Atlanta cheating scandal is worse than it appears from media reports:
Dr. Hall, who retired in 2011, was charged with racketeering, theft, influencing witnesses, conspiracy and making false statements.
Those test scores brought her fame — in 2009, the American Association of School Administrators named her superintendent of the year and Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, hosted her at the White House. And fortune — she earned more than $500,000 in performance bonuses while superintendent.
On Friday, prosecutors essentially said it really was too good to be true.
Dr. Hall was known to rule by fear. She gave principals three years to meet their testing goals. Few did; in her decade as superintendent, she replaced 90 percent of the principals.
Teachers and principals whose students had high test scores received tenure and thousands of dollars in performance bonuses. Otherwise, as one teacher explained, it was “low score out the door.”
Her focus on test scores made her a favorite of the national education reform movement, nearly as prominent as the schools chancellors Joel I. Klein of New York City and Michelle Rhee of Washington. Like them, she was a fearsome presence but she was also known as someone who held herself aloof from parents, teachers and principals. The district spent $100,000 a year for a security detail to drive her around the city. At public meetings, questions had to be submitted beforehand for screening.
To get the whole picture one really has to look at the report prepared by the independent prosecutors (pdf). It’s long, but here are some excerpts from Part III of the report, which is titled “Why Cheating Occurred” and has two subheads, “Targets” and “Culture of Fear.” Sounds like a great place to send a kid to school doesn’t it?
Virtually every teacher who confessed spoke of the inordinate stress the district placed on meeting targets and the dire consequences for failure. Dr. Hall articulated it as “no exceptions, no excuses.” If principals did not meet targets within three years she declared “they will be replaced and I will find someone who meets target.” Dr. Hall replaced 90% of principals.
Principals publicly humiliated teachers if they didn’t meet targets. In one case a principal forced a (probably honest) teacher who didn’t meet her target to crawl under a conference table in some bizarre shaming ritual. Teachers were regularly and repeatedly threatened with termination for not meeting targets.
From the report:
Almost without exception, teachers and principals said that the single most important factor to this administration was “data.” They said, “data is the driver” “data controls everything.” We heard this mantra system-wide from virtually every witness.
Data can be properly used as to assess progress. But data can also be used as an abusive and cruel weapon to embarrass and punish teachers and principals and as a pretext to termination.
When one reads the report, it becomes painfully clear that the claimed gains were unbelievable. No one who actually spent any time in these schools or looked at the scores in any kind of rigorous, clear-headed way would buy this story. But buy it the school reformers did. The big hitters in the school reform industry pointed to this district as a model for a “no excuses” private sector approach to public education. They saw what they wanted to see.
The private sector model for public schools is (sadly) bipartisan, and some very powerful and wealthy people back it, which is why I think we’re swallowing this stuff whole with no real analysis. There seems to be some kind of idiotic assumption that “bipartisan” means “centrist” or “good”. But that simply isn’t true. The last two giant public policy blunders were bipartisan to some extent; deregulating finance and lending and invading Iraq. I would suggest that “bipartisan” should mean more public and media scrutiny, not less, because bipartisan often means there’s very little dissent or challenge or pushback. The time to put your guard up is not when the opinion leaders are fighting, it’s when they’re all singing the same song.
The truth is the school reform salespeople had no earthly idea what was actually happening in Atlanta schools from 1999 to 2013, yet they were absolutely convinced the “no excuses” test-and-target-obsessed model was racking up incredible gains, and they sold the same approach in Newark and Philadelphia and Chicago and Memphis and God knows where else.
This is former governor Perdue on the “business community” blocking his investigation and being sort of mean to him:
“I was dumbfounded that the business community would not want the truth,” he said. “These would be the next generation of employees, and companies would be looking at them and wondering why they had graduated and could not do simple skills. Business was insisting on accountability, but they didn’t want real accountability.”
Really? After the financial crisis he’s “dumbfounded” by that? Will he now re-examine his blind faith in the business community and their approach to public education and “accountability” or are we just moving full speed ahead on reform?
Schlemizel
High stakes testing means high stakes!
If you are a teacher or an admin struggling with a budget that has not kept up with inflation for 30 years plus all the additional burdens placed on schools and you know you will get even less money if you do not get better numbers . . .
Just Some Fuckhead
You will always get the kind of behavior you incentivize.
raven
Well Sonny may not be founded.
raven
And who did the Georgia Dems run against
his successor? The dude who fucked over the teachers.
Kay
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I think they should go back and rehire the 90% they fired. Obviously the 10% are the cheaters. They found them.
Roger Moore
Missing “Hoocoodanode” tag.
EconWatcher
This is a problem in so many areas other than education. You need to have some way of measuring performance to assure accountability, but almost every measure can be gamed, sometimes through spin, sometimes through outright fraud.
It’s tough to fight. But a long prison sentence in a case like this, if the charges are proved, could certainly help.
EconWatcher
This is a problem in so many areas other than education. You need to have some way of measuring performance to assure accountability, but almost every measure can be gamed, sometimes through spin, sometimes through outright fraud.
It’s tough to fight. But a long prison sentence in a case like this, if the charges are proved, could certainly help.
jl
If we ran our schools 100 percent through private contractors and profit making corporations, like we contracted out logistics and troop support and reconstruction in Iraq, this kind of unpleasant news would not become public and we would not have to worry about it. Do you silly liberals now see the problems caused by all this clumsy paleoliberal big government running everything?
/snark
Alison
Chris Hayes’ new show debuts tonight and they’ll be talking about the Atlanta thing. Should be a good discussion, certainly a better one that many/most other news channels would have.
El Caganer
@raven: Depressingly unsurprising, in a “both-sides-do-it” sort of way.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
I was always told that school was my full-time job. Tennessee is making that literal.
c u n d gulag
Education Reformers POV:
Damn the torpedoed principals, teachers, and students – FULL SPEED AHEAD!!!
Never let people look at great grifts too closely.
It might shake-up and wake-up the rubes.
? Martin
Welcome to Michelle Rhee’s free market eduction standards. Nobody should be surprised when administrators behave like Goldman Sachs when you set up the measures and incentives the same way.
