Posted on 04/02/2015 12:36:12 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
In one of the biggest cheating scandals of its kind in the U.S., 11 former Atlanta public school educators were convicted Wednesday of racketeering for their role in a scheme to inflate students' scores on standardized exams.
The defendants - including teachers, a principal and other administrators - were accused of falsifying test results to collect bonuses or keep their jobs in the 50,000-student Atlanta school system.
The educators fed answers to students or erased and changed the answers on tests after they were turned in to secure promotions or up to $5,000 each in bonuses, the court was told.
However the person accused of benefiting the most from the conspiracy, Superintendent Beverly Hall - who is thought to have received up to $500,000 in bonus payouts - died of breast cancer over the course of the trial.
A 12th defendant, a teacher, was acquitted of all charges by the jury this week.
The 11 will all be sentenced on April 8 and could face up to 20 years in prison for the racketeering charges.
They were all found guilty under the the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, which is typically reserved for major mobsters and organized crime bosses.
'This is a huge story and absolutely the biggest development in American education law since forever,' said University of Georgia law professor Ron Carlson.
'It has to send a message to educators here and broadly across the nation. Playing with student test scores is very, very dangerous business.'
The case stems from an investigation carried out in 2011, which uncovered evidence that the educators gave answers to students or changed answers on tests after they were turned in.
Evidence of cheating was found in 44 schools, with nearly 180 educators involved, and investigators found teachers who tried to report it faced retaliation...
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
“... came to light after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in 2008 that some test scores were statistically improbable.”
Basically, what they did was admit that with standards and expectations raised...they couldn’t reach the goals without cheating. And there’s some weight to the consequences involved.
If you have forty-odd kids and you’ve gone through seven years of schooling....with marginal efforts and limited teachers in the classroom, then you whip up some enthusiasm for fixing the problem...it’d all be fine if you were starting with first-grade kids. But the kids in the funnel were already a year...maybe even three years behind. The teachers with these marginally inclined kids were stuck with performers who could not reach the goal intended...without cheating.
While I don’t condone cheating...this ‘no-child-left-behind’ deal was a false premise and triggered thousands of teachers to alter the teaching plan in order to just get marginal kids to pass the test phase.
even with NCLB if they don’t pass then they don’t pass. One cannot mandate that all children will pass or there would be no crime right? You make an excellent point that there should have beem a realistic starting point but we all know that would be politically and even socially unacceptable. There’s no way they could have said everyone from 3rd grade on s screwed or something to that effect.
People don’t always succeed. It’s part of being human.
This being Atanta I am sort of impressed the Feds used Rico laws to prosecute them....
Since the vast majority of the people involved are most likely minorities...
No one has claimed racism yet ?
Well, as the Left never let's a crisis go to waste, I'm sure they will pin this on a lack of funding, racism and white flight.
I place the blame on the bigotry of low expectations by liberals of all colors.
Think about it.
Can you name one group or person that YOU depend on that might cheat and have it be ‘understandable?
Maybe the guy who installs your washing machine - and water damage ruins your floors... The dryer repairman who causes your house to burn down? The medical doctor that gives the wrong diagnosis and causes your sister to die? Tell me who else ‘cheats’ in a sympathetic way?
If the teachers had been doing their job in the first place, properly evaluating their students, helping those who were behind catch up, and teaching them the material they should have been teaching them, there would have been no shortcomings.
As for the teachers cheating, it's just another step down the same road: they didn't do their job and expected to get bonuses for failure. They didn't even have the sand to stand up and say "We have a problem here."--as they all should have, but instead turned on those teachers who did.
I have seen similar failures in local schools where students having difficulty with material are shoved in a study hall with no help and told to do a stack of papers.
If they could have, they would not ask for help. Then those same students are encouraged to drop out of school, (improving the overall test scores for the school).
I wonder if there is a 'profit motive' in it for the local teachers as well.
A government union using mob tactics to silence whistleblowers? I don’t believe it for a second.
So, let’s use the washing machine scenario. Let’s say that the washer was sold to you brand-new and sixty days after the arrival...issues start up, and the company determines that the washer is manufactured wrongly. The company offers a replacement washer. You accept.
Six months later, you have new problems and discover that the replacement washer is screwed up. The company offers another replacement washer. You accept. Six months later, you have new problems.
The true issue here is that the manufacturing side and the engineered design has deep flaws. They’d have to throw out the entire design and fire/replace most of their manufacturing folks...to fix the problem. The odds of this happening? With ‘no-washer-left-behind’ in place....zero chance. So you get a company that continues to manufacture marginal washers and a customer base which figure out the scheme but the price on the marginal washer is so attractive...that people accept the situation as reasonable.
But here's the thing - that's not happening. Companies that continue to produce substandard products go out of business. Maybe a bad model here or there - but recalls happen... AND no Amercan company puts out the same washer for 30 years that has problems. It doesn't happen.
Your 'washer' example might be true in a Communist country where companies are 'protected' by law. In a free market economy a company that puts out crap will go bankrupt... so your example doesn't hold.
Teachers who can't teach should be fired.
A man with a PhD from MIT will teach high school if it pays enough... and maybe that's the quality we need. If 'teachers' lose their union protection then we can start getting people in the schools smart enough to do the job.
If a company can't produce a washing machine they go out of business... if a school system can teach they should be replaced.
The vast amount of people doing the prosecuting and the jury were also minorities.
Kids come out of high school totally inept politically and disinterested in the way our nation operates ... and they have voting power.
I need to do more research, but it seems most everyday people (includuing parents) are locked out of what really happens in a gummint skool classroom, so it is difficult to be activist in making corrections
Our best bet, at the moment, seems to be good and aware kids of activist minded parents, getting information they can respond to
Isn’t Marxism wonderful?
Pray America is waking
The Bill Gates Foundation was funneling some of this bonus money into Atlanta schools. Typical liberal do goodism. Waste of money and bad results. I am hoping whistleblowers come forward in other school systems to expose the liberal fraud and the dishonesty of the public school programs. Time will tell.
Looks like the facts speak for themselves. More spending = better grades. What suprises me is that these teachers could actually do any better than the students. Truth be told the teachers probably didn’t change any answers rather just took a guess at the answers the students didn’t complete.
It helps that the teachers had the test answer master sheets so no guessing needed. They actually arranged test change parties where they met in groups to erase wrong answers etc. You can imagine them sitting around and yucking it up about some dummy who was about to ace a test. Now they can sit in prison for probably 3 to 5 years (of a potential 20) remembering those parties. I heard the judge on live radio telling them how he had to sit there for almost seven months listening to their denials and lack of any remorse. They thought they would walk out of court laughing it up.
“No one has claimed racism yet ?”
I haven’t seen anything on the jury yet, but since the trial was in Atlanta, I would assume that the jury was mostly black. The judge, however, is white and I understand that “community activists” are already on him like white on rice to let them off with a lighter sentence—so I imagine that racism card will be pulled out any minute. I also have to assume that there must be a ton of suits against the APS that have been put on hold until the verdicts were reached since many of the kids futures must have been damaged by these unscrupulous “educators” who thought nothing of hurting the kids.
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