Atlanta Schools Killed Thousands of Egos
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation recently uncovered a systemic, systematic conspiracy by Atlanta teachers and administrators to misrepresent and falsely enhance the achievement of their students and usurp student rights to do their own cheating by changing answers on statewide tests and creating the illusion that both teachers and students were doing well.
The effort gained Atlanta's Superintendent of Schools Beverly Hall wide national acclaim and accolades as an outstanding educational leader. After the cheating was revealed, she resigned in disgrace while still maintaining her innocence and ignorance of any wrongdoing.
Hall may have been ignorant but she is hardly innocent. Not unexpectedly, Hall pledged her "full cooperation" in the GBI investigation and provided none.
New details on the massive scandal involving 178 teachers and principals in 44 Atlanta public schools have now emerged.
Teachers not only altered student answers but deviously located slow students near better students during tests in order to facilitate cheating, thereby giving the teachers somewhat of a break from erasing all those incorrect answers. Cheating for their students also saved teachers from the onus of providing extra help for those struggling.
One of the accused teachers-82 have confessed-told investigators that Supt. Hall's district was "run like the mob." Another claimed, "Everybody was in fear. It is not that the teachers are bad people and want to do it. It is that they are scared." Others "complained to investigators that some students arrived at middle school reading at a first-grade level. But, they said, principals insisted those students had to pass their standardized tests. Teachers were either ordered to cheat or pressured by administrators until they felt they had no choice."
Not bad, no choice, my foot! Most criminals get scared at some point. Decent people resist pressures to commit crimes and some actually have the gumption to overcome their fears, blow whistles, and expose those ordering them to perpetrate criminal acts.
No Atlanta teachers did the right thing.
The only mitigating circumstance in the teachers' favor making their unprofessional, disgraceful actions somewhat understandable if not forgivable is that they were mere pawns-albeit cooperative pawns-in undermining a major goal of today's public education system, building self-esteem in students at the cost of "misedumacating" them.
Teachers are expected to play by the rules although they don't make the rules. In the Atlanta cases they unwittingly accented the misguided policies prevalent in too many public schools in America of concern with promoting social policies, and students, rather than educating.
In effect, by changing incorrect answers, they defeated that misguided purpose by telling students they were too stupid to arrive at right answers so their teachers would have to help them out. What's most surprising is that poorly educated teachers were able to carry out the scam even with answer keys.
For decades, many teachers have fudged grades to enhance their own reputations by posting grades higher, often much higher, than their students deserved. At the same time, they kept administrators off their backs and allowed schools-and school district superintendents such as Ms. Hall-to win praise and acclamations as superb leaders.
Because of parental and administrative pressure, in many schools and districts teachers have passed virtually every child, except, sometimes, kids who had failed so miserably they were beyond teacher fudging and cheating on their behalf.
At the risk of seeming to defend the indefensible Atlanta teachers, they were victims as well as perps, victims of over-achieving administrators, victims of the new, distorted thinking in education, victims of a society in which parents demand their kids be educated and protesting when they are not despite the fact they, too, have failed in their parental responsibility of insuring their progeny conduct themselves as educable.
Kyle Ann Shiver has presented a unique perspective on when things began to go wrong in Atlanta. Daring to reveal her approximate age, Shiver was there, as a high school junior in 1968 at its inception and attributes the decline in Atlanta schools to the same cause as so many other societal problems: political correctness.
Shiver recounts her experience in "Why the Shock Over Atlanta Teacher Cheating?" Her suburban high school was integrated in 1968, with the enrollment of three black students and the hiring of her school's first black, a biology teacher. As she writes, "Our new students were just like us in all ways that counted. They dressed like us. They talked like us. They studied like us. Back then, a middle-class American was pretty much interchangeable with every other middle-class American."
That was then. The now was represented by the biology teacher.
Said teacher "rambled through hours of class time, telling stories from her life rather than teaching. Her tests were either taken from the teacher's text or were so badly written that no student could even decipher the questions." Very soon, the complaints hit the fan with parents insisting she be fired. Shiver adds, "These parents weren't racists; they were just responsible citizens demanding qualified teachers."
Today, their complaints would be interpreted as prima facie evidence of racism.
Shiver concluded her article with a sad commentary on today: "The teacher stayed. The fix was in. The principal put his 'integrated faculty' accolade above his students' education. . . Some of us students took novels to class to dull the boredom. Others passed notes. But no one complained . . . The death-of-public-education die had been cast."
That death may have been foreshadowed in 1968. However, the obsequies definitely took place in Atlanta, 2011.
If justice still exists in Georgia, the acclaimed, ignorant Atlanta Superintendent of Schools Beverly Hall will be tossed into prison for a few years to contemplate why she insulted and deflated the self esteem of tens of thousands of Atlanta kids by having teachers cheat for them. Don't bet on that incarceration, though. It's PC time.