SatanicPanic
@EconWatcher: I can’t remember the name of it, but there’s a rule in science that if you measure something you affect it. It’s a fairly simple concept that people love to ignore.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@SatanicPanic: The Observer Effect. Commonly misnamed as the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle
dswagz
@Kay:
Kay’s got it right: That 10% needs to be looked at a bit more closely…
Grumpy Code Monkey
The profession of teaching gets even less respect now than it did when I graduated 30 years ago, which is a little difficult to believe, actually.
I’m now convinced the entire “education reform” movement is a scam from top to bottom. I’m also convinced public education in this country is irretrievably fucked; too many incompetents and grifters and True Believers have entrenched themselves in the public education system at the federal, state, and local levels. Oh, we’ll have pockets of excellence here and there, but the bulk of high school graduates in the 2020s will be all but illiterate, and their bullshit filters will be so underdeveloped that they’ll be manipulated into indentured servitude on a vast scale, realizing the neo-feudalist fantasies of our Financial Betters.
What, me, paranoid? Perish the thought.
Teachers and teachers’ unions aren’t the goddamned problem. They never have been. Anyone who wants to blame the teachers isn’t paying attention.
Kay
@? Martin:
The prosecutors were one D and one R so I was surprised how blunt they were on the over-reliance on “data” and the coercion and fear that was used to bring up scores and silence people who were making some very practical observations like: “the kids in my class don’t really know this material yet, so I’m wondering about these high scores coming back…”
They did a great job.
SatanicPanic
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: That’s what I thought it was, but I wasn’t sure.
NonyNony
@EconWatcher:
The problem that education has is that there has yet to be a metric proposed for assessing the performance of teachers that actually A) assesses the performance of the teacher and B) is not obviously and easily game-able in a way that is to the detriment of the students. (Find me a metric that is game-able to the improvement of student outcomes and you will have a metric worth using even if it is complete and utter bullshit as a teacher assessment tool.)
You can have good metrics for assessing teachers. Almost all of them are expensive to implement, would be part of the licensing and re-licensing process, and would be voted down by the legislatures of just about every state in the country as too costly. They would also involve long-term tracking of student outcomes over the period of decades to determine not just the assessment of individual teachers, but the assessment of individual schools and school districts, which again would be incredibly costly (and probably have the Mark of the Beast people screaming about Big Brother tracking us.) They are NOT quick fix solutions that promise to turn a district around overnight, but rather long term solutions to fix the actual structural problems that a lot of districts have.
Instead what we get is a metric for assessing teachers that uses “student performance on standardized tests” as a proxy. Except that “student performance on a standardized test” is perhaps the single most easily game-able assessment that you can provide AND the only way to game it comes at the harm of the students that are supposed to be helped by it.
It’s bone stupid. And something that could only be come up with in a culture that prizes easy “solutions” that don’t actually work over solutions that actually solve your damn problems but are hard to actually build and maintain.
Southern Beale
Sorta related, but you know that anti-union school reform advocate Michelle Rhee? She’s got a lot of Nashville connections, and her ex-husband is the Tennessee Education Commissioner. Rhee has always referred to herself as a “public school parent” but it turns out at least one of her daughters attends Harpeth Hall, a very tony private girls’ school in Nashviile. It’s the same school that Amy Grant and Reese Witherspoon attended, to name just two.
Writes the Washington Post:
Indeed. Or, as another blogger noted:
Oh, that would be loverly, wouldn’t it? Instead of robbing pubic school board budgets to send kids to private schools?
But that’s okay. Looks like Tennessee Republicans have tripped over their own bigotry on their way to vouchers. Seems some Republicans in the state senate have just now realized that — gasp! — Muslim schools will be able to use voucher money, too! Nooooooooo!
Elie
Sociopaths abound everywhere we look. They are aided, abetted and encouraged by the take no prisoners, social Darwinism that has characterized our culture — especially as it relates to our major private business, finance and public institutions. No one wants to do the hard work of actually changing something, building the change from the ground up. We think we can command it and thus it will be — we just have to exert enough fear and coercion. The sociopaths know what’s what — that people will not stand up to their treachery for a very long and harmful time. They know that people will not “stick together” but will “hang alone”. Our individualism has helped to foster a period of despotic management that we must get on top of or pay an ever deeper price. The individuals who cheat on their Med school exams, eventually reach the place that their deficiencies show for all to see… American businesses and organizations are filled with so called “brilliant” leaders like this… Maybe every person being considered for a management/leadership position should be given the HARE sociopathy screening test..
Kay
@EconWatcher:
It’s more than that, though. You need some kind of check to people falling in love with a process or approach and then not seeing anything that contradicts what they believe.
This is the state report card on charter schools. We’ve had charter schools on Ohio for 15 years. They STILL do no better than the “sending districts”.
We expand charter schools every year.
They’ve had vouchers in Milwaukee for 22 years. No measurable gains. Yet, vouchers are back.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Kay:
Just because the 90% weren’t cheating doesn’t mean they are good teachers. :)
But yes, a huge percentage of the 90% probably have a lawsuit.
Memphisj
I’ve just re-watched the complete TV series “The Wire.” Basically, all of America has become Baltimore.
The Ancient Randonneur
A 20th century public education model, with 21st century incentives. No one could have predicted this outcome.
My kids go to public school in one of the best school districts in New England and I am horrified at what they do (or maybe what the don’t do!). I can only imagine what an underperforming district looks like. Most of the teachers are great and if those up the food chain would just listen and implement some of the innovative thinking in the classroom the sytem might work better. Problems? School boards that are stuck in a model that doesn’t work and adminstrators looking at job security for themselves at all cost. I lost faith in the system because I know the good teachers aren’t being utilized properly and the bureaucracy is such that I can’t afford to leave my kids in the school system hoping for a better outcome. I am homeschooling one after this year and I’ve given the other one a year to prove that she is getting what she needs from the system.
agorabum
ROLAND “PREZ” PRYZBYLEWSKI: I don’t get it, all this so we score higher on the state tests? If we’re teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?
TEACHER: Nothing, it assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can’t.
PREZ: Juking the stats.
TEACHER: Excuse me?
PREZ: Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and major become colonels. I’ve been here before.
TEACHER: Wherever you go, there you are.
Anya
@Alison: I am looking forward to Chris Hayes’ show. I don’t understand those who are so vehemently against him. Commenters from a particular pro POTUS website hate him with passion, and consider him more dangerous than Faux News. I kid you not.
