Just after this state is relieved of its No. 1 Embarrassment, our school district and community incur national ridicule by our high school principal's foolish decision to keep the school's honor roll secret. Academic honor rolls pay faint honor if not published, and unnatural efforts to hide dishonorable students works at cross purposes with educational and social values.

Austin High School Principal Joe Brown decided, without legal investigation or announcement, to withhold the publication of the customary honor roll, names of those students with highest academic achievement unsullied by other factors. His reasoning, unreasonable as it actually is, claims that lack of inclusion in a publicly published list, such as in this newspaper of record, would unintentionally betray the identity of students who would otherwise be on the roll were it not for "being in trouble with the law." It would violate the data practices law requirement of privacy, he says.

Brown has, by any measure, a job that is at once unusually important and immeasurably difficult. But he can grow professionally and increase his effectiveness in response to constructive criticism. Here is some.

Students rightly laugh when their principal so pleads. They know -- they all know -- who is in trouble. The classroom teachers learn it from the students, and the administrators learn it from the teachers. By this time, everyone knows it. Moreover, there is nothing in or about the honor roll that betrays confidential data and his is at best an argument from silence. Those few who have objected that some tender soul has been exposed would use their energy better by working with the offending students rather than harassing the principal.

The argument is disingenuous, because inconsistent, illogical, and even dishonest. The same thing can be claimed for rosters of sports teams, program notes for concerts and plays, and many other public listing of students doing worthy things. A logical line of reasoning would lead to jerseys with neither names nor numbers and program notes absent the performers' names. Finally, the school would be disallowed from admitting even that an individual is a student, and graduations would be in secret lest those who failed to graduate would be embarrassed -- or their parents would become offended.

Mr. Brown is jealous for his school and also wants to protect it from costly litigation in an increasingly litigious society, and he understands this better than most of his critics. In this, however, he is on safe legal ground and every attorney I have consulted agrees. If this should be the source of someone learning what is otherwise held confidential, it is not by what the school has said or done but by someone's inference from what it did not say or do.

If changes need to be made in the honor roll system -- and they do -- they would include what Mr. Brown has already indicated in that the honor roll should be published less frequently. The present is an over-exposure the tends to trivialize it. Far more serious than being too frequent, it is too long by half. That is to say, when students feel, as they do, they have some kind of entitlement to be included, there is no way to distinguish between those who have truly honored themselves by academic achievement and those who are allowed on it because they have attended most classes, handed in many of their assignments, and behaved in class much of the time. It happens.

This might be something of a tempest in a teapot, but I worry the more about the principal's overall judgment, and I watch for greater caution and sharper perspective.

Honor roll students should not be forced to help pay the penalty of dishonorable students.

Dr. Wallace Alcorn’s commentaries appear in the Herald on Mondays.