Another facet of Affirmative Action?
This is happening all over, not just in urban districts; the dirty secret of public education is that over the past twenty years learning has nose-dived all over (as the quality of teachers declines), and most parents who think their children are getting any kind of public education would be shocked at how little their children are learning.
Much of the urban perception that learning is “acting white” has spread out to the suburbs, where white children try to prove how “street” they are; teachers across the board are cheating like this to avoid the No Child Left Behind ramifications of failure. Good teachers complain that because they don’t change answers, their classes fare the worst on standardized tests, and this reflects on them. People should also consider this when merit pay is discussed for teachers; I agree with the concept, but there is tremendous incentive for teachers to engage in even more of this dishonesty.
God don’t teach the kids cheat on the test. That’s the answer huh? We had SAT tests in the 1950’s and 1960’s. I don’t remember any teacher cheating to better the score. They actually wanted to see where the students needed improvement!
This is the real problem. It is a cultural one, and it is now very, very deep. Everyone knows education is important, and everyone sees it as essential for the kids to get a good education, which gives the left the lever they need. Setting up "targets" for improvements, with penalties for not achieving, sounds really good at first glance, but slowly and surely it sets up an appalling mindset. To avoid criticism, educators redirect their priorities from teaching kids actual useful things they might need to know, and towards teaching them how to pass exams. And of course they cheat - not neccesarily as badly as in this article, but by telling kids answers, giving them assistance so blatant that they never have a chance to understand - I've heard of schools where teachers virtually write the essays for their pupils.
The really pernicious thing is that once one batch of teachers (or administrators - they are probably even more culpable) are doing this kind of thing, others have little choice but to follow suit. Think on it. If other teachers are getting their pupils through the courses by making it easy, then their results are better than yours. You come over as being a "bad" teacher. And as your chance of promotion and even re-employment is based on how well your pupils do, then obviously if you want to keep up you have to "cheat" too. "No child left behind" and similar programs paradoxically encourage lower standards.
The honest truth that leftists leave out is that achievement at school is not solely determined by the educators. You can have the finest teachers and best teacher pupil ratios going. You can offer every opportunity to your pupils, but in the end they have to play their part too. If they insist on slobbing around and jerking off then they will fail, and as far as I'm concerned if they do do that they should fail.