Ken Payne has a skin condition that makes his fingerprints unreliable, so he has been barred from teaching in California classrooms. While an expert can identify his prints, they aren't readable by electronic scanning devices. (It turns out that a small percentage of the population has this problem.) According to the Santa Rosa *Press Democrat*, California Department of Justice officials "say they can't conclude Payne lacks a criminal past [as required by law] because their technicians can't compare his prints with the millions of others stored in the state's databases".
Amazingly, while nearly everyone seems willing to grant that something isn't quite right in this picture and that the law needs amending, the situation has now gone unchanged for several years. Having fought the absurdity since being told years ago that he would never hold a full-time teaching position, Payne -- who has good recommendations as a teacher -- is on the verge of giving up and leaving the state. He sees "no apparent way" through the bureaucratic hurdles.
Well, almost no way. It appears that, if he cut off his hands, he would qualify under the law's waiver for the disabled. Or he could become a felon, and then the system would finally be able to peg him. There are programs allowing some rehabilitated felons to become teachers. What I find most disturbing about this story is not that the system has committed an individual to an obviously wrong pigeonhole (such things are inevitable and can be quickly remedied if the right spirit infuses the system). Nor is it that the reliance on computerized data processing makes such problems worse (although it certainly can). The real punchline of the story is that in all this time not a single school principle or superintendant or county or state education official has had the courage to stand up and say, "I've hired Ken Payne and hereby give notice of the fact to the public and my superiors. I will not alter my decision without reason. Those with power in the matter have two choices: fire me, or put the law right."
In other words, the right spirit evidently does not infuse the system. And that is precisely the risk of an ever more mechanized, data-processed, computerized society: that we will fail to counterbalance the mechanisms with our own ever more vivid and assertive presence, meeting the system's inevitable failure of logic with our own corrective judgments. Actually, this particular case hardly required courage. Any well-respected educator taking the right stand would likely have become a public hero. Not many officials would risk their careers by playing the ogre and firing the hero before the public's gaze. Also, there are usually many options available in this sort of situation, short of a career-risking move. A board of education, for example, recognizing the injustice of the situation, could have publicly petitioned the proper authorities for a waiver.
That no one has taken a stand against the absurd, no one has acted against the classic failure of computer-enamoured bureaucrats to make a few obvious distinctions -- here you see the negative potentials of the computer age writ large.
What if real courage were required? As a reading public we devour books like Hitler's Willing Executioners -- imagining, no doubt, that we would stand against tyranny. But if Ken Payne's case is any measure, a simple bit of nonsense that everyone can recognize as nonsense is already too much for us, once it becomes securely embedded in "the system".
Perhaps it is time for a few genuine, sledgehammer-wielding Luddites to remind us with symbolic outward force that our fluent, independent, inner powers of judgment and action must always be strengthened to hold the balance against the systems of automated judgment growing up in our midst.
(Thanks to Robert Westcott for the news story. Late word is that, due to international coverage provoked by the Press Democrat story -- which the Associated Press, CNN, and NBC's Today Show all picked up -- California legislators are now talking about addressing the problem.)
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A front-page N.Y. Times story last November included this statement about reliance on S.A.T. test scores and the like:
Admission officials say that much as they would love to rely more on nuanced measures like essays and interviews, the pressures to use test scores are growing from the sheer volume of applicants, limited budgets for evaluating them and the rise of college ranking guides that emphasize test scores. (Nov. 8, 1997)
Evidently, the reduction of the individual to a set of numerical indices can be hard to reverse, once the reductive tools are in place and society has adapted itself to them.
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Printless Teacher Gives Up Trying For Job in State
ID requirement stymied Petaluma job search
Pamela Podger, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, June 13, 1998
©1998 San Francisco ChronicleURL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/06/13/MN30547.DTL
Petaluma's Ken Payne, whose skin disorder makes it hard for him to get a clear set of fingerprints required for a teaching post, is calling it quits and will look for employment elsewhere in the West. ``I could stay here and fight the state for the rest of my life,'' Payne said. ``But it is time to move on with my life and work with a state that is more accommodating.''
Payne, 55, said he has battled with the state Department of Justice, Sonoma County Office of Education and Petaluma School District officials since October, when a state law began requiring fingerprints as part of a criminal background check. The law was passed after a Sacramento area student was killed by a school janitor. Even though the county education office is working with state officials on obtaining a waiver from the fingerprint requirements, the Petaluma man said the action is ``too little, too late.''
Payne said he has missed the peak hiring period for teaching next year because of the bureaucratic hitches during the past eight months. Payne said he is considering teaching jobs in Washington and Idaho, where there are waiver policies in place for people who cannot provide clear fingerprints. Payne expressed his frustration with the state Department of Justice and stressed that he would have to start the waiver process from scratch if he applied for jobs in other California counties.
Stephen Rosenbaum, a lawyer for the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund in San Francisco, said Payne's outspokenness and actions will benefit others with physical reasons for not being able to comply with the mandated fingerprints. ``Payne has left his fingerprints behind on the state educational and criminal clearance process,'' Rosenbaum said. ``He felt the state has denied him of his dignity. He has found a couple of other states with a more streamlined process.''
Assemblywoman Barbara Alby, R-Fair Oaks, has a bill before the state Legislature that offers people with disabilities or dermatological conditions a background check based on a person's name and identifiers such as residence, height and weight. Payne said he worked as a substitute teacher from 1991 until 1996.
He taught mainly at Petaluma High School and Casa Grande High School in English, art, government and history. Robert Henry, a lawyer for the Sonoma County Department of Education, said he was saddened by Payne's decision to leave California.
©1998 San Francisco Chronicle Page A22
