Atlanta public school cheating controversy

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Atlanta public school cheating controversy

Mandy Thompson: Dec 26, 2014; by zen death robot

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/21/wrong-answer

The New Yorker had a wonderful article about the scandal itself. Yesterday, many of the teachers were given draconian prison sentences over the scandal. http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/14/us/georgia-atlanta-public-schools-cheating-scandal-verdicts/ 7 years in some cases. There have been a number of commentators cheering, having a hang 'em high attitude, including the judge. But is this truly fair? There is the larger problem of people being effectively punished for asserting their right to a fair trial: accepting a plea for a reasonable sentence but admitting guilt or getting an insane punishment if you lose. But still, if you look at the details, the real villain here was a culture of high stakes testing that created a no win situation for these people dedicated to teaching students. The consequences of failing to make targets, which didn't account for the realities on the ground for disadvantaged children and the schools they went to:the broken families, the history of abuse, the instability in the kid's lives, was mass firings and closing the school down. These schools may have been a pillar of the community in violent neighborhood, that was the only safe place for these kids to go.

quote:

One afternoon in the spring of 2006, Damany Lewis, a math teacher at Parks Middle School, in Atlanta, unlocked the room where standardized tests were kept. It was the week before his students took the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, which determined whether schools in Georgia had met federal standards of achievement. The tests were wrapped in cellophane and stacked in cardboard boxes. Lewis, a slim twenty-nine-year-old with dreadlocks, contemplated opening the test with scissors, but he thought his cut marks would be too obvious. Instead, he left the school, walked to the corner store, and bought a razor blade. When he returned, he slit open the cellophane and gently pulled a test book from its wrapping. Then he used a lighter to warm the razor, which he wedged under the adhesive sealing the booklet, and peeled back the tab.

He photocopied the math, reading, and language-arts sections�the subjects that would determine, under the No Child Left Behind guidelines, whether Parks would be classified as a �school in need of improvement� for the sixth year in a row. Unless fifty-eight per cent of students passed the math portion of the test and sixty-seven per cent passed in language arts, the state could shut down the school. Lewis put on gloves, to prevent oil from his hands from leaving a residue on the plastic, and then used his lighter to melt the edges of the cellophane together, so that it appeared as if the package had never been opened. He gave the reading and language-arts sections to two teachers he trusted and took the math section home.

Flipping through its pages, he felt proud of how much material he had covered that year. �Without even reading the question, I could tell you just by the shape of the graph, �Oh, my kids know that,� � he told me. He put the test in his fireplace once he�d confirmed that he had taught the necessary concepts. But he worried that his students would struggle with questions that were delivered in paragraph form. Some of his seventh-grade students were still reading by sounding out the letters. It seemed unfair that the concepts were �buried in words.� Lewis felt that he had pushed them to work harder than they ever had in their lives. �I�m not going to let the state slap them in the face and say they�re failures,� he told me. �I�m going to do everything I can to prevent the why-try spirit.�

The principal of Parks, Christopher Waller, knew that he had seen the questions before the test. Waller told me that Lewis was a �star teacher,� a �very hard worker, who will go the extra mile.� When the math portion of the test had been completed, Lewis said that Waller asked him how his students had done. Since Lewis had looked at the questions, it no longer seemed like a big deal to review the answers. Lewis returned to the testing office and opened up the answer sheets of a few students in his class who got average grades. He looked for a hard question and, when he saw that they�d solved it, he moved on, assuming that they had done fine. Then he said that he �piddled� in the room, wasting time. When he felt that he had been in there long enough, he told Waller that it looked as if his students had done O.K. But Waller told him to check the answers of students who weren�t in his class. This time, when he looked, Lewis saw that some of the smartest students at Parks had the wrong answers.

