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Across Atlanta Public Schools, staff worked feverishly in secret to transform testing failures into successes.
Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students’ answer sheets.
Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible.
Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.
For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests.
in case you're interested, the rest can be found here; if not, i guess i understand--nobody much outside of atlanta seems to care.
i dunno, it seems like every day there's a new story of the sort that, a mere generation ago, would have not only have been generally unthinkable, but would have been met with the sort of national outrage of which we as a nation no longer seem capable.
when the rule of law and the public trust become nothing but meaningless catchphrases, how is a nation expected to find its way?
2 comments:
Guttermorality knows that scandals are as old as the Republic. The teapot dome scandal comes to mind as a particularly egregious example.
The Atlanta scandal was bad because in the end, it's the students that are hurt. No child left behind as a law set goals and Atlanta was meeting these goals only by fraud.
There are so many poorly performing schools and we do not seem to know how to fix them.
It is too easy to blame the teacher's unions (I'm surprised you didn't given you hatred of unions generally and the teacher's union specifically).
In places where there are charter schools -- without unions -- the scores are often not any better and sometimes a lot worse.
You appear to be disappointed because where the pressure to make better numbers was so intense that a bunch of people cheated.
As a cynic of mankind, you knew that this was inevitable.
The scandal got some decent coverage here in the Northeast. As a teacher of teachers who believes in hands-on learning, the husband immediately saw the indictment of No Child Left Behind that encourages teaching to the test rather than teaching for knowledge. Of course all those standardized multiple choice test papers were just calling out to be the nexus of fraud.
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