(See all sources at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=4997)
The effort gained Atlanta's Superintendent of Schools Beverly Hall wide national acclaim and accolades as an outstanding educational leader. After the cheating was revealed, she resigned in disgrace while still maintaining her innocence and ignorance of any wrongdoing.
Hall may have been ignorant but she is hardly innocent. Not unexpectedly, Hall pledged her "full cooperation" in the GBI investigation and provided none.
New details on the massive scandal involving 178 teachers and principals in 44 Atlanta public schools have now emerged.
Teachers not only altered student answers but deviously located slow students near better students during tests in order to facilitate cheating, thereby giving the teachers somewhat of a break from erasing all those incorrect answers. Cheating for their students also saved teachers from the onus of providing extra help for those struggling.
One of the accused teachers-82 have confessed-told investigators that Supt. Hall's district was "run like the mob." Another claimed, "Everybody was in fear. It is not that the teachers are bad people and want to do it. It is that they are scared." Others "complained to investigators that some students arrived at middle school reading at a first-grade level. But, they said, principals insisted those students had to pass their standardized tests. Teachers were either ordered to cheat or pressured by administrators until they felt they had no choice."
Not bad, no choice, my foot! Most criminals get scared at some point. Decent people resist pressures to commit crimes and some actually have the gumption to overcome their fears, blow whistles, and expose those ordering them to perpetrate criminal acts.
No Atlanta teachers did the right thing.
The only mitigating circumstance in the teachers' favor making their unprofessional, disgraceful actions somewhat understandable if not forgivable is that they were mere pawns-albeit cooperative pawns-in undermining a major goal of today's public education system, building self-esteem in students at the cost of "misedumacating" them.
Teachers are expected to play by the rules although they don't make the rules. In the Atlanta cases they unwittingly accented the misguided policies prevalent in too many public schools in America of concern with promoting social policies, and students, rather than educating.
In effect, by changing incorrect answers, they defeated that misguided purpose by telling students they were too stupid to arrive at right answers so their teachers would have to help them out. What's most surprising is that poorly educated teachers were able to carry out the scam even with answer keys.
For decades, many teachers have fudged grades to enhance their own reputations by posting grades higher, often much higher, than their students deserved. At the same time, they kept administrators off their backs and allowed schools-and school district superintendents such as Ms. Hall-to win praise and acclamations as superb leaders.
Because of parental and administrative pressure, in many schools and districts teachers have passed virtually every child, except, sometimes, kids who had failed so miserably they were beyond teacher fudging and cheating on their behalf.
At the risk of seeming to defend the indefensible Atlanta teachers, they were victims as well as perps, victims of over-achieving administrators, victims of the new, distorted thinking in education, victims of a society in which parents demand their kids be educated and protesting when they are not despite the fact they, too, have failed in their parental responsibility of insuring their progeny conduct themselves as educable.
Kyle Ann Shiver has presented a unique perspective on when things began to go wrong in Atlanta. Daring to reveal her approximate age, Shiver was there, as a high school junior in 1968 at its inception and attributes the decline in Atlanta schools to the same cause as so many other societal problems: political correctness.
Shiver recounts her experience in "Why the Shock Over Atlanta Teacher Cheating?" Her suburban high school was integrated in 1968, with the enrollment of three black students and the hiring of her school's first black, a biology teacher. As she writes, "Our new students were just like us in all ways that counted. They dressed like us. They talked like us. They studied like us. Back then, a middle-class American was pretty much interchangeable with every other middle-class American."
That was then. The now was represented by the biology teacher.
Said teacher "rambled through hours of class time, telling stories from her life rather than teaching. Her tests were either taken from the teacher's text or were so badly written that no student could even decipher the questions." Very soon, the complaints hit the fan with parents insisting she be fired. Shiver adds, "These parents weren't racists; they were just responsible citizens demanding qualified teachers."
Today, their complaints would be interpreted as prima facie evidence of racism.
Shiver concluded her article with a sad commentary on today: "The teacher stayed. The fix was in. The principal put his 'integrated faculty' accolade above his students' education. . . Some of us students took novels to class to dull the boredom. Others passed notes. But no one complained . . . The death-of-public-education die had been cast."
That death may have been foreshadowed in 1968. However, the obsequies definitely took place in Atlanta, 2011.
If justice still exists in Georgia, the acclaimed, ignorant Atlanta Superintendent of Schools Beverly Hall will be tossed into prison for a few years to contemplate why she insulted and deflated the self esteem of tens of thousands of Atlanta kids by having teachers cheat for them. Don't bet on that incarceration, though. It's PC time.
(See all sources at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=4997)
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