At the end of the testing week, Lewis went back to the testing office with Crystal Draper, a language-arts teacher. For about an hour, they erased wrong answers and bubbled in the right ones. They exchanged no words. Lewis couldn�t even look at her. �I couldn�t believe what we�d been reduced to,� he said. He tried to stay focussed on the mechanics of the work: he took care to change, at most, one or two answers for every ten questions. �I had a minor in statistics, and it�s not that hard to figure out windows of probability,� he told me. Many students were on the cusp of passing, and he gave them a little nudge, so that they would pass by one or two points.

A month later, when the scores came back, Waller told the students to gather in the hallway outside the cafeteria, where there was a spread of ice cream, pizza, and hot wings. A teacher announced, �You did it! You finally made it!� For the first time since the passage of No Child Left Behind, Parks had met its annual goals: the percentage of eighth graders who passed rose thirty-one points in reading and sixty-two points in math. �Everyone was jumping up and down,� Neekisia Jackson, a student, said. �It was like our World Series, our Olympics.� She went on, �We had heard what everyone was saying: Y�all aren�t good enough. Now we could finally go to school with our heads held high.�

Parks Middle School is three miles south of downtown Atlanta, in Pittsburgh, a neighborhood bordered by a run-down trucking lot and railway tracks fallen into disuse. Founded after the Civil War, Pittsburgh was a black working-class area until the nineteen-sixties and seventies, when residents began leaving for the suburbs. Half the homes in the neighborhood are now vacant. Lewis�s students called the area Little Vietnam and Jack City, because of all the armed robberies. Once, when Lewis stopped at a convenience store to tell his students to go home and do their homework, a prostitute approached him. �I�m, like, �Whoa, whoa, I�m a teacher!� � he said. �And she�s, like, �I don�t care. Teachers get down.� �

Lewis grew up in a violent neighborhood in East Oakland, California, in a house built by Habitat for Humanity. His father was a crack addict, and his mother supported four children by working as a bank teller; she later opened a safe house for ex-prostitutes. �She�s a real underdog-lover,� Lewis told me. On the weekends, she took Lewis to picnics hosted by the Black Panther Party. She worked so much that the neighbors helped raise Lewis: they often told him to wash his face or tuck in his shirt or put Vaseline on his chapped lips. His football coach became a father figure and encouraged Lewis to go to college in Atlanta so that he could have a �historical black experience.�

Lewis received a scholarship to attend Clark Atlanta University, which is less than three miles from Parks. He was homeless for several months and got arrested for possessing marijuana, but he still earned good grades. He was a �lightweight nerd,� as he put it. When he graduated with degrees in math and philosophy, his mother urged him to try teaching, since he�d always had a talent for simplifying complex ideas. In 2000, he started working at Parks and was immediately moved by his students� despair. �Being born in the seventies, coming out of the civil-rights movement, amidst the Black Panther meetings in Oakland, I didn�t have limitations,� he told me. �I was raised in the generation that lost the shame of being black.�

His students, who came to school with bad breath and parkas that smelled of urine, seemed to lack the conviction that they would ever leave the neighborhood. Parks was run by an older woman who was not inclined to innovate. Homework was a joke. There was litter in the hallways, and students urinated in trash cans. A veteran teacher told Lewis that only twenty per cent of his students would grasp what he was teaching, so he should go over each lesson five times. �Please�I�m a better teacher than that,� he remembered thinking. �She was just making excuses for why she spiralled in circles.�

Atlanta�s school superintendent, Beverly Hall, who was hired in 1999, quickly became aware of the problems at Parks. A neighborhood minister repeatedly called to complain about drug dealing in front of the school. Hall, who was born in Jamaica, had spent her career in underperforming urban districts: she began as a teacher in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in the seventies, and moved on to become a superintendent in Newark. At one of her first meetings in Atlanta, she said, someone �got up and was literally screaming, �Just tell us what to do. We�ve got to do something about education in Atlanta.� � Three-quarters of the students in the district were living near or below the poverty line�ninety per cent were black or Latino�and fewer than forty per cent graduated from high school.