About the topic at hand, I think the unholy alliance between the media, misguided Dems and charter school champions created a poisonous environment for anything to be accomplished.
scav
Why Bless, it’s the South again, business flavor this time. Must be Georgia’s turn.
(wish IL wasn’t so eager to play follow the leader though.)
Corner Stone
@The Ancient Randonneur:
With a support group, tutors, by yourself?
If you don’t mind me asking.
Corner Stone
@Anya:
That’s odd. I haven’t noticed the hatred against him here.
RSR
Here’s what a mom and associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University has to say about state testing in PA
“Why I won’t let my son take the PSSA
The opt-out movement is growing because high-stakes tests are wrecking our schools”
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/why-i-wont-let-my-son-take-the-pssa-681537/#ixzz2PEiDS4r6
Corner Stone
@SatanicPanic:
You were uncertain about it?
gvg
Actually it is rather surprising that business doesn’t want to know what isn’t working. I always used to think of businessmen as rather cold and logical, not ideological and fools. the financial scams I understand-money for me makes for short term hang alone choices, but school evaluations…from business people who didn’t have a stake in the new business!
Always be suspicious when the propose test for thee but not them. I can’t believe florida doesn’t test private and charter schools. that means it’s always been a scam. Sorry to change states but I’m in florida and know more about here than there.
Davis X. Machina
Good teachers have, before all else, to be good learners.
What they’ve learned is, find out what the beast eats, and feed it to the beast, else the beast eats you instead.
Memphisj
@agorabum:
Agorabum, that’s the exact scene I was thinking of. Regardless of what area you’re discussing, the drug war, the media, labor or schools, The Wire is more relevant today than on the original airing.
El Cid
Can we require that all ‘education reformers’ pull into town right in front of the saloon in a horse-drawn carriage from which they can then unfold their cabinets, hop onto the improvised stage, and stun the crowd with their totally-not-faked demonstrations of their miracle elixirs?
At least that way, we might see some real performances worth remembering. It’s not like the potions are ever worth a shit.
Davis X. Machina
@Kay:
They don’t have to do better, because they are better.
Everything private is better than anything public, and anything that turns a profit is better still.
And so long as one of us, somewhere, is covered by a collective-bargaining agreement, none of us is truly free.
Rafer Janders
There’s a saying in business that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
Of course, that all too quickly leads to “you only manage what you can measure”, so everything that’s not quickly and easily reduced to statistics gets left by the wayside.
Suffern ACE
I saw this was on the cover of the times this week. Now if they would only cover their own to good to be true testing problem in New York…but that would mean embarassing the mayor and its not like it affects their children anyway.
Elie
@RSR:
Its encouraging to read about people starting to “rise up” against “the machine”
Our kids need to know how to THINK and PROBLEM SOLVE — not take tests..
Comrade Dread
I don’t know the man’s religious faith, but I will never understand the mindset of Christians who believe that somehow working for a corporation mitigates original sin and total depravity and makes the person into a would-be, walkin’ on water Saint.
sharl
Oh, Ye of little Faith!
Looks like it’s time to usher the lot of you into the theater at the Re-indoctrination Center, to view a TED-x-Wall$treet presentation by Michelle Rhee (16m38s).
You’ll need to pass an exit quiz, in order to be allowed to leave.
RaflW
“Really? After the financial crisis he’s ‘dumbfounded’ by that? Will he now re-examine his blind faith in the business community and their approach to public education and “accountability” or are we just moving full speed ahead on reform?”
As Chris Hayes made very clear in Twilight of the Elites, the meritocracy creates perverse incentives and outcomes. Until the house of cards collapses. And I’d say the meritocracy infested with too much market idolatry.
No could imagine that a million sub-prime loans, run thru a blender and sold as beautifully wrapped sludge could possibly go wrong. Till it did.
No one could imagine that obsessive testing could lead to, at best, teach-to-the-test, and at worst, flat-out cheating (performance bonus optimization, I’d rather call it).
The free market (well, we don’t have that, but) markets are basically OK for determining the price of oranges. Or airplane seats to DC next Thursday. But – and this will ruin most neoliberal’s day – markets are not the best at allocating all resources or making all public policy decisions.
SHOCKING!
Kay
@Suffern ACE:
It’s a tough thing, as a political problem, because they’ve effectively discredited teachers as critics. The response to any teacher criticism is “self interest!” I would be frustrated by that were I a teacher. There’s no way to win that.
Weird how they never see “self interest” in privatizing and monetizing public schools.
kc
@Southern Beale:
Fucking hilarious.
Corner Stone
I’d say it’s balls on bipartisan when you consider the position of people like Arne Duncan and Peter Orszag:
“Standard Tests Do Reveal Which Teachers Are Best“
Ben
@Anya:
Considering that his wife works for the administration, I don’t see why they would think that…
Anya
@Corner Stone: Yeah, like BJ can be classified pro Obama.
Unsympathetic
It’s not the teachers – at all. It’s all parents. Parental involvement is the only variable that matters a whit.
They have “data” but their model does not explain the variance they are experiencing in the output metric of test scores. And somehow voters keep buying the school reformer bullshit? What.the.heck has been wrong with the voters who put these morons in power?
Just because someone asserts they have “data” doesn’t mean that data is valid.
El Cid
@RaflW: No one who has been trained since birth to not imagine some certain thing is likely to imagine that certain thing until said certain thing happens, in which case they are the best people to explain exactly why that certain thing which they failed to foresee and predict and act in preparation for did in fact occur, and how best to prevent it from happening again, which it couldn’t.
West of the Rockies
@Southern Beale: I completely agree, SB, but I can imagine some people would make the same sort of argument about Obama’s children: Shouldn’t he send his kids to the same public schools he is sort of distantly in charge of over-seeing? Rhee, however, is an especially obvious example of hypocrisy as public education is her primary focus.
Anya
@Ben: Used to work. I think she went on mat leave. But they’re not the most rational bunch.
SatanicPanic
@Corner Stone: You saw what I did there
Roger Moore
@NonyNony:
Which is where you can spot the true bullshit. Whenever you see the possibility of doing a better job of measuring performance and saving a bit of money, the reformers always seem to choose saving money. If anyone tells you they can do a reasonable job of testing how much students know using a multiple choice test, you need to count your fingers when you’re done talking to them.
