Ethics Headlines
#69         

Volume 2, Number 17
                            Friday, April 21, 2006


Ethics Headlines is an ethics-in-the-news clipping file published each Friday by Greg Feldmeth, a high school teacher at Polytechnic School in Pasadena, California. It contains news items from the media in the past week that deal with some area of ethical inquiry.

SUBSCRIBE. You can receive the file via email every Friday afternoon with links to the original articles. Just email your address here and put Ethics Headlines in the subject line. If you know of others who would be interested, please forward the page to them.

This week's headlines--select the headline to read the article
  • States help schools hide minority scores. States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the No Child Left Behind law's requirement that students of all races must show annual academic progress. With the federal government's permission, schools aren't counting the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found. Minorities - who historically haven't fared as well as whites in testing - make up the vast majority of students whose scores are being excluded, AP found.
  • Lying on the job is a fact but dealing with it is tricky. Lying in the workplace happens every day: little lies, big lies, white lies, resume lies. How a person handles a lie depends on the type of lie and usually the relationship between the liar and the person lied to. Sometimes...a lie is clearly wrong. If an employee messes up, Nancy Palazza's relationship with a client could be ruined. Not good for business. But in other cases, a lie might be a stretching of the truth or simply not telling the whole story. And in the workplace that happens quite frequently. At what point do people think they should forgive and move on?
  • The state is looking after you. LIBERALS sometimes dream of a night-watchman state, securing property and person, but no more. They fret that societies have instead submitted to the nanny state, a protective but intrusive matriarch, coddling citizens for their own good. Economists, with their strong faith in rationality and liberty, have tended to agree. As many decisions as possible should be left in the individual's lap, because no one knows your interests better than you do. Most of us have gained from this freedom. But a new breed of policy wonk is having second thoughts. On some of the biggest decisions in their lives, people succumb to inertia, ignorance or irresolution. Their private failings—obesity, smoking, boozing, profligacy—are now big political questions. And the wonks think they have an ingenious new answer—a guiding but not illiberal state.(Link broken last week--sorry).
  • Court lets schools ban inflammatory t-Shirts. A federal appeals panel rules that an anti-gay slogan sported by a San Diego-area high school student interfered with others' right to learn.