Hall belonged to a movement of reformers who believed that the values of the marketplace could resuscitate public education. She approached the job like a business executive: she courted philanthropists, set accountability measures, and created performance objectives that were more rigorous than those required by No Child Left Behind, which became law in 2002. When a school met its targets, all employees, including bus drivers and cafeteria staff, received up to two thousand dollars. She linked teacher evaluations to test scores and warned principals that they�d be fired if they didn�t meet targets within three years. Eventually, ninety per cent were replaced. She repeated the mantra �No exceptions and no excuses.�

In 2001, she hired a new principal for Parks, a former college-football player named Michael Sims, whom Lewis described as the �father I never had.� Sims focussed nearly as much on building a sense of community as he did on academics: he renovated the school, hired guidance counsellors, and replaced the �P� that had fallen off the sign at Parks�s entryway. He told students that they were representing their school even when they were off campus. If they got into a fight over the weekend, they would be suspended on Monday. The school provided computer classes to parents, who had been so removed from their children�s academic lives that it was a struggle to get them to sign progress reports. �We had to trick the parents and give away this, that, and the third in order to get them into the building,� Lewis said. �Some of them looked like they were on drugs�not fun drugs but ruin-your-life drugs.�

Parks started to feel like a place where both teachers and students, nearly all of them black, could expose their vulnerabilities. �All our little problems that we grew up hiding from the rest of the world�it became our line of communication,� Lewis said. He told students to dump their laundry into the back of his pickup truck, so that he could wash it for them, and encouraged them to sleep at his house when their mothers were absent or high. (Few had fathers in their lives.) He became the football coach, and if practice ran late he dropped students off at their homes. Several ended up calling him Dad. He told them, �I don�t know how you feel about me, but I, at least, feel like I made it. If you want to know if you can make it, look at me.� He married a language-arts teacher at Parks, who was similarly devoted to the students. �She was a great model of what an adult woman is supposed to act like, talk like,� Lewis said.

With the help of a college-prep program called Project Grad, which Beverly Hall implemented after securing millions of dollars from donors, Parks set up after-school programs and hired tutors. A 2004 documentary called �Expect the Best� explained that Parks, which had previously functioned like �day care,� had become a �model of what a good school can and should be.� The video shows Lewis on his porch, playing chess with a student who had moved in with him. The narrator of the video explains that the student, Antonio, was living with his math teacher �because his mother is in no shape to support or care for him. This arrangement, though temporary and unusual, has done a lot to stabilize Antonio�s life.�

The school steadily improved, but students� test scores were never high enough for Parks to make �adequate yearly progress,� a measurement defined by No Child Left Behind, a nearly utopian statute that required all public-school students to become proficient in math and reading by 2014, as judged by their test scores. The reform model, which drew on an accountability system used in Texas in the nineties, ignored less quantifiable signs of intellectual development. Schools that didn�t progress at an appropriate pace were eligible for federally funded support. They also received a series of escalating sanctions, including state monitoring, a revised curriculum, replacement of staff, and restructuring or closure of the school. LaShawn Hoffman, the head of the Pittsburgh Community Improvement Association, told me that when Parks opened, in 1966, it was a source of pride for the community, the neighborhood�s �jewel.� Now he worried about the burden of another large abandoned building in the neighborhood.

en Lewis showed up for the new school year in 2004, Parks�s principal was absent. Lewis knew that Sims would never miss the first day of school and assumed that he must have been in some sort of accident. Then a district administrator called a meeting and explained that Sims would not be returning; he had resigned after being accused of sexual misconduct in a previous job.

