Quote:
Originally Posted by DrPhil
I doubt it was just loser teachers and staff who were too darn lazy and wanted to misappropriate funds. But, if people insist that's what the issue is, why are these schools being given teachers and staff who are lazy losers who want to misappropriate funds?
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Who is insisting this?
I think it was caused by a county office and superintendent who wanted the appearance of achievement and the accolades that went with it, even though they had no faith in their staff or in their students. And they created the pressure for everyone else. I think there are probably a small number of teachers and principals, as there were elsewhere in the state, who would have been willing to cheat anyway because as individuals they wanted to look good or wanted their kids to look good. But I have no reason to think those individuals, independent of the corrupt county office and the pressure the county office created, would have been overrepresented in APS.
There are very similar districts in the Atlanta area (and in other urban areas of the state) that have the demographics and history that I think your are describing, and they didn't have similar wide spread problems with cheating. So it's kind of hard to think that APS's issues were caused by larger social issues that might seem to excuse the county leadership when other very similar districts were able to resist.
AGDee, we're not seeing transfers between districts down here, even at similar schools who didn't cheat and were labeled Needs Improvement. Maybe people don't realize they can request them. But because it isn't happening, I doubt that presented a tangible enough fear in the leadership to drive the pressure. I think you're looking at people who got tired of people thinking they were in charge of "bad" school, wanted to look good, and were willing to do whatever it took, even if it meant cheating first the kids and then everyone else. Something was uniquely, at least for Georgia, wrong in this system, I suspect it's going to come back to the superintendent, although I think it may have been even more her core staff that were responsible.
ETA: We've got other dysfunctional systems in Georgia for sure, regardless of the history and demographics, but in most of them, individual teachers are still apparently expected to act ethically and still do apparently for the most part, even when the leadership is nutty. I think the difference is that the leadership in APS, maybe aided by previous dysfunction, was able to go educationally Enron.
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