Which cheating teachers?

Senate approves bill to take bonuses away from cheating teachers | ajc.com
Georgia educators who cheat would have to return any bonuses or incentive pay they earned through falsified standardized test scores under a bill passed unanimously Monday by the state Senate.
...Educators from some of the APS schools implicated in the state investigation received about $500,000 in bonuses through the district's payout program, according to records obtained from APS.
The sponsor of HB 692, Rep. Billy Mitchell, D-Stone Mountain, had at the time investigators released their report promised to fight for a law to make cheating educators give the money back. He said the law does not affect employees' due process rights.

I looked it up. Here's what the law does say:

A teacher or other certificated professional personnel's salary increase or bonus that is based in whole or in part on an evaluation which included student assessment results, standardized test scores, or standardized test answers that were falsified by such teacher or professional or known or caused by such teacher or professional to have been falsified shall be automatically forfeited.

What an awful, tortured sentence.

My concern is this: Who has to say that a given teacher cheated in order to trigger the provisions of this bill? The Bowers/Wilson report names 180 teachers. Is the fact that they were named enough? Are they all liable? Is it enough to prove that the results were changed, even if you don't bother to prove which teachers actually changed them? The phrase we see repeatedly throughout the Bowers/Wilson report is that they "knew or should have known". Is that good enough?

If not, where exactly do you draw the line? What about the teachers who resigned rather than face termination? Does that count as an admission of guilt, or is it a get-out-of-jail-free card?

Okay, what about the teachers who didn't resign? How about the ones whom the APS tribunal recommended to be fired? (That's three so far, I believe.) Is that justification enough? They haven't faced the PSC, the Professional Standards Commission, to defend their teacher certifications. What if the PSC doesn't act to censure them? And then they're looking at criminal charges, and there's no guarantee they'll be found guilty in a court of law. Will they still have to give back the money?

And then there are the other 80-100 educators-on-leave who have been collecting their salaries all this time. Since the bill specifically says bonuses, not salaries, I guess they get to keep that no matter what.

Those are the kind of big whopping loopholes that the bill has to address, and it doesn't.

Besides, isn't there already a law that deals with people who profit from fraud? Well, I guess they have to actually be convicted of fraud for that to be relevant. I suppose it could make a certain amount of sense for the code to actually say that it's not OK for teachers to lie, but surely that's already there, somewhere. Isn't it?

HB 692 looks more like a publicity stunt than meaningful legislation. That's not the side of this issue I want to be on. I want the guilty parties -- the real guilty parties, the ones who forced dozens of teachers to choose between committing fraud or losing their jobs -- to pay for what they've done. I don't want the General Assembly to waste time passing loosely-defined, unenforceable laws.

And I especially don't want them closing the barn door after the horses are gone. A good defense attorney, or even a mediocre one, will argue that crooked teachers can't be subjected to the provisions of a law that wasn't in place at the time their actions occurred. Alleged actions, I mean. I'd hate for this bill to be used to justify crooked teachers keeping the money because the law wasn't in place when they stole it.