The potential 20-year prison terms in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal are unduly harsh. I believe the defendants either had woefully inadequate legal representation, or the result was a gross miscarriage of justice.
No disrespect for the dead intended, but in my opinion, the guilty party, Beverly Hall, was the person who deserved to be charged and sentenced. The teachers, several single mothers among them, had little choice but to follow the mandates of the superintendent or lose their livelihoods. I am not excusing the behavior of the educators who participated; I am simply saying the real problem has not been addressed.
The AJC noted, “The former educators helped create a false impression of academic success, then covered up their actions — in part because The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was investigating the scandal.”
If you want to get an idea how often a false impression of academic success is created, you need to consider how many students in the United States graduate high school every year, yet are required to take remedial classes during their freshman year in college to acquire the skills their high school diplomas say they were supposed to have already acquired.
As the AJC has reported, nearly 23,000 Georgia students were taking learning support because they entered college unprepared. In fact, if creating a false impression of academic success is the standard, then almost every public school district in the country would be guilty.
Who will hold these high schools and their teachers responsible for the inadequate education their students’ diplomas certified they had received?
The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, reported in 2010, “Every year in the United States, nearly 60 percent of first-year college students discover that, despite being fully eligible to attend college, they are not ready for postsecondary studies. After enrolling, these students learn that they must take remedial courses in English or mathematics, which do not earn college credits. This gap between college eligibility and college readiness has attracted much attention in the last decade, yet it persists unabated.”
While some institutions have cut back the number of students they will accept who require remedial instruction, these students are doomed to a fate of reduced opportunity that a college education would provide even though they have, based upon the issuance of their high school diplomas, satisfied the requirements of the 12th grade, and should be thus capable of going on to the next level of instruction as college freshmen. To argue otherwise is to acknowledge their high schools did not adequately prepare them.
The real problem has to do with the fact these students do not get the kind of rigorous instruction, beginning in elementary school, that will adequately prepare them for the rigors of a college education. It is a function of a poor public school curriculum, and how elementary and secondary teachers are trained in our nation’s colleges.
I know teachers and teacher organizations will resent that criticism, but rather than be defensive, we need to fix the problem. The real victims are our children who labor through the process through 12 grades, and then are handed diplomas worth much less than their face value.
