Is anyone following the  Atlanta cheating scandal?  It’s the biggest in the nation’s history. Last week  a dozen people were sentenced to jail. Two participants have so far died.

Here for me is the really interesting part. You can read a long article in the New York Times (that being the preeminent symbol of media that no longer does investigative journalism) and not have any idea what actually happened.

 When you hear people talk about cheating in a school, you assume that students are cheating. That was not the case in Atlanta.

Teachers, principals, and administrators were cheating, massively, over many years. Hundreds of people were involved in the sense that they either changed scores on tests or they helped facilitate the whole thing.

And the big boss gangster of this whole thing was Superintendent Beverly Hall. She had been given a huge award two years before by President Obama  because she was the star superintendent in the country. 

 Why were these people cheating like this? The coverage of this huge event is so shallow and skimpy that the average American has never heard of this event and still has no idea what it was all about. The schools were so bad, and the students had such low scores on their tests, that officials had to get involved in order to protect their own careers and incomes!

They conspired to raise the grades of the students, but the motive was to help themselves. In fact, they hurt students because the students had no sense of how bad their education was to that point. and how, for most of them, the real problem was that Georgia insists on using sight-words so children never learn to read properly. 

 Here is more about this outlandish crime: "The cheating scandal in Atlanta – the real story"

http://www.examiner.com/article/cheating-scandal-atlanta-the-real-s...