Merfy
@Memphisj:
For the last few months, my husband and I have been watching The Wire for the first time, and I have been absolutely blown away by it. We just finished season 4, which deals with the Baltimore schools. I had an impassioned discussion with my husband about the recent episodes and the student characters, about whom I have come to care a great deal. After I finished talking, he looked at me and said, “You realize it’s just a show, right?” I responded with an exasperated, “No, it’s not.” As you said, it is extremely relevant to our current experience.
nemesis
But Murika is exceptional! (covers eyes, ears)
sharl
Here’s an interesting angle – and one I haven’t seen discussed a lot – from security expert Bruce Schneier: Changing Incentives Creates Security Risks:
That last sentence presumes motivations and goals that were not necessarily in existence at the time.
ETA: I see that DxM @35 (among others) have touched on this aspect already…
raven
@Merfy: You bet it’s not. Simon and Burns know their subject quite well. If you haven’t seen Generation Kill pick it up too.
Tone in DC
What Tennessee wants to do is something out of a Philip K. Dick novel. All it needs is a title like, “Through fifth grade, darkly”.
James E. Powell
The whole bubble-test regime needs to be brought down. Unless and until it is, the great American public, who are not in a position to judge the competence of teachers, will continue to accept the scores on those tests as the One True Measure of a teacher’s competence.
RaflW
@Kay:
It is strictly against protocol in the Church of the Free Market to ever, ever question the motives of privateers. They love children, puppies and profit. So they are good people.
Kay
@Corner Stone:
The Democrats who supported “reform” as they imagined it to be, I guess, since obviously their vision has nothing to do with what’s happening, tell me that Duncan is different than Jindal because Duncan doesn’t push vouchers.
Arne Duncan draws the line at vouchers.
The thing is, I’d rather have old-fashioned vouchers that go to primarily religious schools because those schools are at least non-profit. The threat here is from a 600 billion dollar market they want to skim 20% off, private sector schools, not actual private schools.
Walker
I used to have some sympathy for school reformers, but now I am convinced the whole movement has been hijacked by looters who are in it for the money.
For example, I actually like MOOCs, if you consider them a replacement for textbooks as opposed to a replacement for the classroom. But if you talk to people at the major MOOC companies, they do not actually care about learning — only about getting rich.
nemesis
@Merfy: I pretty much avoid the vulagr eyeball torture machine, save for documentaries and sports, yet The Wire for me is the best TV program I have ever watched. Loved the part where a police lieutenant creates a drug zone where the users may congreate with no fear of reprisal. The local communities reclaimed their streets, kids ride their bicycles without worries of stray gunshots, order was restored to wide swaths of BMo. When the suits found out about this island of debauchery, as they were certain to do, the cop was force-retired and the drug haven eliminated. So the kids had to return to hiding in their homes and the drug lords were back to controlling the streets. What a commentary on our country!
MattR
@Merfy: Johns Hopkins offers (offered?) a public health course that uses the Wire as a jumping off point to discuss various problems facing society.
JoyfulA
In 1977, we had a big scandal about cheating in high-stakes testing, with indictments and firings, in Philadelphia.
Could we please not continue repeating the same scandals so frequently?
Maybe a little creativity or humor or ludicrous bigotry for a change, like Abscam?
Ted & Hellen
@Anya:
I have to ask: Are you in earnest with this comment?
RaflW
@James E. Powell: The odd thing about that is as a product of bubble-test land, I can still remember how bogus and stooopid the whole testing regime was.
Is there something about becoming a parent (I’m not one, so I’m semi-seriously asking) that makes one forget how foolish the whole standardized testing series of hoops was?
maurinsky
As someone who did very well on standardized tests, I always knew they were bullshit. I was a lazy slug of a student, I was just a very good test-taker.
RaflW
@Walker:
Ding! Ding! Ding!
Give this player a cookie.
Walker
@Kay:
When I was reading for admissions this year, I ran into another thing about charter schools. When we evaluate minority candidates inner city schools, we know how to adjust the scores based on their background in order to determine whether or not they could succeed here.
But in many of these areas, charter schools have moved in and sucked up the best and most talented minority students. They are getting great grades at these charter schools. Hence, many of minority students now come from that pipeline.
Except that when they get here, the charter school students perform much, much worse than the students we used to recruit from the “failing” schools.
Corner Stone
@Kay:
I liken it to what I see as similar with SS “reform”. Any idiot who cracks the door, no matter their vision or intent, is going to be stampeded by the greedy grifters. Because once the door is cracked there is simply too much money inside to be ignored.
And that’s all the “reformers” ever wanted. This is so obvious it actually does dumbfound me we have to keep saying it out loud.
Cassidy
Sadly, I think this is more accurate.
Older
@RaflW: I suspect it is so. I know I have often noticed that most parents don’t remember anything at all about being a kid. It’s like they never were kids. Well, I was one, and I remember a lot of it, and it was never what they said it was, and it’s not what most parents think it is now.
El Cid
@Cassidy: I think this is unfair to all the people who fervently hate the notion of equal and open secular public education in and of itself. If working with looters helps them destroy what they hate, they’re OK with that.
Chris
@Kay:
It’s always selfish when working people want money, or just a voice in how things are going. Unions are selfish too, as are people on welfare, and all the rest. It’s only for people at the top that selfishness is a good thing.
As with everything else, any assessment of their beliefs will fall flat if it doesn’t take a double standard in favor of the powerful into account.
low-tech cyclist
I’ve got no significant thoughts to add to this thread.
But I just want to say: Kay, thank you for keeping us all informed about what’s been going on with school “reform.” Because I’ve been reading your posts here, the only thing that astounds me about the Atlanta scandal is the sheer scale of it.
But it seems clear by now that the whole “school reform movement” is just one big scam. Sometimes it’s a way for people like Hall and Michele Rhee to become big shots and make the big bucks, and often it’s a way for corporations to suck money out of our school systems, by either taking over schools or selling them 21st-century miracle cures. But it’s almost always a scam.
The scary thing is that there really isn’t that much money to be made off of K-12 education. So when ‘reformers’ of whatever stripe vacuum up a bunch of money from school systems, it’s going to take away from actual education. And that’s the real sin here.
