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Monkey Business

July 23, 2013

During the summer weeks, "From the Director" will bring to you some of our favorite entries from previous years. Today's blog first appeared Aug. 24, 2012.

I hesitate to assert that my wife and I are hikers, but we certainly are avid walkers. Walking is a routine of our daily life; and it’s a highlight when we travel. Walking is the means by which we absorb the sights, sounds and smells of each locale, while faster modes of tourism pass us by.

One of my wife’s delights as we travel is to discover monkeys in the wild; so sometimes monkey sighting has been the goal of walks, for example, in Costa Rica and Panama. This has made us familiar with howler monkeys; and I’m sorry to say, it’s caused me to see parallels between howler monkeys and modern media.

The growls of the howler monkeys send messages through the treetops. One howler begins, and others forward the message for miles. I’ve been told by locals (I’m no expert) that the monkey culture doesn’t reward creativity and that there’s an expectation that the message at the end of the line is the same as it began.

Sort of like forwarding an email, photo or video; or sharing a posting on Facebook. Or like the wire services’ distribution of news through traditional media. It’s rare that anyone vets the information; and retractions or corrections are even rarer.

I read in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Lacuna that the most important thing about a story, and about a person, is what you don’t know, which gets to the heart of the weakness of much of modern media. Yes, because of the volume of information in today’s 24/7/365 “news” cycle with thousands of channels and the universal access to reporting news through social media, we’re likely to get most of the facts, eventually; but the salient and true facts are likely to be lost in the rush and the clutter.

Set at a time before television, Kingsolver’s protagonist in The Lacuna writes in 1946: “The newsmen leap on anything . . . The radio is the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment’s pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence. You can’t imagine the effect of this. The talkers are rising above the thinkers.”

However real that observation would have been then, it’s clear today that cable television, talk radio and the Internet have raised the talking-without-thinking effect to heights that would have been unimaginable in the 1940s.

Transfer Trends

January 23, 2015

One of the responsibilities that schools have asked our organizations like the MHSAA to execute is the management of transfer student eligibility. Historically, many associations have linked eligibility to residence ... thus, for some the regulation has been called the "Residency Rule" or "Transfer/Residency Rule," not merely the "Transfer Rule."

Over the years, as society became more mobile and families less stable, these rules became more and more complicated; and now, for most state high school associations, this is the regulation that consumes the most (or second) most pages of their Handbooks. Over the years, this has also been the regulation most frequently challenged in court.

Over the years, some states have relaxed their transfer rule and others have refined their transfer rule. In either case, the transfer rule remains an imperfect rule, an imperfect net. Sometimes this net snags students who should not be made ineligible, and for those situations all associations have arranged some kind of waiver or appeal process. 

And sometimes, and much less easily solved, the net fails to catch the situations it really should ... the transfers that are not hardship related or the result of some very compelling educational need, but those that are obviously for athletic reasons. It is those that we have been most focused on in Michigan.

Our first effort to get at the most problematic transfers was the adoption for the 1997-98 school year of what we called the "Athletic MOTIVATED Transfer Rule" ... Regulation I, Section 9(E). Examples of an athletic motivated transfer are included in the rule. The rule only applies to transfer students who do NOT meet any of the stated exceptions for immediate eligibility and are ineligible for one semester under our basic transfer rule. They become ineligible for 180 scheduled school days if there is a finding that the transfer was more for athletics than any other compelling reason.

This effort has not been successful enough because it requires a school that loses a student to another school to promptly allege to the MHSAA office, with supporting documentation, that the transfer was more for athletic reasons than any other compelling reason. The receiving school then must respond to those allegations. Then the executive director makes the decision. The unfortunate result of applying this rule is that it usually causes hard feelings between the schools, and hard feelings toward the executive director by the school decided against. In 17 years, schools have invoked this rule only 41 times.

Our more recent effort to address the most egregious athletic transfers resulted from requests from the coaches associations for wrestling and basketball which were watching too many students change schools for athletic reasons, usually related to an out-of-season coaching relationship. The new rule – the "Athletic RELATED Transfer Rule" -- is Regulation I, Section 9(F). The difference between Section 9(E) and the newer Section 9(F) is that in 9(F) one school does not have to make and document allegations before staff can act. If MHSAA staff discover or are informed of any of the circumstances listed in 9(F), we can act. Again, the rule only applies to those transfer students whose circumstances do NOT meet one of the automatic exceptions. It applies only to students who are ineligible for a semester under the basic transfer rule. If there is a finding that one of the athletic related "links" exists (usually an out-of-season coaching relationship), then this transfer student who would be ineligible for one semester is made ineligible for 180 scheduled school days.

So far, it appears that 9(F) may be a better deterrent than 9(E). It has been referenced when students are rumored to be transferring, and it has stopped many of those transfers before they occur. 

We have said that if this latest effort does not succeed in slowing athletic transfers, then the next step is 180 days of ineligibility for all transfer students who do not qualify for an exception that permits immediate play. I fear that would catch far too many students who should not be withheld so long from competition and could lead to a period like the early 1980s when the MHSAA, at the request of the state principals association, adopted the core of the transfer rule we have today and which resulted in a period of busiest litigation for the MHSAA when, at one time, the association had more than a dozen cases in court simultaneously on transfer matters. We’ve got to make the current rules work.