Friday, September 6, 2013

Atlanta Cheating Scandal: Tamara Cotman Found Not Guilty

First Trial Ends in Acquittal in School Scandal in Atlanta

LINK

Tamara Cotman

ATLANTA — The first Atlanta school administrator to face trial in the largest school cheating scandal in the country was found not guilty on Friday.

The case, heard by a Fulton County Superior Court jury, centered on whether Tamara Cotman, a former administrator, influenced a witness during the investigation of widespread cheating in the 52,000-student district.

That investigation resulted in 65 indictments against 35 teachers and administrators, among them Beverly Hall, the superintendent once highly regarded for her work turning around a district plagued by poor academic performance.

Ms. Cotman’s three-week trial was narrowly focused, and it was far from clear whether the acquittal could be counted as an indicator of how the broader case, scheduled to start next spring, would fare.

Prosecutors hope to prove that a group of educators conspired to falsely raise scores on Georgia’s Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, then covered up the cheating and retaliated against people who tried to report it.

Bonuses, federal money and Dr. Hall’s national reputation were tied to higher test scores, and thus the motivation for cheating, the indictment alleges.

Prosecutors said Ms. Cotman, who oversaw 21 Atlanta schools, influenced witnesses and advised principals under investigation to essentially rebel against state investigators.

Benjamin Davis, her lawyer, said during the trial that the case was not about cheating and that his client never witnessed any criminal behavior and did not try to block the investigation.

Prosecutors tried to portray Ms. Cotman as an operator in an atmosphere of deceit that stemmed from immense pressure to protect jobs and produce high test scores at any cost.

“She did it on the backs of babies,” Fani Willis, an assistant district attorney, said during closing arguments.

As preparations for what will surely be a complex and logistically challenging racketeering trial of nearly three dozen educators continue, personal troubles are beginning to surface.

Dr. Hall has had a diagnosis of breast cancer, said Richard Deane, her lawyer, who added that the court had been advised of her medical condition.

In addition, Willie Davenport, 66, an elementary school principal named in the indictment, had breast cancer and died this week.

Atlanta Cheating Scandal

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The Empire's Clothes

Susan D. Blum | Posted 08.26.2013 | College

Somewhere, deep in the mists of the past, there may have once been a good reason for requiring testing. But that reason seems so far beside the point that it recedes invisibly.

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Cheating Teachers Teach Cheats

Victor Dorff | Posted 08.03.2013 | Politics

Cases of teachers and principals changing their students' answers after the test, or filling in the correct answers that students left blank, have made headlines in recent months.

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The Cheating Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Jason Stanford | Posted 07.23.2013 | Politics

A new General Accounting Office report demonstrates that cheating by school officials on standardized tests has become commonplace despite the use of security measures the report recommends.

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From School Reform to Reform School

Patricia McGuire | Posted 07.07.2013 | DC

Allocating one day out of 180 days of teaching to celebrate teachers when they are put down the rest of the year is just patronizing. If we really want to honor and celebrate teachers, let's show them some respect, support and encouragement.

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Why Don't More Kids Cheat?

Posted 04.29.2013 | Politics

This opinion was republished with permission from TNTP Blog, a national nonprofit committed to ending the injustice of educational inequality. By T...

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Ex-Atlanta School Chief Denies Alleged Role In Cheating Scandal

AP | Posted 06.22.2013 | Politics

ATLANTA — Lawyers for former Atlanta schools superintendent Beverly Hall say allegations that she participated in a scheme to inflate test score...

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Desperate Kid Cheats Under Pressure -- What Else Is New?

Victor Dorff | Posted 06.16.2013 | College

"Pressure" is inevitable for students today. The question is, how do we teach our students to evaluate the reality of the pressure they feel and to deal with it appropriately?

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Missing the Point on Cheating -- The Incentives Problem is far Bigger

Elaine Weiss | Posted 06.15.2013 | Politics

Cheating is just one of many responses to heightened pressure in recent years to deliver the impossible: substantially increased test scores, in short order.

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The Devil's Due

Adam Kirk Edgerton | Posted 06.14.2013 | Politics

We have to start measuring our success in the happiness of our children, not in the height of our data plots, if we are to avoid more misguided leadership and foolhardy fads.

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Rhee Cheating Investigation Dregs Up Old Memos

HuffingtonPost.com | Joy Resmovits | Posted 04.14.2013 | Politics

More than five years after Michelle Rhee took over Washington, D.C., public schools, and nearly three years after she left her position as chancellor,...

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It's More Than Just Numbers

Andy Porter | Posted 06.04.2013 | Politics

Jobs were on the line. Money and glory were in the offing. One need only look to Wall Street, Las Vegas, or professional sports to see that any time meaningful consequences are involved, some folks are going to try to con the system.