Roger Moore
@RaflW:
I think the key thing is the fear of bad schools. Well meaning parents who are really interested in getting the best for their kids are much easier marks for this kind of thing than you’d expect. Grifters with a school improvement scam to sell start by scaring the parents with horror stories of failing schools, which people have a tendency to fall for even in the majority of the country where the schools are doing OK. Parents who are sufficiently scared of failing schools are willing to put aside their personal experience and common sense and buy anything the school reform grifters sell them.
Kay
@Walker:
It doesn’t strictly apply, but I read that kids who are on a wait list for a “magnet” public school and don’t get in do just as well as those who do get in to the school. Both groups had parents who were engaged enough to put them on a wait list, so that was what mattered not the specific public school.
Just as a parent I think the reformer’s obsession with teachers is crazy. Do people really want to tell their kids that their teacher is the single factor that determines whether they learn anything? Isn’t that a weirdly passive stance for the student?
The whole reform dialogue just rings false to me. I never thought of my kids as just appearing at school to be taught. They (mostly) considered themselves part of the school while they were there, to one extent or another.
I think it’s more private sector garbage, the idea that kids are “customers” and teachers deliver a product to them. I don’t even think that’s solid parenting, let alone a national education policy. Shouldn’t they have some responsibility for what they learn at school?
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I’ve heard something similar about college applications. You do a better job of predicting how students will do by looking at the schools they applied to than looking at the ones they get accepted to or wind up attending.
Corner Stone
@Kay: If a teacher isn’t there to teach, to deliver to an audience, then what is their job?
Morzer
One issue that isn’t sufficiently addressed in the whole ‘data-driven’ lifestyle vision is that data takes on meaning from context. Anyone can rhetoricize data e.g. quoting statistics about pass rates going up = double-plus good reform for make glorious high school learnings of America. What matters is the context. What are higher pass rates worth, if the content of the test has been dumbed down? Not so much. Added to which, people much prefer to believe that easy, cheap solutions will produce comparable or better results, especially if you can tell them that tax cuts and union busting are included for free.
The edu-grifter movement, in its wizened heart, is about re-packaging dumbed-down second-rate education as reform, while getting as much taxpayer money for oneself as possible.
Mnemosyne
@Merfy:
FWIW, David Simon is a former Baltimore journalist and knows people throughout the whole city, so what he puts in the show is slightly fictionalized but based on actual facts that he’s been told or observed.
A current show of his that’s extremely underrated is “Treme,” about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. IMO, it’s never gotten the attention it deserves because it doesn’t have an easily explainable “hook” like “it’s a cop show” or “it’s a show about lawyers.” It really is about the city and the people who live in it and how they’re trying to recover from the upheaval.
Plus it has a stellar cast, including a lot of African-American actors who don’t get nearly enough work, like Khandi Alexander. The first few seasons are available on DVD, so it’s worth checking out.
Kay
@Corner Stone:
Well, sure they’re there to teach, but telling kids over and over that the sum total of a year’s learning is completely determined by the “quality” of the teacher really leaves them very little role in all this. They walk in there as complicated human beings. They’re not identical, cookie cutter receptacles ‘o learning. They make a lot of choices. They can listen, or not, they can ask questions, or not, they can actually engage in varying degrees.
I just wouldn’t want mine sitting like a lump hoping they encountered excellence or whatever. “Excellence” seems to me to be fairly rare, whether it’s teachers or lawyers or Administration Cabinet picks. They may miss a lot waiting for it to drop in their lap.
Our youngest was doing test prep on a snow day. They give them a packet of test prep now for snow days, probably because his teacher is bored to death with it and is palming it off on me. One of the (horrible) reading selections was “Interesting Facts About Pyramids”. He said he didn’t think they were “interesting”, necessarily, and that’s always a tip off, right, when they have to tell you it’s “interesting! going in? I was pleased. He’ll determine what’s “interesting”, for God’s sake. He can do that much, I hope.
The Moar You Know
When there’s big fat money for making the numbers and a job to be lost if you don’t, you will make the numbers.
MBA thinking at it’s very finest.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Suffern ACE: Rahm’s in the same situation in Chicago. He bought this crapola hook, line and sinker but I doubt the fact that it’s all based on a fraud will give him a second’s pause. Getting tough on teachers is a good soundbite. That’s all that matters anymore.
The Moar You Know
@Kay: Yes, Kay, they sure do. Because that explanation lets the most important person in the entire education process, the parent, off the hook completely.
You really would not believe the extremes that parents will go to in order to shuffle blame for their child’s poor academic performance elsewhere.
LanceThruster
He that troubles his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.
Roger Moore
@The Moar You Know:
FTFY. And I think that’s the point Kay was getting at. We shouldn’t be telling kids that education is all about the teacher (or the parent), since it discourages them from taking any positive steps to do anything about their own education.
Ohio Mom
I saw this on another thread somewhere in blogtopia and I think it sums up the ultimate aim of the school deform movement quite succinctly:
“The goal is to liquidate a public good and convert it to a consumer good.”
High-stakes testing, test prep, test cheating…all just means to that end. You want to debate how much depends on teachers v. parents v. the kids themselves? Might be an interesting discussion but it’s besides the point. The point is privatizing as much of the public school system as possible. And they are making alarming progress.
gvg
@Kay: Non profit for who? the “organization” sure but the bosses? No, they are profiting.I’m a foster mom in Florida where they have privatized certain aspects of foster care. The bosses are raking in money, the case workers are mostly the same people rehired without state benefits….and they tried to use us as feel good props when we went up for a legislative session, “for the children” but they were pushing for legal protection for being sued for mistakes as some people have woken up to the fact these private agencies can be sued for mistakes when the state could not. Their insurance costs are going up because some agencies have screwed up badly (murdered kids) so even the ones who haven’t screwed up, are seeing higher costs. Be that as may, the executive saleries are pretty fancy as far as I can tell. And I loath the various random religious agendas.
I don’t remember standardized tests to be that bad. They weren’t the whole story however and security (preventing cheating) was always taken pretty seriously. I’m talking SAT’s and PSAT’s though, just 2 tests. I proctored a Gordon rule test in florida once and the security seemed pretty good during the test. didn’t occur to me to wonder about after they had the tests locked up. This was about 20 years ago too. Anything simple presented as a total answer is suspicious.
mai naem
OMG, I am so sick and tired teachers being blamed. It is not the freaking teachers. It’s the kids and their parents and their socioeconomic situation. I know a bunch of several smart kids. All, every single last one, has super involved parents. Most have two parent households where one parent is available after school etc. I also know several kids who aren’t doing that well in school. Most are from single parent households with unstable financial circumstances. Some are dual parent, but again, shaky financial situations. Guess what? if you want a smart kid it’s a whole lot easier if you have the financial resources to provide the kid with internet access, with transportation to activities, with athletic gear, with supplies for extra-curricular enrichment activities.
