The Principal Speaks

Got “A Message From the Principal” from Lilly’s school the other day. It was a build-up to these concluding sentences about class assignments next year: “… I am confident that your child will have a quality experience regardless of the teacher that he or she is assigned. In creating class lists for the 2006-2007 school year, the staff and I will create classrooms that are academically and ethnically balanced. Therefore, it is necessary for me to inform the parent community that I will not be able to honor parent requests.”

His italics. I’m sure he’s tired of being pestered about class placement by parents who think it matters. Probably what he really wanted to write was, “Leave me alone already! All of our teachers are pretty good, so your kids will probably learn something next year, provided they have any brains at all. Speaking of which, it’s not done any more to put all the smart kids in one class, so we aren’t going to do that. The kids will sort themselves out in that way eventually anyway. Each class is going to have as much of a mixture of skin hues as possible, though truth be told, most of the kids tend toward the pale end of the spectrum in this suburb.”

Of course “ethnically balanced” probably doesn’t just refer to skin color, though I have to wonder just what kind of formula they’re using to achieve such balance. Use pushpins to represent each child, stick them into a world map at his or her place(s) of ancestry, and try to form a class from pushpins that are far as possible from each other? Or maybe calculate the vowel-consonant ratios in each last name and feed the data into a program (Ethnic Balance 2.1.3) that creates a class list with the widest possible variety of ratios? Alas, I’m afraid that some groups will be sorely lacking in Lilly’s class, no matter how hard the administration strives for balance: Zulus, for instance, or Lapps or Mosquito Indians, just to name a few from very different places.