By Any Means Possible

Chat with Momma T: By Any Means Possible I wanted to make a comment on the cheating scandal in the Atlanta school system. I was watching Good Morning America yesterday morning and the ticker at the bottom of the screen said something like 200 school officials and teachers have been arrested for cheating in the past year. I just felt a little twinge of anger and feel compelled to respond. It is really difficult to be a successful teacher and there are so many dedicated teachers out there. What this does is to forever stamp Atlanta with a negative mark. Why did this happen? Well, what I am going say here is controversial but in my experience accurate. I previously worked at a school that was able to bolster their test scores by cheating. They got the test a week ahead of time and went over the questions in "study sessions". I refused to participate in these activities and applied for a transfer to another school. Everything has always been very much on the up and up at the school I work at now. How do you get to a point where this -by any means possible - attitude happens? The cheating that I mentioned previously happened before the No Child Left Behind Act. So that can't be the only reason. There is definitely too much pressure on educators to show test score improvement. I also strongly believe that some educators don't really believe that this is cheating. I can guaranteed that if we went back 15 years to my old faculty and interviewed the teachers and administrators involved that they would be surprised to hear that they may have been implicated in a cheating scandal. It is not something I completely understand, but I witness this on a continuous basis since I work with a varied segment of our population. Typically students from lower income homes and also very wealthy homes seem to have a totally different moral compass. For example- if something, such as an Ipod, is out in the open and they need it- it is free for the taking. If they are taking a test and they can text and look up answers-so be it! I actually took a chemistry class for my master's program in the late 1980's and some of the Atlanta school system teachers in there cheated on tests. I was pretty horrified,because it was very flagrant. They didn't understand why they couldn't work together on the test when the professor left them alone the whole exam period. Does this just represent a difference in social class or culture? I still don't understand and I am old now! Let me know what you think! Link: http://chatwithmommat.blogspot.com/2011/06/chat-with-momma-t.html?spref=bl

10:30:00 AM

by Momma T

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