Cygil
The thing is though, although the Republicans are inevitably trying to portray this as a Democrat scandal, what the article describes is utterly typical Republican management philosophy. This states that in any enterprize it’s too hard to improve actual productivity or profitability, so the best path is just to game the system: cheat, in other words. And if anyone has any ethical qualms, just scream and bully all your subordinates into going along with you, fire everyone who disagrees, and use shaming and humuliation tactics to keep everyone in line. It’s Enron style management brought to education, and why not, it’s just another market, right?
Hall’s behaviour, as alleged, is also textbook psychopathy, but the really shocking thing is that isn’t enough to diagnose her as a sociopath, because, ironically, Republican management philosophy is purely about exalting the psychopath as the model of a good manager. So even non-psychopaths are emulating this model. It’s like something out of a David Mamet play.
Note that to be nominated “Administrator of the Year” in 2009 she would have done all the work she did to get to that exalted position under the Bush Administration.
NonyNony
@Corner Stone:
You’ve got it backwards. You have to define the job of the student before you can define the job of the teacher.
It is the job of the student to learn. It is the job of the teacher to help the students to learn, and especially in the case of primary/secondary education it is the job of the teacher to help the students learn how to learn.
But it’s all about helping the students. The best teachers in the world can’t do anything until they’ve motivated their students to want to learn the material somehow, and the worst teachers in the world in front of highly self-motivated students aren’t going to do much damage at all.
Kay
@Cygil:
Everyone was on board. Laura Bush even went down there to celebrate all the excellence in test-taking.
Teach for America had her on their home page, because
They had over 100 TFA’s in there, although I imagine she’s been scrubbed now.
gene108
One thing people overlook about charter schools/school reform/privatization is that most Americans are in good school districts or at the worst are not greatly dissatisfied with the education their kids are receiving.
The problems caused for teachers and administrators hasn’t really impacted the overall populace for whatever reason.
Kay
@NonyNony:
Seriously, though how many “excellent” teachers have you had?
I think I’ve had 5. I have only personally encoutered one judge I would describe as “excellent”.
Am I not supposed to go to work until we attain excellence in the judiciary?
Ruckus
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Older generations have been making this type of statement for ever. Unfortunately I think you are correct this time. We have done to education what we have done to the DoD and the financial sector. That is – We can reduce everything to numbers, fuck that there are real peoples lives at stake.
Kay
@gene108:
There’s a great study where they actually asked parents to describe what they care about in a school. It’s the opposite of the reform mantra. They want a “community school” with teachers they trust. They don’t find test scores that helpful and mist of them think their public schools are good.
The study took care to let them use their own language, so they wouldn’t repeat what they heard.
It sort of gives me hope. You can throw a lot of bullshit out there, but when what you’re selling conflicts with what people value about public schools you are going to meet what reformers call “friction” and I call “dissent”.
gelfling545
@maurinsky: My daughter (did I mention she made Phi Beta Kappa in History? Well, maybe I did)picked up a copy of one of the recent state tests for Social Studies that her niece – grade 8 was “practicing” from. She read it through with obvious amazement, clearly appalled that it does not actually test any historical knowledge. I explained to her that the Board & the Regents don’t really care if the students have any knowledge, just that they get a good score. She was surprised by this for some reason.
gelfling545
@Kay: This is it exactly. In almost every field, teaching included, people are ok. A few are excellent. A few are terrible. Most are ok with strengths & weaknesses in their fields. I don’t know where people get the idea that ALL teachers can possibly be excellent, especially for a cut-rate price.
Cygil
@Kay: Unfortunately in the current climate we can’t have a rational discussion of teacher quality, because the very institution of public education is under severe assault by Republicans that literally want to destroy it. But some day we might have a debate where we acknowledge the fault for dismal performance lies roughly equally with parent and community environment, and with teachers. I don’t think I had a single teacher in high school that I would describe as competent, merely mediocre.
@NonyNony: The worst teachers in the world in front of highly self-motivated students aren’t going to do much damage at all.
Stop blameshifting. There is actually pretty substantial evidence that terrible teachers can do immense damage to children. I can personally say that one truly incompetent and abysmal teacher in grade 6 turned me, fomerly close to a model student, into a bitter, angry, chronic truant and serious discipline problem and destroyed my respect for the education system permanently.
Ruckus
@Cygil:
This is a problem from the standpoint that lots of people can think of their worst teacher. And from people that I’ve heard discuss this it generally is not that they didn’t know the material but that they turned their classroom into their own little fiefdom. Sometimes with management approval but mostly not. But even so how many teachers are this bad? I can’t think of but one out of 17 years of schooling that was useless although at the same school I did see another who was just putting in the time till retirement and he still managed to have a learning environment if the student was willing.
Corner Stone
@NonyNony:
IMO, there are a couple points being made. I may have them confused a little bit, or I may not.
Of course there is a responsibility for the student to take some level of ownership in their effort and outcome. And involvement of the parent/support structure, SES, is a crucial factor.
But it sounds like I’m hearing the teacher is an empty vessel just there to reflect others efforts or impetus. I disagree with this, if that’s the tilt some have argued.
My 2nd grader has already informed me his teacher doesn’t check their homework. So when I make him rework something because it’s sloppy (but correct) he asks why since Mrs. Teacher never looks at any of it? Just gives a check mark when it’s turned in.
I argue that I have expectations for the district, the school staff, teachers, my child and my responsibility. The whole ball of wax. I’m not expecting Mrs. Teacher to teach him French or physics, but I do have expectations.
I’ll comment on STAAR testing in another comment some time.
The Moar You Know
@Roger Moore: No, you actually fucked it up completely. I meant precisely what I said. Parents will do almost anything, including paying shitloads of cash money and embarking on years-long lawsuits, so that they can avoid having to take responsibility for their complete lack of involvement in their child’s educational process, or for their child’s complete lack of involvement in the educational system. I understand Kay’s point as well. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Rex Everything
The “to some extent” doesn’t really fly. But the rest is right on. Thank you.