After a few months, Christopher Waller, a Methodist pastor who had worked in public schools for nine years, became the new leader of Parks. Waller was burly and freckled, and, at thirty-one, he was the youngest principal in the district. After a week of introductory meetings, he saw that the district prioritized testing results more than any other place he�d ever worked did. �All decisions have to be made by data�you have to be baptized in it,� he told me. �I lived it, slept it, ate it.�

He held a meeting with the faculty and explained that teachers needed to use data to drive every aspect of instruction. Lewis raised his hand and said, �I need to be excused from this meeting.� He left the room. Another administrator followed him into the hallway and tried to appease him, but he told her, �You all come in here trying to change every goddam thing we�ve been doing for years. We�ve been making step-by-step progress, and it�s working.�
....................
Waller quickly learned that principals in the district insured loyalty by working with teachers whom they had personally selected. At one of his first meetings with Beverly Hall, Waller said that he was willing to work with the school�s current teachers. Hall laughed and told him, �You will need your own team.� Waller began encouraging veteran teachers to retire early. Lewis soon found himself one of the most senior teachers at Parks. He worried that the new faculty were being deprived of the �ethical guidance that comes from listening to older teachers.�

Under Hall, four sub-superintendents oversaw different regions within the district, making sure that schools advanced toward their targets. After Waller had been at the school for a year, he received a stern memo, titled �Mid-year Review,� from Michael Pitts, the sub-superintendent who was responsible for Parks. [/b]�Please understand that no excuse can or will be accepted for any results that are less than 70% of school-based target acquisition,�[/b] Pitts wrote.

Waller told Pitts that the targets�set by the district�s Department of Research, Planning, and Accountability�were unrealistic. It took a quarter of the year just to gain students� trust. Two students, he said, were raped in the neighborhood that year. Others lived alone, with neither parent at home, or were on the verge of being placed in juvenile detention. When a student was arrested for stealing cars, Waller went to court and asked the judge not to send him to jail. Waller told me, �The administration wanted to move kids out of poverty�I do believe that. But test scores could not be the only means.� When Waller expressed his concerns, Pitts reiterated that Hall accepted no excuses, and told him, �The way principals keep their jobs in Atlanta is they make targets.�

Waller struggled to understand his students� success in elementary school. They had passed the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test in fifth grade, and yet when they arrived at Parks they were reading at a first-grade level. �The students and the data aren�t matching,� he told Pitts. �They�ve got to be cheating at the elementary schools. There�s no way those scores are real.� One day, when he and Pitts were walking through Parks, Waller pointed out a disruptive sixth grader who had excelled on the test the year before, even though his academic skills were dismal. He recalled that Pitts laughed and said, �Sometimes children just test well.� Then Pitts told him, �You need to keep your mouth shut.� He urged Waller to �forge stronger relationships� with the principals at the elementary schools, which Waller interpreted as a message to learn how they�d artificially boosted their scores.

I encourage you all to read the rest of the article. It goes on to talk about how there was a culture from the very top that demanded cheating, where people who complained about the cheating were fired, where obviously bogus results were handwaived and now the teachers are going to jail for trying to keep their jobs and their school open.

Mandy Thompson fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Apr 15, 2015

# ? Apr 15, 2015 21:01

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# ? May 3, 2024 10:40

Bel Shazar: Sep 14, 2012

Thank you for starting this thread!

I think you are incorrectly excusing the actions of the teachers with statements like "the real villain..." and "... just trying to keep their jobs and their school open". I agree that the other groups and structures involved are also to blame and should be held accountable to the same extent as the teachers involved, but that does not absolve these teachers of their crimes.

Had they not acted the way they did, it is likely that people would have been fired and schools would have been closed. Now, people have been fired, sent to jail, and schools will likely be closed. They have made the outcomes worse.

It is a horrible situation created by poorly designed laws trying to throw a band-aid on the byproducts of a diseased society, but outside of the point you made around sentencing used as punishment for demanding a trial, I do believe it is fair.

# ? Apr 15, 2015 22:09

My Imaginary GF: Jul 17, 2005; by R. Guyovich

My question, what was the race of those teachers?

