Posted on 07/08/2011 6:05:38 AM PDT by Libloather
Atlanta announces anti-cheating plan
published Friday, July 8th, 2011
by Associated Press
ATLANTA — As the Atlanta school district grapples with a cheating scandal that has drawn national attention, the interim school superintendent said Thursday that the district will automatically investigate suspicious test scores and require ethics training for all employees.
The changes announced by interim Superintendent Erroll Davis Jr. come two days after state investigators said 178 educators had cheated on standardized tests used to meet federal benchmarks dating back to 2001. Davis reiterated Thursday that none of those educators will work in an Atlanta classroom again.
The educators face possible criminal charges and could lose their teaching licenses for changing answers on students’ tests and helping students answer questions. Some may face charges of lying to investigators or tampering with state documents.
“This is just a start,” said Davis, who has been on the job less than a week.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesfreepress.com ...
Somewhere, somehow this has to be tied to the HOPE scholarship.
Yeah, ethics training is a joke. CHEATING AND LYING ARE WRONG. How much more training does a body need.
That’s not cheating - it’s Social Justice.
/s
The sad thing is these parents will be putting their kids back into a failed system in the fall instead of letting the powers that be know that they will take care of their childrens’ education from now on. That’s what these so-called educators are banking on. The parents don’t have the initiative to ask their pastors to make classroom space available in their churches to educate these children. The school relies on truancy laws and a “free” babysitting service to coerce parents into sending their kids to the public schools. It doesn’t matter to school personnel if the kids learn or not. They’re a captive audience whose sole purpose is to provide a salary to these creeps.
It won’t change until the parents threaten to pull their kids out.
Atlanta BoE is symptomatic.
I want to hear the SRM report this and include pictures of the perps on every newscast for the weeks until school starts again. I know, not going to happen since they are holder's people.
Wait, I think I have the perfect anti-cheating plan: TEACH!!!
I am willing to bet that you can find widespread cheating of this kind in many large school districts in this country. And we can all thank Mr. George W. Bush and his silly "No Child Left Behind" nonsense for all this sh!t. Every Federal dollar that is tied to student performance is a major incentive for school districts to make fraudulent representations about the performance of their students.
The one thing that might vary is the manner in which this cheating is carried out.
I’m shocked that the interim superintendent is one of Holder’s people. I believe that is the number one qualification of any public school superintendent nowadays. I remember a situation in Greensboro, NC a few years back where one of Holder’s dudes with no experience running a school system (he was a lawyer, I believe, who worked in administration in the Charlotte school system) was picked over a highly qualified, current school system superintendent in a smaller area of the state. She wasn’t qualified because she wasn’t one of Holder’s people, I suppose.
I’m sure that Jesse and Al are in the concourse at Hartsfield just waiting for the limo ride to the hastily assembled educational forum on “Honesty and Ethics in Todays Urban School Systems”
Anyone who knows how programs like NCLB work could have seen this coming from a mile away. That's why I have all the confidence in the world that this sort of scandal is widespread.
I'll even predict the next step in the game, too. In order to address potential problems with cheating among teachers and administrators, additional Federal oversight of the NCLB funding process will be needed. So there will be thousands of additional bureacrats added to the U.S. Department of Education in the coming years -- specifically to oversee school districts and monitor testing. Eventually, every classroom will have a minimum of two staffers: a teacher and a Federal monitor.
If you think that sounds ridiculous, I'll just point out one similar item in the book/movie, "The Hunt for Red October." If you're familiar with either of them, just ask yourself why a "political officer" would be needed on a combat vessel.
We have in our midst an entire culture steeped in dishonesty and immorality. An ethics workshop ain't gonna fix it. Atlanta should purge its schools.
“Mark my words, folks — this Atlanta case is just the tip of the iceberg.”
You bet! But it’s not limited to large or even urban school districts. My children attended Fairfax County (VA) public schools, purportedly the No. 1 public school system in the country, and one of their class valedictorians (4.2 gpa) required remedial reading in her first semester at UVA! (And UVA is no academic bulward.) The assessments of high schools in northern Virginia, in particular, were based on preposterous criteria—family income, residence lot-size and whether owned or rented, number of children in family, parents’ education and employment data, student grade-point averages, SAT scores, Advanced Placement offerings (in approximately that sequence, along with at least ten other stats). And don’t let the student grade-point or SAT average statistics fool you: one of my daughters learned after she began teaching middle school that an F-grade in any subject for any student was simply beyond the pale. “Can’t you give the child a make-up test or an opportunity for extra credit?” SATs, on the other hand, during my older children’s HS years were either dumbed down or (as they were later described) “recentered” FOUR TIMES! Sure, some students will shine regardless of the inferiority of the education they’re getting, but most won’t graduate with even rudimentary skills. Worse still, not even an elected school board hell-bent on correcting the situation has the time to influence any part of the system, a system wholly owned by teachers’ unions.
No Child was/is far from perfect, but the defense used by Atlanta’s and so many other teachers—too much pressure—is utterly criminal. County, state, and even national testing seems to be the only answer; but the composition, administration, and evaluation of such testing ought to be handled exclusively by private or nonschool-related entities.
Which will never happen. Better simply to home-school.
I saw hope. In the eighties and nineties a lot of well-educated and motivated black NYers (and others from the NE) saw Atlanta as a way to get back to southern roots and create a successful ‘black capital’. For a while it looked like it might work. I didn’t follow it though so I don’t know exactly what went wrong.
“I didn’t follow it though so I don’t know exactly what went wrong.”
Systemic corruption.
The attitude from the top down to the bottom seemes to be, “This is our turn and we’re going to milk it for all it’s worth!”
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