Rex Everything
After the events of the past 5 years, the Wisdom of the Free Market requires more blind faith than the Easter bunny.
James E. Powell
Public education, like several really good progressive policy ideas, began to die just as soon as middle class and working class whites found out that they had to share with the [insert racist epithets].
Explore the history of race relations in Milwaukee and Cleveland to understand why those two cities took the lead on vouchers.
The very great majority of Americans don’t give a damn about public education. Whether it’s because they have no children or because they only care about their own children’s education, to most Americans public education is just another tax they have to pay. If some one comes along and tells them that they won’t have to pay any more, they will believe whatever goes along with that story.
The one thing Americans will never believe is that parents’ poverty, illiteracy, and lack of formal education is the most accurate predictor of a child’s performance in school. And there are just enough exceptions to allow the marketing & public relations industries to obscure reality.
The Moar You Know
@gelfling545: Even if we did what Finland does, and pay teachers the rate of a top-flight surgeon or lawyer, you’d still have mediocre teachers. I think the number of truly bad ones would go down, however.
Here in California, you can drop out of high school, get your GED, go through prison guard training and after nine months be making as a starting salary about three times what a beginning teacher makes. The teacher must complete four years of getting a bachelor’s, two years of credentialing, and six months of unpaid student teaching. The wonder of it is not that we have bad teachers. The wonder of it is that we have any good ones at all.
Davis X. Machina
@James E. Powell:
Public education is public. In a representative state, it’s as good or bad as the public wants. It wasn’t imposed from without by an occupying army.
No one wants to admit it, but if it sucks — assuming arguendo that it does suck — it’s because there’s a coalition for having it suck.
Davis X. Machina
@Corner Stone:
You can’t just ‘deliver to an audience’ any more. That is Sage-on-the-Stage. Which is a Very Bad Thing.
Corner Stone
@Davis X. Machina: I don’t mean from behind a podium like a tenured prof. Delivery in the sense of interaction, guidance, instruction etc.
The Moar You Know
@James E. Powell: Totally agree – literally every study ever done backs up your assertion – but must add an interesting caveat.
You left out “not giving a shit because I got mine so fuck you” as a predictor of student achievement, because the problem in our local district is not with the poor kids – which in this district means “middle class” and are usually the best students – it’s with the rich kids.
Doesn’t matter in the end, though. The parents bulldoze the district into passing their kids, or in the worst case scenario, when the kid is utterly unwilling to be educated, they just send ’em to private schools and pay for the grades they want. They roll through college the same way. “Legacy admission”, they call that. The kids end up utterly incompetent, but they’ve got advanced degrees from the right schools, so they get hired into good jobs anyway and they stay in their parent’s socioeconomic class – which is all the parent gives a shit about.
Sorry to soapbox about it, this is a problem that doesn’t exist in most districts and I guess we’re lucky to have it, but it makes my wife’s job as a teacher absolutely miserable.
James E. Powell
@Cygil:
There is actually pretty substantial evidence that terrible teachers can do immense damage to children.
I had a similar experience that you describe. In 9th grade I was pretty much a straight-A student, highest scores in my class on the Iowa Basic Skills tests, three honors classes. By the end of 10th grade I was a vocational student with no plans to go to college.
It wasn’t one teacher and I’m not even sure if the teachers I had were bad in any objective sense. They may have been fine for other students. But for me the whole high school drill was bullshit and demeaning.
With respect to your statement that I quoted above, can you cite to any sources for that? Nearly every study I’ve read says otherwise. More specifically, the studies I’ve read show a very strong link between parents’ SES & education and the student’s performance in high school.
gelfling545
@The Moar You Know: If everyone is “excellent”, then excellent means nothing. Most people in most professions are a mix. We’d all like to have the best doctor, the best plumber, auto mechanic, etc. and generally we only have a few of these in a lifetime, not 20 or more as with teachers but the facts are that we almost always settle for competent.
Actually, the biggest problems in the teaching/learning relationship come from the teacher being a poor fit for the particular student while s/he may be fine for many of even most. It happens to everybody at some point – the teacher whose approach you just don’t respond to; the student with whom you just can’t connect. Sometimes, from the student side it is a matter of trust. It took me 5 years at the school in which I spent most of my career before the majority (never all) of the students believed that I had their best interests at heart and would not leave them for a “better” school or do/say something to make them feel stupid or make their lives harder. I even had kids say to me “You’re really smart. How come you stay at this school. You could go someplace good.” They had been taught by some truly horrible life experiences and the school district’s machinations that they were inferior & somehow unworthy. Fortunately, I had most of my students over a 4-5 year period so I could develop relationships over time. Most teachers had 9 months and done.
James E. Powell
@The Moar You Know:
For better or worse, I haven’t had to deal with the sort of parents that you describe. My experience is mostly in schools located in what is usually referred to as the ‘hood. It is very common for parents to be unable or unwilling to come in for a conference. It is hard sometimes to get them to return a phone call.
El Cid
@The Moar You Know: Also, let’s not forget the ‘Boo Fucking Who’ response and also the ‘So What? If They Can’t Overcome Every Hurdle We Keep Piling In Front of Them Then They Don’t Deserve It,’ not to mention the ‘I Have No Purpose In Life If I Cannot Judge Someone And Find Them Morally Wanting and Therefore Take Joy In Despising Them’ impulse.
gene108
@Kay:
I think the level of “bad” that has to happen via school reform is pretty high before it starts hitting the good school districts, where there are enough middle to upper-middle class people to make politicians take notice.
Gov. Christie slashed state funding for education by $800 mil his first year int office, because he rolled back the surtax on incomes over $1 mil/year. The initial reaction was a lot of frustration by parents in good school districts, because some programs were cancelled and teachers were let go.
After four years, when their kids are still able to get into good colleges, they aren’t really bothered about the cut in education funding. Whatever larger class sizes, etc. took place because teachers got laid off, just created a “new normal” that they’ve been able to adjust to without the necessary suffering that forces change.
I think the impact in poorer school districts and/or with students at the margins has been significant, but they aren’t the demographic politicians respond to.