# ? Apr 15, 2015 22:13

ugh its Troika: May 2, 2009; by FactsAreUseless

My Imaginary GF posted:

My question, what was the race of those teachers?

Why does it matter?

# ? Apr 15, 2015 22:17

My Imaginary GF: Jul 17, 2005; by R. Guyovich

-Troika- posted:

Why does it matter?

A southern judge handing down a draconian sentence to black "trouble-makers"? :monocle:

How unusual and unexpected!

# ? Apr 15, 2015 22:19

Zeitgueist: Aug 8, 2003; by Ralp

-Troika- posted:

Why does it matter?

I saw "7 years for cheating" and knew instantly they were black.

Zeitgueist fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Apr 15, 2015

# ? Apr 15, 2015 22:22

Oracle: Oct 9, 2004

Zeitgueist posted:

I saw "7 years for cheating" and new instantly they were black.

Pretty much this, yeah. Especially considering Georgia politicians who've been convicted of corruption have gotten less, which in my mind should be the only capital crime because gently caress you if you undermine the tenets of democracy.

I hope Obama commutes the sentences of all of them on his way out.

# ? Apr 15, 2015 22:34

My Imaginary GF: Jul 17, 2005; by R. Guyovich

Oracle posted:

I hope Obama commutes the sentences of all of them on his way out.

Well, if you're in a position to bundle and attend a private small dinner for his library, give it a shot and see what he thinks.

# ? Apr 15, 2015 22:36

Oracle: Oct 9, 2004

My Imaginary GF posted:

Well, if you're in a position to bundle and attend a private small dinner for his library, give it a shot and see what he thinks.

If I had that kind of money I'd have hired them real lawyers and avoided the whole thing in the first place.

# ? Apr 15, 2015 22:38

Savage For The Winjun: Jun 27, 2008

when i was in high school all the kids in the honors math class got caught cheating, the school quickly hushed it up and tried to pretend nothing happened

it worked too, everyone got away with it and we had out honors society awards the next day!!

# ? Apr 15, 2015 23:22

Sharkie: Feb 4, 2013; by Fluffdaddy

I think one of the key parts of the article was this quote:

quote:

with the passage of the law, teachers were asked to compensate for factors outside their control. He said, �The people who say poverty is no excuse for low performance are now using teacher accountability as an excuse for doing nothing about poverty.�

The administrators who have no long-term investment in the community are determined to ignore everything we know about poverty and education in order to improve their own performance: if you can show that you raised test scores X% in a lovely district, you put that on your resume so you can move on to a better position in a cushy district. And of course, the corporate model of education, where test scores are the bottom line, practically forces this perspective where your quarterly performance is all that matters, and long-term planning and patience are punished. Of course, the students are the ones that bear the brunt of this punishment in terms of losing funding, etc., so you've gotta do what you've gotta do, and this occurs everywhere, there's too much at stake to leave it up to the students.

I was a teacher and yes, we were encouraged to cheat. Specifically, I had special education students who, due to their IEPs, got to have the questions and possible answers read out loud to them, and so we were told to read the answers like "a. 12, b. 7, c. 15"

And if you don't think the wealthier districts are cheating, lol. It's just that high scores there aren't considered anomalous, and they have the social capital to not get it dragged out into the open.

Sharkie fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Apr 15, 2015

# ? Apr 15, 2015 23:23

GenderSelectScreen: Mar 7, 2010; I DON'T KNOW EITHER DON'T ASK ME; College Slice

The real reason those students failed the test in the first place isn't that they're hard, it's that they don't give a gently caress. When I had to do standardized testing I would do all the reading and history questions and then bubble in random answers for math and science. Those tests were so boring and irrelevant to my actual education that I could care less. Maybe if they actually went towards your overall grade students would care but to them it's another worthless test they have to take every year.

