, while the schools with the least vandalism seem also to be the places where it is made clear that students are clients and not inmates.

I've been in schools where the kids' bathrooms look like bathrooms in any high-traffic commercial building: Much-used but well-cared-for. The kids in those schools treat the entire facility as if it were their workplace, which it is.

At the other end of the scale, I was at an outdoor sports event at one school and went inside to find that the only boys' bathroom not blockaded by after-hours gates was locked, with a hostile message on the door from the principal about repeated violations of regulations and so forth and so on. An identical message was posted on the locked door of the girls' bathroom.

I guess the intention was to teach discipline and consequences and all that good tough-love stuff, but all it really taught was that a well-paid, allegedly professional adult could be dragged into a silly game of "got you last" with a bunch of turned-off kids, and furthermore, could be tweaked by them into making an utter ass of himself. It was less like something out of "Room 222" than it was "Hogan's Heroes."

So if I were the new commissioner of State Ed, rather than look at test scores and graduation rates, I would send out undercover agents to peek into the bathrooms of schools all over the state, and that would be my method of assessment.

But, you know, I'll bet the result would be that the schools most in need of improvement would start laying off teachers to hire more janitors. The most common reason for failure in schools is a short-sighted focus on meeting arbitrary assessment goals rather than on making a comprehensive effort to perform the functions being assessed.

Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.