I don’t know how badly you have to screw up public education before parents rebel against politicians, but we aren’t close to there yet.
johnny aquitard
@The Moar You Know:
I sometimes wonder if this is part of why conservatives demand jebus in the classrooms. They blame secular public school for the moral failings in their communities, in society, especially among their young people. As if the teacher’s role in moral education is the most significant thing in their child’s life. Talk about the expectation of just having your kid show up and be educated…
Obviously, if their kids had school prayer and were taught creationism and they displayed the 10 commandments at every school, then so many of their young people wouldn’t get knocked up, or get into meth, or get divorced, or worse, leave the church.
Ultimately it’s a way to shuffle blame for the failings, moral and otherwise, of their belief system.
Ruckus
@gene108:
That is a good point. Most parents only have grades to judge if their kids are doing well and once they have passed and moved on up the ladder most parents cease to care about schools. When I lived in OH having one’s school district considered good improved the value of one’s property and was discussed with possible new neighbors and friends. I never ran into that in CA. But with most people having fewer kids than 50yrs ago their exposure to good or bad schools is even more limited, let alone what constitutes good or bad being ill defined.
Kay
@gene108:
I would argue that for Democratic politicians, it’s like voting rights.
A lot of people don’t give a shit about voting rights, but Democratic politicains care about voting rights, because it’s key to a group that they need to win.
I think you’ll see something similiar happen with
privatizing public education.
For Democrats, I don’t just think it’s bad policy, I think it’s bad politics. Not next year but soon. That’s my prediction, anyway.
Kay
@gene108:
NJ is behind states like OH, FL and MI on privatization.
This stuff is brazen. They had a committee vote in the FL statehouse the other day and 5 of seven members had a direct financial interest in a proposed or existing charter school. The for profit stars, OH, MI, FL, IN. Those are the ones to watch.
Rosie Outlook
@Kay: I think you have summed up the problem. Remember the Farengi, the little bald people on Star Trek who worshipped commerce? This is a nation of Farengi. (Side gripe: I don’t like being a consumer. I want to be a citizen again.)
Rosie Outlook
@mai naem: Well, I don’t know about that. I was a smart kid before the Internet was even a gleam in a Darpa scientist’s eye, with blue-collar parents who rarely had time to go to conferences and were too intimidated to say much to The Teacher when they did go. I think intelligence, like beauty, is largely the luck of the genetic draw. We all know families where one kid is much smarter (or dumber) than the rest.
Rosie Outlook
@Cygil: I think that teacher crawling under the table should have bitten Hall’s ankle while she was down there.
Rosie Outlook
@Cygil: Hey, me too! With 2 exceptions, I had terrible teachers. So if I am siding with the teacher under the table, you know things are bad.
West of the Rockies
@mai naem: You’re sure right about parent involvement! I know my experience does not necessarily reflect the norm, but my wife and I home-schooled our daughter in first grade. It was pretty easy; by Christmas, she had gone through the curriculum for the whole year and was to start on 2nd grade. However, we were a bit concerned about socialization, so we moved her to a public school. The last half of first grade and 2nd grade were good! But then she ended up with an instructor who had a new math program that she was not equipped to implement (by her own admission) in third grade; our daughter’s math scores and confidence eroded rapidly. Despite our requests of the principal to place our daughter with anyone else but her 3rd grade math teacher the next year, she ended up with the same instructor who’d been so ineffective in 3rd grade math. (This instructor focused most of her attention on the low achievers and paid almost no attention to those students who were doing well; thus those students tended to get bored, disinterested, and become less effective learners.) We moved back to home-schooling in 4th grade. By that point, it was much more challenging to teach her! (I, by the way, am a junior college lecturer, so I certainly had experience with teaching.)
We’ve now moved her to a charter school where she is again excelling in and enjoying math. My point? Parents have to be aware, participate, be informed. I’ve volunteered several hours each week in the classroom, so I know the instructors and the students. Parent involvement is not a panacea; it’s not a guarantee of success. But it IS a factor, I believe.
Morzer
@The Moar You Know:
Finland doesn’t just throw money at the problem. They have very stringent standards for teachers, and some pretty enlightened policies about how schools operate.
Cygil
@James E. Powell: @Rex Everything:
A starting point is John Hattie’s piece which argues that around 30% of the variance in student performance is attributable to teacher quality, as opposed to 50 percent student socioeconomic status. So while SES is very importance, that’s still a major proportion of the variance attributable to the quality of the teacher.
https://www.det.nsw.edu.au/proflearn/docs/pdf/qt_hattie.pdf, linked at
https://www.det.nsw.edu.au/proflearn/areas/qt/research.htm#5
And:
Even more compelling evidence for the
influence of class/teacher-effects on
students’ achievements derive from the
VCE Data Project
(Rowe, 2000f; Rowe, Turner &
Lane, 1999, 2002) [..]
After adjusting for measures of students’ abilities, gender and
school sector (government, Catholic and independent), class/teacher effects consistently accounted for an average 59 percent of the residual variance in students’achievements, compared with a mere
5.5 percent at the school-level.
That is, there was significantly more variation
within-schools than between-schools,
indicating that the quality of teaching and
learning provision was by far the most
salient factor accounting for variation in students’ achievements at Year 12.
https://www.det.nsw.edu.au/proflearn/docs/pdf/qt_rowe2003.pdf
Cygil
@Morzer: Finland doesn’t just throw money at the problem, but they most certainly do throw more money around. A skilled teacher makes as much as a medical doctor, and reportedly gets as much respect from the community.
redoubt
@Cygil: This thread is basically closed, but: This is also a hostile takeover in progress.
Next door, in DeKalb County (where I live) the Republican Governor (unconstitutionally) removed six of the nine elected school board members, replacing them with handpicked non-elected members. The replaced board members have decided not to sue. There was an issue with money going missing from construction contracts, and the Governor decided to “send a message.” (Unlike the Atlanta situation, no one has been indicted.)
DeKalb County, like the Atlanta Public School system, is majority-minority.
Mike
Well I had a psycho dean for a few years, but nothing compared to this. The pdf is a work of art, literally, and kudos to the investigators and Governor Perdue.
But really, thirteen f*cking years, when the evidence was starting to accumulate in 2001. There is something rotten about a community and state where this can fester so long, hundreds or thousands in the know – not as a rumor, but through direct knowledge and participation in a criminal conspiracy.
The school district, community, and state could benefit from some soul searching. All the normal controls failed, failed systemically, and for a long time.