# ? Apr 15, 2015 23:46

Mandy Thompson: Dec 26, 2014; by zen death robot

Oracle posted:

Pretty much this, yeah. Especially considering Georgia politicians who've been convicted of corruption have gotten less, which in my mind should be the only capital crime because gently caress you if you undermine the tenets of democracy.

I hope Obama commutes the sentences of all of them on his way out.

Can't pardon for state crimes

# ? Apr 15, 2015 23:49

Mandy Thompson: Dec 26, 2014; by zen death robot

Hitlers Gay Secret posted:

The real reason those students failed the test in the first place isn't that they're hard, it's that they don't give a gently caress. When I had to do standardized testing I would do all the reading and history questions and then bubble in random answers for math and science. Those tests were so boring and irrelevant to my actual education that I could care less. Maybe if they actually went towards your overall grade students would care but to them it's another worthless test they have to take every year.

Actually, they still might not care.

Bel Shazar posted:

It is a horrible situation created by poorly designed laws trying to throw a band-aid on the byproducts of a diseased society, but outside of the point you made around sentencing used as punishment for demanding a trial, I do believe it is fair.

I just don't think the punishments fit the crime, especially considering that they were following orders of the superintendent and the administration.

Mandy Thompson fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Apr 15, 2015

# ? Apr 15, 2015 23:51

Aves Maria!: Jul 26, 2008; Maybe I'll drown

The fact that cheating on standardized tests to save a school is considered a crime worse than assault or rape tells you how stupid and broken this country is.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 00:02

Blue Raider: Sep 2, 2006

Lotka Volterra posted:

The fact that cheating on standardized tests to save a school is considered a crime worse than assault or rape tells you how stupid and broken this country is.

they didnt do it to save the school, the did it for bigtime performance bonuses aka racketeering

i mean read something about it besides the new yorker of all rags
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/01/how-and-why-convicted-atlanta-teachers-cheated-on-standardized-tests/

# ? Apr 16, 2015 00:21

Aves Maria!: Jul 26, 2008; Maybe I'll drown

Blue Raider posted:

they didnt do it to save the school, the did it for bigtime performance bonuses aka racketeering

i mean read something about it besides the new yorker of all rags
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/01/how-and-why-convicted-atlanta-teachers-cheated-on-standardized-tests/

That prosecutorial analysis of what was going on is the dumbest poo poo I've ever read.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 00:28

Fojar38: Sep 2, 2011; Sorry I meant to say I hope that the police use maximum force and kill or maim a bunch of innocent people, thus paving a way for a proletarian uprising and socialist utopia

also here's a stupid take
---------------------------->

7 loving years for cheating on an SAT is a travesty of justice. gently caress the South forever.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 00:30

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Campbell's Law

"The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Testing kids is fine. Rewarding teachers for good work is fine. Tying the two together is just asking for trouble.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 00:33

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

JeffersonClay posted:

Campbell's Law

"The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Testing kids is fine. Rewarding teachers for good work is fine. Tying the two together is just asking for trouble.

Yeah, I think this sentence, like almost all sentences given in the US, is overly harsh. However, I do think a crime was committed and we can't simply let it slide entirely.

Now, the real problem is that there's an incentive to commit this crime in the first place. That, to me, is something that's far worse than the crime itself.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 01:11

Mandy Thompson: Dec 26, 2014; by zen death robot

Blue Raider posted:

they didnt do it to save the school, the did it for bigtime performance bonuses aka racketeering

i mean read something about it besides the new yorker of all rags
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/01/how-and-why-convicted-atlanta-teachers-cheated-on-standardized-tests/

If you made the target, you got a bonus. If you didn't make the target, you got fired. I think it was more about the latter. People don't get in this business to get rich.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 01:12

My Imaginary GF: Jul 17, 2005; by R. Guyovich

PT6A posted:

Yeah, I think this sentence, like almost all sentences given in the US, is overly harsh. However, I do think a crime was committed and we can't simply let it slide entirely.

