NO MORE TEACHERS' SILLY RULES

By MARGARET CARLSON

Possession and distribution of Midol will get you four months, with over three months off for good behavior and enrollment in a drug-rehab program. Advil in your backpack will get you a one-day suspension. Kiss a girl and make her cry? In North Carolina that's punishable by detention and missing an ice-cream party; in New York City, by a five-day suspension.

Have the nation's teachers lost their minds? The spate of news stories would have you think so. Maybe Bob Dole was on to something when he blamed the people who mind our ABCs for everything that's wrong in the schools. Certainly, it does look absurd to treat Advil as the gateway to addiction and a seven-year-old's clumsy mauling as sexual harassment.

But teachers were coping with kids' misbehavior long before there was zero drug tolerance or gender sensitivity. What has changed is the parents. The welter of written regulations that have supplanted the rule of common sense in America's schools did not arise in a vacuum but in an atmosphere where parents think they know best--and certainly know how to call a lawyer. In response, skittish school boards have pursued rule codification as a way to narrow discretion and defend lawsuits. Yet trying to write detailed regulations about what is permissible between boys and girls during their most chaotic years and when, where and in what quantity any drugs may be taken on school grounds makes drafting the Code of Federal Regulations look easy. Remember the joke about Chelsea's having the school nurse call her father when she needed an aspirin? The real punch line wasn't that her mother was too busy, but that at schools these days, an adult would no more give a child an unauthorized pain reliever than a vial of crack.

Meantime, while the North Carolina school was being ridiculed for suspending a six-year-old, a jury ordered a San Francisco school district to pay $500,000 ($6,000 to come from the principal's own pocket) to a girl who had endured months of sexual taunts from a sixth-grade classmate. The school had argued that fear of a lawsuit by the boy's parents prevented it from taking disciplinary action. Next time, it's safe to say, the school will err on the side of strict enforcement, even if it means being pilloried on the Today show. Says Anne Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Association: "We live in a very litigious world, and school districts have to protect their schools. A $500,000 award is a lot of textbooks."

It all makes you long for the time when parents usually gave teachers the benefit of the doubt in disciplinary matters rather than challenging them on the grounds that little Johnny is perfect and any blot on his transcript will keep him out of Harvard. But the situation could get even worse. A constitutional amendment has been drafted guaranteeing that parents' rights to direct the education of their children "shall not be infringed." The amendment, being pushed by the Christian right, is on the November ballot in Colorado, and has been proposed in 28 other states. If it ever becomes law, we will have school by daily plebiscite with creationists and evolutionists, liberals and conservatives, condom givers and abstinence advocates, prayer sayers and secularists playing out their agendas. If parents aren't willing to go in the other direction and collectively trust teachers to teach and discipline, a thousand little Johnnies will bloom and destroy what remains of public education. Say goodbye to Mr. Chips and all that, and hello to 40 substitute teachers (parents) in every classroom.