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Who's Cheating Whom? Atlanta Scandal Makes Us Wonder What It's All About

Susan D. Blum | Posted 06.03.2013 | College

When all that matters is test results, people will do everything they can to make them look good. High-stakes testing gives the message that the process doesn't matter -- not even for teachers. High-stakes testing puts the attention on the measurable: simple answers to simple questions.

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Teachers Union Head Sounds Off On Cheating Scandal

The Huffington Post | William McGuinness | Posted 04.03.2013 | Politics

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, blamed "test-crazed" education policies in sharp comments released Tuesday regardi...

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High-stakes Testing Makes Cheating Inevitable

Jason Stanford | Posted 06.02.2013 | Politics

The latest example came late on Good Friday when an Atlanta grand jury indicted 35 teachers, administrators and principals under laws meant to target the mafia.

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School Cheating Suspects Ready To Surrender

AP | CHRISTINA A. CASSIDY | Posted 06.02.2013 | Politics

ATLANTA — When Beverly Hall first arrived in Atlanta as superintendent of the city's public school system, she cautioned she wouldn't be riding ...

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Why Teachers Cheat

David Callahan | Posted 06.01.2013 | Politics

Perhaps the best way to think of these cheating scandals is that they are the result of a natural experiment: What happens when you change incentives so that low test numbers translate into pain and high test numbers translate into rewards?

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Atlanta Cheating Suspects Expected To Surrender

AP | CHRISTINA A. CASSIDY | Posted 06.01.2013 | Crime

ATLANTA — The criminal prosecution of dozens of Atlanta Public Schools educators presents considerable challenges for both prosecutors and defen...

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3 Dozen Indicted In Massive School Cheating Scandal

AP | KATE BRUMBACK | Posted 05.30.2013 | Politics

ATLANTA -- Juwanna Guffie was sitting in her fifth-grade classroom taking a standardized test when, authorities say, the teacher came around offering ...

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Educator: Teacher Helped Students Cheat Because They Were 'Dumb As Hell'

Posted 08.30.2012 | Home

Atlanta math teacher Shayla Smith is accused of giving students answers to state exams because they were "dumb as hell." A tribunal hired to invest...

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Virginia District Uncovers Teacher Cheating, Students Must Retake Exams

Posted 07.26.2012 | Home

Students at a Virginia school district had to retake standardized exams after five teachers were found to have given "inappropriate assistance" to stu...

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Atlanta Schools Superintendent Urges Recovery From Cheating Scandal

Posted 08.29.2012 | Home

In a letter Atlanta residents, Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Erroll Davis has pledged to move beyond the cheating scandal that rocked the stat...

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Cheating Found In 3 D.C. Schools

HuffingtonPost.com | Joy Resmovits | Posted 06.22.2012 | Home

Three Washington, D.C., schools cheated on 2011 standardized tests, according to a forensic report the district will release today. Of the 38 Washi...

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High Stakes Testing: Who's Cheating Whom?

Dennis Van Roekel | Posted 05.28.2012 | Home

Let's get back to the core purpose of public education -- ensuring students have access to a great education that prepares them for lifelong learning and success -- and leave the pressure cooker for pot roasts.

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Schools Nationwide Flagged For Possible Cheating, Some Question Analysis

AP/The Huffington Post | Posted 03.25.2012 | Home

ATLANTA — Hundreds of school systems nationwide exhibit suspicious test scores that point to the possibility of cheating, according to an investigat...

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How Sleuths Catch Cheater Teachers

HuffingtonPost.com | Joy Resmovits | Posted 03.01.2012 | Home

The first time Bob Wilson, a former DeKalb County, Georgia, district attorney, interviewed educators suspected of cheating on exams in 56 Atlanta scho...

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Thursday, September 5, 2013

A Personal Favorite: NYC Educator On Eva Moskowitz' Dislike of Bill De Blasio

Bill may be happy that Eva doesn't like him.

Bill De Blasio and his wife Charlene and family are good for New York City.

Elect them. It takes a family.

Betsy Combier

NYC Educator

Wednesday, September 04, 2013

LINK

Eva Gets Creative

In what's likely to be the new status quo for the reformy crowd, overpaid charter magnate Eva Moskowitz takes surging Bill de Blasio to task for making the "choice" to send his kids to public school. The previous meme was simply trashing people like Diane Ravitch and Matt Damon, who had relatives in private schools. At that time, their absurd and idiotic argument was that such people wanted to deprive poor children the opportunity to goose-step along with Eva and Doug Lemov.

You see, in the quest for our tax dollars, it makes no difference that Eva and KIPP are not offering what's at Sidwell Friends or Dalton. Who cares if it's a test-prep factory you wouldn't send your kid to on a bet? The point is that is your choice. And the more crappy schools poor children can choose, the more money for the likes of Eva, Geoff Canada, and Rupert Murdoch, all of whom love your children more than you do.

