Tuesday, August 9, 2011

"Oh, I guess they are just a great guesser"

CNN | Cheating report confirms teacher's suspicions
"I started believing that I wasn't a good teacher," [Julie] Rogers-Martin says. "Other teachers were coming in with these perfect scores and mine are not so perfect. I mean they weren't bad, they were just normal."
I'm tempted to respond to this with a sarcastic "welcome to the party" to CNN, who cannot possibly think this is a new story. They are, after all, headquartered here. But reporter Paul Frysh does something that few other reporters do, and he does it well: He puts a face to the honest teachers who found themselves bewildered by impossible student performance happening all around them -- but not in their own classes.

As I've said, the wonder is not that the news media are all over this: They should be. The wonder is that it took so long. It wasn't subtle, and it wasn't clever. When a student is below average one year, brilliant when CRCT is administered and back to below average the year after, how stupid does a cheating educator have to be to believe no one will notice?

They were confident in the ability of their administrators to terrorize everyone into, if not participation, at least cowed silence. This is to everyone's benefit! Don't you want those bonuses?

But... (I swore I'd never say this, because too many people invoke it as an "abracabra" phrase to halt debate) but... What about the children?

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