Now, the real problem is that there's an incentive to commit this crime in the first place. That, to me, is something that's far worse than the crime itself.

Used to be a crime to teach blacks in the south. Funny, similar arguments were made that folks had to respect the law, even if it were a racially motivated and discriminatory law.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 01:15

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Prison and jailtime should be used for people who are a danger to the public. My view is simple: would you feel safe sitting next to this person on a bus? I think we can all agree that these teachers and administrators are not a danger to the public as long as their not in a position of authority at a school. As someone who lives in the Atlanta suburbs I would be fine with these people not serving a day in jail.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 01:35

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

My Imaginary GF posted:

Used to be a crime to teach blacks in the south. Funny, similar arguments were made that folks had to respect the law, even if it were a racially motivated and discriminatory law.

That's a good point, perhaps I am misjudging how hosed up the NCLB system actually is. There are some situations in which I would consider breaking the security of an exam to be both criminal and unethical (although still not worthy of a 7 year sentence), but this is indeed probably a situation where, although a crime was committed, it was not ethically wrong to do so.

Apologies, I probably should've thought that through a little bit further.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 01:55

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Thanks for the social perspective on this, I hadn't thought about anything but "cheating bad."

# ? Apr 16, 2015 02:32

woke wedding drone: Jun 1, 2003; by exmarx; Fun Shoe

This is so stupid. No matter the pressure folks, DON'T FIX FOR YOUR BOSSES. They will leave you twisting in the wind.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 02:48

Ethiser: Dec 31, 2011

I live in Georgia and have been following this story and I do not understand what some of these people were thinking. The judge came out the other day and announced that he would allow the accused to take a plea deal and avoid all jail time, which some of these people did. He said multiple times that if found guilty by the jury he would send them instantly to jail. From the facts of the case it was obvious that the jury would find them guilty. The judge basically seems like a crazy person so you know the sentence would be harsh. I have to believe that those sentenced to jail did't take the plea as some sort of protest.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 02:52

Syndic Thrass: Nov 10, 2011

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Thanks for the social perspective on this, I hadn't thought about anything but "cheating bad."

This was me too! I live in Athens so naturally any poo poo about this hits our local news and I hadn't thought any further than that. Will deffinately keep up with this thread and read up on it though.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 03:12

Stereotype: Apr 24, 2010; College Slice

SedanChair posted:

This is so stupid. No matter the pressure folks, DON'T FIX FOR YOUR BOSSES. They will leave you twisting in the wind.

They were likely fixing it for themselves, their students, and their community. NCLB mandates closing schools that do badly, causing the teachers to lose a school they had possibly invested decades into, students to be forced into more distant failing schools, and removing a centerpiece to the community.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 03:15

woke wedding drone: Jun 1, 2003; by exmarx; Fun Shoe

Stereotype posted:

They were likely fixing it for themselves, their students, and their community. NCLB mandates closing schools that do badly, causing the teachers to lose a school they had possibly invested decades into, students to be forced into more distant failing schools, and removing a centerpiece to the community.

Yeah and teachers committing felonies to get better results is the wet dream of the wreckers who created the law.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 03:22

boner confessor: Apr 25, 2013; by R. Guyovich

Fojar38 posted:

7 loving years for cheating on an SAT is a travesty of justice. gently caress the South forever.

The people who organized the conspiracy got seven years. The people who just changed answers repeatedly got at most a year or a suspended sentence. Did you read the article or just skim this thread?

Nckdictator posted:

Prison and jailtime should be used for people who are a danger to the public. My view is simple: would you feel safe sitting next to this person on a bus? I think we can all agree that these teachers and administrators are not a danger to the public as long as their not in a position of authority at a school. As someone who lives in the Atlanta suburbs I would be fine with these people not serving a day in jail.