The great thing about this is they can now trash absolutely everyone who opposes charter schools. You chose to send your kids to free public schools and now you oppose us taking the high scorers and leaving what's left for neighborhood schools to fret over? You, sir, are a hypocrite!

As am I, of course, for sending my kid to her local public school. What's really galling, if you bother to read her drivel, is that Eva doesn't want her fancy schools to have to take in the high needs kids public schools take without question. She repeatedly insists she's a public school, but let's face it, she makes twice what any public school principal does, spends all kinds of money on advertising, and sued to avoid facing a state audit.

What the hell kind of public school is that? Eva Moskowitz wants to pick and choose who gets to patronize her "success" academies, Eva Moskowitz wants to take state money, but she doesn't feel we lowly taxpayers have any right to know what she does with it.

Eva can write trash about Bill de Blasio in Rupert Murdoch's yellow rag every day of the year, for all I care. But it's pretty clear to me she isn't worthy to touch the hem of de Blasio's garment. And if I were de Blasio, I'd be glad. Who knows where that hand has been?

Monday, September 2, 2013

Patrick Walsh on Why He Supports Unions

Why I Am and Will Always Be Union

by patrickwalsh

Even though I was not really aware of it for years afterward, I was raised and informed in a union household. My father and my uncle ran a local of the International Longshoreman’s Association, the infamous ILA. I was a boy when my father went from being a union member to running a local. I remember the raucous celebration following his election and also remember having no idea of what exactly it meant. My friends’ fathers all seemed to be cops or firemen. Their jobs were very clearly defined. They wore uniforms. Not so my father, who, suddenly had to wear a suit sometimes. Nor did he explain much. What my brothers and sisters and I picked up about the business of unions, we picked up almost by osmosis. All we knew was that the phone rang at all hours of the day and night. Men were always looking for my father: men with the gruff voices of a long vanished New York, men who pronounced the word “father” as “fadar” as in , “Is your fadar dere?”

The men always seemed to be in trouble. Little by little we learned it was our father’s job as a union guy to help them. I never heard my father say, “ We need to look after each other” or “We need to protect each other.” I never heard my father use words like “empathy” or” brotherhood” or “justice.” And I’m not sure he ever did. I just heard him make those abstractions into realities for men who would have never tasted them, not in a million years, had it not been for the union. And slowly, in time, I learned that that was what unions did. Later, after my father’s death I happened to meet some of the men, here and there. It was as clear to me as it was to them that without the union the quality of their lives would have been grossly diminished. The unions afforded them a living wage and health care and due process and all of these combined afforded them dignity. I shudder to think what would become of them today in a world increasingly without work or unions. I shudder to think of what will become of many of my students when they need to find work in a few years. The union afforded my mother and father the wherewithal to feed, clothe and house no less than eleven children on his single modest salary and even buy us a house. The union, in very real terms, gave me my brothers and sisters. And it gave me something more: it infused in me a belief in the dignity of all labor and the sacrality of all human life. This was an immense gift that came with a sacred obligation.
These beliefs sank deep into my bones and they remain there. I am under no illusion that unions are perfect or ideal organizations any more than I am under the illusion that any human organization is perfect or ideal. I know that they can be as corrupt as any government or Wall Street hedge fund and if so they must be reformed.
But I am sure of this: the world grows crueler, more savage, more ahuman by the hour, in no small part because of the undermining or destruction of unions and all that comes with them. There are those who say that globalization, de-industrialization, technocracy, and ever increasing corporatism have made unions redundant.
They have certainly made them scarce and immensely weakened.
The results are obvious for all to see: a terrified and constantly shrinking middle class, less job security, greater fear and stress. This in turn makes us more and more selfish, less and less trusting, less and less fully human. We are perfecting the nightmarish vision of Thomas Hobbes, “The war of one man against all men.” Unions mediated against this horror show.

I understand that there are people, readers of Ayn Rand, for example, who believe that such a vicious fantasy world is somehow only natural and that such a state of ceaseless competition or outright war produces not merely splendid gadgets and gizmos but also freedom loving and heroic individuals; further that those who cannot compete in such a world should have thought of that before they were born.

I say that such a state mass produces spiritual mutants and monsters not unlike the ones currently running our nation and remaking it in their addled, diseased image.

I say the greatest display of freedom and heroism is to fully love another human being and that such an act is highly unlikely in a world fueled by insecurity and fear and limitless greed.

I say we have to find some kind of way to spark a rebirth of unionism in this nation or we will almost all soon be living lives that are barely recognizable as human.

I say happy Labor Day!

patrickwalsh | September 2, 2013 at 6:28 pm | URL: http://wp.me/pqvp4-Bh

Friday, September 6, 2013

First Trial Ends in Acquittal in School Scandal in Atlanta

By KIM SEVERSON, NY TIMES

Atlanta Cheating Scandal

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Wednesday, September 04, 2013

Monday, September 2, 2013