Cheating Teachers In Atlanta

I agree with your statement, but you are missing the real point of the story.

This story is about people who were placed in an impossible situation. Their jobs were threatened if they couldn't meet impossible goals on numbers pushed by politics measuring things that were largely out of their control.

I am not excusing cheating. But given the situation where their careers were ruled by a single number, that cheating happened isn't surprising.

Of course there are ways of raising these numbers artificially that aren't technically "cheating" by running the kids through drills that increase the scores without teaching them anything of value. I suppose this is a preferable way to deal with these stupid tests.

I didn't miss this point, I just reject it.

Throughout my career I have seen and been faced with these sorts of difficult situations, but ultimately I and everyone else has had a very real choice:

Do what one knows is wrong to perserve one's job or change jobs and remove oneself from this perverse choice.

Teachers are uniquely succeptible to making the wrong choice because they have been (willingly) conditioned to believe that their job is sacrosanct and that they, personally, are more valuable than their profession.

Yes, if you back someone into a corner you should not be surprised when they rationalize any and all misdeeds, but this doesn't excuse them.

As a manager, you should never put your employees in such a position for the very reason that you cannot rely on their inate integrity, but this, by no means, suggests that the people who revert to the behavior of cornered rodents are innocent victims.

You are contradicting yourself.

This problem would be pretty much solved if we got politicians out of the education business.

Not really. The story doesn't reveal what I nevertheless believe to be true.

This is a related thread...

http://able2know.org/topic/170203-1