Agreed, I think it is Right and Good that none of the CEOs who caused the financial collapse will ever be imprisoned.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 03:43

Mandy Thompson: Dec 26, 2014; by zen death robot

SedanChair posted:

Yeah and teachers committing felonies to get better results is the wet dream of the wreckers who created the law.

Absolutely, you have people in bowties with the ideology of privatizing everything because everything works better for profit (because it is working so well for healthcare) who need to vilify teachers and teachers unions to do it.

I don't think American Public Schools are even broken. The pedagogy is constantly being improved, studied, worked on by the biggest experts. What is broken is the distribution of wealth in this country and stagnant wages and the dismantling of the unionized manufacturing jobs in the urban core. We need a $15 minimum wage, a single payer healthcare system, and an aggressive renewed war on poverty. Why must we be so focused on getting kids to "compete?" We need a living wage. We need socialism. Capitalism is the problem with education, not the solution.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 03:44

My Imaginary GF: Jul 17, 2005; by R. Guyovich

Nckdictator posted:

I get what you're saying but prison isn't the place for nonviolent offenders,no matter if their teachers who changed answers or CEOs who defrauded millions.

With non-violent offenders, it's much easier to rehabilitate without resorting to prison: i.e. banning the CEOs from being officers at public companies in the future

# ? Apr 16, 2015 03:59

Mandy Thompson: Dec 26, 2014; by zen death robot

Mandy Thompson posted:

You got a point though, I think the idea is that there a better and more appropriate ways to punish people. We need to move to restoritive justice. I would even include some violent offenders in that.

With regards to crooked CEOs and big-time scammers and that sort of thing, I think it's important to consider the damage that has been done to people's lives as a result of their actions. These things can and have ruined people's lives -- is that better than getting into a fist fight with someone who pissed you off just because it's not violent? I would say it is worse.

This has little bearing on the case at hand, as it did not meaningfully impact anyone in a negative way, and even in the event that weren't done with the best of intentions (which it likely was) it would probably not warrant a custodial sentence.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 04:10

woke wedding drone: Jun 1, 2003; by exmarx; Fun Shoe

Mandy Thompson posted:

Absolutely, you have people in bowties with the ideology of privatizing everything because everything works better for profit (because it is working so well for healthcare) who need to vilify teachers and teachers unions to do it.

I don't think American Public Schools are even broken. The pedagogy is constantly being improved, studied, worked on by the biggest experts. What is broken is the distribution of wealth in this country and stagnant wages and the dismantling of the unionized manufacturing jobs in the urban core. We need a $15 minimum wage, a single payer healthcare system, and an aggressive renewed war on poverty. Why must we be so focused on getting kids to "compete?" We need a living wage. We need socialism. Capitalism is the problem with education, not the solution.

Correct, failing schools is a lie to begin with. Nobody educates the whole population with anything close to the results public schools achieve.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 04:18

Barlow: Nov 26, 2007; Write, speak, avenge, for ancient sufferings feel

If a system puts teacher in a situation where they can cheat or they will lose their jobs it hardly seems just to send them to prison for doing so. Cheating in such circumstances might even be seen as moral in a Les Mis�rables sort of way as it helps their students by preventing the school from closing. If we are going to talk about prison terms those who wrote No Child Left Behind deserve prison far more than some black teachers in an impoverished school because they created this entire situation.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 04:26

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# ? May 3, 2024 10:40

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Barlow posted:

If a system puts teacher in a situation where they can cheat or they will lose their jobs it hardly seems just to send them to prison for doing so. Cheating in such circumstances might even be seen as moral in a Les Mis�rables sort of way as it helps their students by preventing the school from closing. If we are going to talk about prison terms those who wrote No Child Left Behind deserve prison far more than some black teachers in an impoverished school because they created this entire situation.

After thinking about it a bit more than I had when I first posted, I've pretty much reached this conclusion too. NCLB is, itself, nothing short of criminal.

# ? Apr 16, 2015 04:31

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Atlanta public school cheating controversy

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