Is Atlanta cheating story about race: Why aren't Michelle Rhee - and Joel Klein in handcuffs?

So let’s see how the justice system dealt with these two cases. When mostly African-American educators at poor schools in Atlanta cheat on tests, they get the book thrown at them .....

"The darkly amusing part of all this is that the harsh sentence in the Atlanta case is seen as a necessary counter to the temptation to cheat caused by the testing regime. So prosecutors devote huge amounts of resources (the district attorney called it the most complex case of his career) and judges dole out long sentences, all to keep teachers in line. No similar deterrent has been created for the industry that sells Americans the most important financial product of their entire lives. We send messages to teachers; we send bailouts to bankers.... from the ravitch blog, Did Atlanta Educators Get Equal Justice Before the Law?

Some pictures tell 5000 words

Mike Klonsky posted this photo on his blog: Taking the fall for Duncan's testing madness 

Mike posted my favorite scene from The Wire where the ex-cop turned teacher finally gets that testing is similar to police crime reporting -- juking the stats "where burglary is turned into petty theft" (https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM).

Mike references a John Merrow tweet:

Post-Atlanta convictions, you might want to recall Michelle Rhee's Reign of Error in DC, where cheating paid: http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=6232 

John had hit a stone wall in trying to make Rhee accountable. If an equivalent investigation instead of a coverup was done in Washington, I would bet a more extensive cheating scandal there just by the nature of the Rhee abusive personality.

Does anyone thing there WASN'T a whole lot of cheat' going on under KleinCott?

I got it pretty early in my career - in 1969 - the results in my 1970 4th grade class were so good I made a chart showing the equivalent of VAM -- how much they all had improved -- and went job hunting with that chart -- no one gave a shit.

But, yes, tests were high stakes for kids -- used to keep them back or put them in homogeneous classes. In some cases an decent student blew the test -- you could make the case for them but some admins didn't listen to teachers.

I'm one of those people who have no problem with cheating on high stakes tests when it's done in the interests of children.

Holding educators accountable for student test results makes sense if the tests are reasonable reflections of teacher performance. But if they are not, and if educators are being held accountable for meeting standards that are impossible to achieve, then the only way to meet fanciful goals imposed from above—according to federal law, that all children will make adequate yearly progress towards full proficiency in 2014—is to cheat, using illegal or barely legal devices. It is not surprising that educators do just that... Richard Rothstein as quoted by Ravitch

I remember a specialized pull-out teacher who one year was outraged at my principal's rigid holdover policy that refused to take teachers into account. She worked with special ed students with severe speech problems and when she found out many of them were being left back she asked me what to do. I told her I knew exactly how many answers the kids needed to pass the threshold set by the principal and that it was too late this year but in the future she should come by before I turned the papers in and if the child was within 1-3 questions of the threshold change those answers for them -- it might mean a difference of a 4.8 vs a 5.0 for the 6th grade -- 5.0 and you passed. I so trusted her judgement better than my principal. (Before she took over our old admin always consulted us and let us pretty much make the final decisions.) I hope the statute of limitations has run out.

Beverly Hall, by the way, was once Supt of District 27 (Rockaway, Howard Beach and Ozone Park) in the early 90s --- not a very happy ending for our district. (See Howie Schwach Remembers Beverly Hall, Former CSD 27).

In an important post, which I am including in full below the break,
Diane Ravitch asks: Did Atlanta Educators Get Equal Justice Before the Law?

Howie Schwach Remembers Beverly Hall, Former CSD 27 (including Rockaway) Superintendent

People forget that cheating scandal plagued Atlanta Supt. Beverly Hall, who just passed away, was a local Supt and DOE official here in NYC and was District Supt of District 27 (Ozone Park, Howard Beach and Rockaway).

I moved to Rockaway in 1979 but never paid much attention to the local school stuff in District 27 other than to read The Wave's Howie Schwach's reports in his School Scope columns (I took over the column when Howie became Wave editor over a decade ago.)
Howie left the paper after Hurricane Sandy and how has an online presence reporting on Rockaway events.

Here is Howie reporting on Hall's death and recalling events around her superintendency almost 25 years ago. Scandals in District 27 and other districts helped bring the death-knell of community control and the rise of the even more disastrous Bloomberg mayoral control. In fact, controls were being put in place to control these scandals when community control was killed. I would go back to that a modified version of that system in an instant.

http://www.onrockaway.com/page-16.html

Dr. Beverly Hall, former CSD 27, dies of cancer

Posted at 4:45 p.m. on March 6
    Dr. Beverly Hall, the woman who sparked a contentious battle for the superintendence of Rockaway’s School District 27 in the early 1990’s and later led the Atlanta (Georgia) schools when it was hit by a massive test cheating scandal died of cancer on March 2 at the age of 68.
     She will be memorialized at a service to be held on March 28 at 10 a.m. at Trinity St. John’s Church, 1142 Broadway in Hewlett.
     Many who worked in Rockaway schools at that time will remember Hall as a tough boss who brought the Carnegie Middle School Reorganization Program to the district.
     The battle between Hall and several other candidates for the position of School District 27 Superintendent quickly became racially-tinged and contentious with now- State Senator James Sanders, who was then the president of the school board, tainted by a vote-swapping plan to give Hall the job.
     Hall, then the principal of a Brooklyn public school had been nominated by Sanders, as the new superintendent of schools for the district. There were a number of other candidates, both black and white, and the district, in the wake of a contentious school board scandal in which three members were indicted for crimes that danced around racism and cronyism, was sensitive to the issues.
     Hall is black and many black parents demanded a minority superintendent for the district’s schools, which included Rockaway, Broad Channel and a large chunk of the mainland as well.
     Hall won a contentious election when one board member was removed for trading votes and others were charged with unethical acts. The entire scenario was one that forced to city to do away with school boards and go to the community education council model that still exists today.
     In 1994, Hall left to lead the city’s special programs. Then, she went to the Newark Public Schools as superintendent. From there, in 1999, she went to Atlanta, Georgia and made history be being indicted in a cheating scandal. She resigned from the Atlanta schools in disgrace in 2010, after being named National Superintendent of the Year” the prior year. Hall was charged, along with dozens of teachers and administrators.
     Hall pled not guilty to a racketeering charge and other lesser counts. Because she was battling cancer, however, she was deemed unfit to stand trial, and her case was continued even as the others went on trial last year.

 Dr. Beverly Hall, who sparked a contentious local school election and then was the center of a massive state cheating scandal in Georgia.