TX: Dumb Fight On Hair Mountain

There are roughly 14,000 school districts in this country, and on any given day, someone in one of them is doing something stupid and then doubling down on it. Choosing to die on a particularly dumb hill of hair is the superintendent of the Barbers Hill Independent School District.

This is the district that kicked off the year by kicking Darryl George into alternative ed for having hair they didn't like. It was, I guess, their special way of celebrating the passing of the CROWN act, a version of an act passed in several state in which it takes a state law to keep some school administrators from discriminating against Black students for having Black hair.

Superintendent Greg Poole has doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on the punishment. It has been one suspension after another for George since last September. George's family has sued the district over their apparent violation of the CROWN act. Poole says, no, they were just enforcing the school's dress code rule about male students' hair length, which is not protected by the CROWN act:

Male students’ hair will not extend, at any time, below the eyebrows or below the ear lobes. Male students’ hair must not extend below the top of a t-shirt collar or be gathered or worn in a style that would allow the hair to extend below the top of a t-shirt collar, below the eyebrows, or below the ear lobes when let down.

Just to be clear, this is a dumb rule, and all the noise about statistics showing that strict dress codes result in higher student achievement doesn't make it any less dumb. Who knew we were going to have to relitigate the long-haired hippy freak panic of the 1960s. 

So the argument is that George's dreadlocks, it not coiled on his head as they usually are, were unleashed, his hair would dip too far below the Naughty line.

Not convinced yet? Poole was so put out by the negative coverage that he received in The Chronicle that he took out a full-page ad (even though the editor says they "tried to work with Dr. Poole’s staff on an op-ed that we would have published free of charge." 

Poole argues that they have given religious exemptions to Black students who asked for them. He points out that George came from a neighboring district "that allows long hair on males," so I guess implying that George is bringing along those slack values from Those People? And in the most-quoted section:

Our military academies at West Point, Annapolis and Colorado Springs maintain a rigorous expectation of dress. They realize being an American requires conformity with the positive benefit of unity, and being a part of something bigger than yourself.

Yes, being American requires conformity. He said that. In fact, he typed it out so he had time to think about it, and that is still what he submitted to the newspaper.

"Barbers Hill ISD will continue to make decisions to protect and fight for the rights of its community to set the standards and expectations for our school district even if that path takes us to the U.S. Supreme Court," Poole wrote. "We will not lose sight of the main goal — high standards for our students — by bending to political pressure or responding to misinformed media reports. These entities have 'lesser' goals that ultimately harm kids — just as keeping students out of school in response to the COVID-19 health crisis ultimately did and lowering student expectations will."

Poole also cites his four decades of professional education experience, which is how he knows that if he lets this one kid wear his dreadlocks today, the whole school will be collapsing into anarchy and failure tomorrow. 

The full page rant was paid for by Barbers Hill Education Foundation, a sort of PTA-esque fundraising group for the district.

Meanwhile, the author of the CROWN act is planning to go back and amend it so that guys like Poole who want to observe the letter and ignore the spirit of the law will have one less avenue to do so.

Folks of a Certain Age will recognize this whole flap. Yes, it's about racism and sexism and even generational foolishness. But it is also about running a school on demands for compliance. These are Cartman Rules, where the rule itself doesn't matter so much as demanding that the student Respect My Authority, and pretty soon here you are--a grown-ass man drawing national press attention because you got yourself in a fight with a teenager over hair. 

And while it pains me to do so, I must also note that Poole invokes "local control." It's a thing I value in a school district, but it has to be remembered that local control (like states rights) can be invoked in the service of ridiculous and harmful policy. 

Poole claims that the family's lawyer said she wants to "bankrupt" the school district, and after the student's junior year has been so thoroughly disrupted, I don't have a hard time imagining that she might have. Poole and his district have picked a dumb hill to die on; we'll see what the court has to say. In the meantime, the district has to reckon with the Rule of Dumb Rules, which says that whenever you throw an institution's weight behind a dumb rule, you diminish its ability to enforce smart ones.