Why 178 Public Educators in Atlanta SHOULD BE in prison…

posted at 11:49 am on July 7, 2011 by Kevin McCullough
[ Cronyism ]   

Evidently state level investigations into Georgia public schools are nothing new, but the new revelations of the attempt to defraud test score results merely for enhanced funding status from the Federal Government–in my mind–should be a RICO complaint, with secondary charges of theft.

The majority of the nation doesn’t know that investigators have turned up a hatched-scheme in which Union bosses coordinated efforts with public education officials. Further that 44 of 56 school districts in the Atlanta Public Schools system strategically convinced Superintendents, Principals and teachers to cheat–primarily by going back and erasing answers on tests and replacing them with correct ones–in order to have a higher means score for the No Child Left Behind funding qualifications.

The evidence is overwhelming.

• 2100 Interviews…
• 178 educators involved…
• 38 principals involved…
• 80 confessions to the schemes…
• 800,000 documents as evidence…

And if the cheating is bad… then the cover-up should be counted twice as damning. Beverly Hall the Superintendent for APS was awarded recognition during the decade which the cheating was at it’s height. Her deputies were brought into the scandal and eventually teachers “grew to fear” for their jobs and well being if they did not play along:

The special investigators’ report describes years of misconduct that took place as far up the chain of command as the superintendent’s office. The report accuses Hall and her aides of repeatedly tampering with or hiding records that cast an unflattering light on the district.

In one case, Hall’s chief Human Resources officer Millicent Few “illegally ordered” the destruction of early, damning drafts of an outside lawyer’s investigation of test-tampering at Atlanta’s Deerwood Academy, the report said.

Another time, Few ordered staff to destroy a case log of cheating-related internal investigations after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution requested it, the report said. Few told staff to replace the old log with a new, altered version. When the district finally produced the complaints, the investigators wrote, it illegally withheld cases that made it “look bad” — either because its investigation was poor or because wrongdoing received minimal sanction.

Few also made false statements to the investigators, the report said.

The cycle of intimidation, corruption, fraud, and reward was at play for the better part of 10 years.

The Associated Press

The improved scores and seemed improvements of the children had caused others to point to APS as a model for how to base other inner city/large urban schools systems should operate.

Now the biggest question to be answered is just how many of the 178 deserve to do the perp walk right into prison?

I’m Kevin McCullough and that’s how I “Binge Think”
And I wrote the book that told you why he couldn’t!

UPDATE: My listeners responded…>

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