Diane Ravitch Wraps Up the Atlanta Cheating Scandal
At her blog, Diane Ravitch brings together three stories about the recent convictions and sentencing of 11 Atlanta educators who cheated to raise their students' test scores. The eleven people were lead away in shackles, some to sentences up to 20 years. Let's just all agree that what they did was wrong. But they were tried and convicted under the RICO Act. You remember that one - it's the one the Feds like to use for racketeering. So let's compare and contrast. One was by Richard Rothstein . In this brilliant article, Rothstein argued that the 11 convicted educators were “taking the fall” for a thoroughly corrupt testing regime that set impossible goals and punished those who can’t meet them: Rothstein writes: Eleven Atlanta educators, convicted and imprisoned, have taken the fall for systematic cheating on standardized tests in American education. Such cheating is widespread, as is similar corruption in any institution—whether health care...