Posted on 01/26/2002 9:48:59 PM PST by KC Burke
WYANDOTTE COUNTY, KS -- Cheating, power struggles and a teacher who says she just can't do her job.
A classroom project triggered a battle in the Piper School District in Wyandotte County over right and wrong that won't soon be forgotten.
The teacher says some 30 students plagiarized off the Internet. The teacher was going to flunk them, but parents complained to the school board and everything changed.
The teacher says the students learned a dangerous lesson, and she learned she simply couldn't teach them anymore.
It was the end of the fall semester at Piper High School, 4400 North 107th St. A final project to collect and describe leaves for 10th grade biology.
Teacher Christine Pelton noticed a disturbing trend.
"They were giving the same report, word-for-word," Pelton says.
Pelton went to the Web and matched up entire paragraphs from some papers, then told the students they'd plagiarized.
"The kids claim they didn't know how to cite and what plagiarism was, and we covered it in class," Pelton says.
She referred them to the district handbook they received at the beginning of the year and the policy inside. She referred them to the same policy on the syllabus, which the kids and their parents had signed.
Then, based on that policy, she gave 30 students, about a quarter of the class, a zero on the project.
The project was worth 50 percent of the semester grade. That's how the teacher before her had done it; that's how she did it. Flunking the project meant flunking the course, so parents complained to the teacher and then the school board.
The board, in turn, revised its own plagiarism policy and applied it to Pelton's class. Then the board revised Pelton's policy about the weight of the grade, from 50 percent to 30.
Some of Pelton's former students see the whole flap as a sign that the wrong people are running the school.
"It's not the parents' decision if they should be failed or not. They're not the ones in the classroom," says Lance Finley, a junior.
Pelton says the decision undermined her authority, and made it practically impossible to keep teaching at the school.
"When they found out, they started cheering, 'We won, we won. We don't have to listen to you any longer,' that, 'teachers need to realize that we run the school, not you,'" Pelton says.
That's why she resigned a month ago.
The school superintendent confirmed all of the facts that Pelton presented to KCTV5, but did not express an opinion on the board's decision, saying, quote, "I don't want to pick at that scab again."
The school board president declined any comment, and the rest of the board did not return KCTV5's phone calls.
When a 12-year-old cheats on a test, it's understandable because they are still kids but when the ADMINISTRATORS cheat, what a horrible example they are setting for those kids.
I sarcastically told the local radio station that the schools were just following Bill Clinton's example and that they'd learned well that lying about what you accomplish takes far less effort than actually accomplishing anything.
And if 30 kids flunked and they represent 1/3rd of the class, doesn't that mean the classroom had 120 students?? Isn't that a rather large herd to tame? No wonder the kids thought they could pull one over - some of them probably haven't even been introduced to the teacher in a room that big.
The barbarians have stormed the gates and are wrecking havoc.
More big news: the union, and the administrators, do not support teachers in these matters. Period. They are there to please the parents.
My, that is big news. From raising two kids in the public school system, I always got the impression that the administrators were there to please the unions, and the unions were there to please the NEA. Teachers just paid their dues and read the script, powerless to do much about anything meaningful.
I would have dreamed of doing this myself. In my senior year, a couple of popular and well behaved students in my class got drunk on the senior trip to Washington, DC. When a teacher told them they were grounded, they sassed her.
The result was the next class lost their senior trip, the two students were on probation for the remainder of their high school career, and an assembly of the entire school was held at which the two students had to apologize in front of the dead silent student body, and especially to explain to the juniors why their misbehavior had cost them their highly anticipated trip.
Consider: School vouchers are provided to parents. The amount is usually 50%, or less, than the tax money spent on each student. This reform is a great money saving idea. The major payoff is breaking the repressive lock the NEA, through the government, has on the educational system.
Godspeed, The Dilg
If I didn't know better I would think that my parents were reading and posting on FreeRepublic. lol!
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