Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal Points Finger to Superintendent

 

At first glance, this woman looks harmless. Something like a really cool grandmother, or perhaps a teacher. However, Dr. Beverly Hall, former Superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools is in waist deep shit with the release of the Governor's Office for Student Achievement investigation regarding cheating on Criterion Reform Competency standardized tests in 2009.

The office used a simple assessment. They scanned all the competency tests to view the number of erasures on answers that went from wrong to right. They found out that several public school systems, including the state's largest, Atlanta Public Schools, as having a high number of erasures. These erasures imply that answers were removed and the correct answer replaced. By whom is the million dollar question, but also suggest that adults rather than students having an epiphany of testing intelligence to go back and fix numerous wrong answers.

Two years ago, when the governor's office requested information regarding these large numbers of wrong-to-right erasures from Hall Administration, Dr. Hall, the 2009 awardee of "Superintendent of the Year" rebuffed requests, sending even more alarms during the inquisition.

But get this, there are whistle blowers in this investigation, principals and teachers who say that the Hall Administration created a climate of fear and retribution if one did not comply with the erasures. According to the investigation, 58 principals and 444 teachers who instruct in 1 - 8 schools are under fire for cheating. Add to that over 80 people have come forward with information detailing the cheating climate at APS.

Dr. Hall who announced her retirement months before this investigation was released has now come out to say that she did not know about the cheating. According to the Jamaican born educator who got her fame working in New York and New Jersey public schools, the whistle blowers were blowing hot air. In a written statement she says, “Apparently, not one of the 82 persons who allegedly ‘confessed’ to  cheating told the investigators that Dr. Hall at any time instructed,  encouraged or condoned cheating.”

Okay, I am simple, but if 82 people have said that they were coerced and over 500 people have been fingered for this scandal, Dr. Hall is either a dumb ass, or a horrible liar. A woman who had the reputation for running a school district with "an iron fist" now pleads that she was ignorant to these egregious acts of which were spread throughout her district.

Interestingly, it was the large jump in achievement on standardized tests that was a major accomplishment that got Dr. Hall her fame, accolades, and $400,298 yearly salary.

Furthermore, she has literally vanished from Atlanta and has left others to take the heat.

This scandal has created a round of discussions, one of which is around the "No Child Left Behind" bill during the Bush regime that totally disrupted public schools and dis-empowered teachers and parents in providing wholesome education. The implementation of schools being given funding based on standardized achievements placed pressure on schools to concentrate on passing tests instead of getting real education. As well, parents have meet a plethora of roadblocks in finding the right schools for their child if they did not perform well on tests.

This draws another fact in standardized tests. As a former teacher, it is well known that in the history of teaching there has cheating going on for a very long time. From elementary tests to SATs, cases upon cases have discovered that many have fallen under the pressure of tests that really don't prove much at the end of the day. George W. Bush can agree to that!

Nevertheless, Dr. Hall, you get an F for major fuck up! You have failed communities and the public education system grossly.

Firing Teachers at Underperforming Schools is Unproductive Reform

Teachers are the life blood of this country. So when I heard that the U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan chose to fire a host of teachers in the Chicago schools, in the middle of a recession, I shook my head.

Obama and Duncan are about to see how it feels to get politically bitch-slapped by the most underappreciated union in the country, the teachers. And I hope my mother is leading the way.

They are using one elementary school in Chicago as the model. You would think that people who are so smart could not be as stupid and simple minded as Duncan and Bami, but...my expectations are a little too high in this case; especially since people like Obama have always sent their children to private school and Duncan's children go to an "elite" public institution that Pookie could not get into.

You see Duncan, one moderate "success" story with your program will not be the answer to every school. Take for example the illiteracy, drop out rate and poor performance at schools on Native American reservations. Is it bad teachers? Or is it them still dealing the residuals of a very bad government.

The remedy of firing all teachers is supposed to be the across the board solution, but it is not, it is actually spitting one the profession once again and removing teachers in the group who are have made a difference.

Duncan's tactic is similar to cancer treatment. Kill all cells good and bad in hopes that you can go in to remission.

Why are the teachers to blame when schools fail? That boggles my mind from the Bush era's "No Child Left Behind" to this new initiative "Rising to the Top" a push to make educational levels a national standard.

First the onus was on the bad parents, now it is bad teachers. What about a failed and flawed school system that has ALWAYS been in place due to the preferential treatment of the priveleged and was never fixed. Oh yeah, and what about all the dumb people who have been my supervisor, but got the jobs due to flesh privelege.

Even though the legal system threw out a couple of desegregation laws that have been reversed at least socially today, the evidence of a backwards America exists in the backwards school system.

Of course there are bad teachers.

I will not argue that there are some teachers who are so horrible they need to be placed on something akin to a sexual predatory's list.

Nonetheless, the profession of teaching is seen and treated as an inferior career.

Need I remind U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that teaching has become the depository for everyone who needed a job.

As well, the "integration" of schools disrupted the academic climates of many schools that suffer racial tensions, disappropriation of honors classes to certain races, and the social/economic downfall of communities whose taxes do not go to their community educational instituions.

Maybe if the standards of teaching were elevated before one hits the classroom and real teachers were compensated, promoted and given more say in the run of the school as opposed to an administrator who probably has not been in classroom.

Maybe if the mandate to have teachers bused into communities they fear and will never live teach, while those who have stayed and are the glue that hold some of these raggedy schools together without notice, the climate would change.

Or just maybe if the running of poor school were linked the building of prisons, or economic injustice in working class and communities of color, inequital distribution of taxes, and seen as a bigger issue than just student performance, "bad parenting", or crappy teaching, than everyone who has really profitted off of schools, but failed would be held accountable and fired.

However...

Bureaucrats have to point to somebody so they can look good. But there is an African proverb that says, "Point one finger and three are pointing back at you."