NYC Educator: Today in Creative Headlines

NYC Educator: Today in Creative Headlines

Today in Creative Headlines

Someone trying to alert me to the perfidy of teachers tweeted this headline at me the other day: FBI probes allegations of deep rooted academic fraud in NYC Schools. It sounds pretty scary, doesn't it? Boy, those teachers must be really terrible. Clearly they don't give a damn about children and are only concerned with themselves.

That's the stereotype you get hit with if you spend your days trying to help city children, and as if that's not enough, they accuse you of hating them because you oppose "school choice." It makes no difference that charters do not, on the whole, do any better than we do. It's of no consequence that they almost never accept students like mine, teenagers learning basic English for the first time. It doesn't matter that they don't take a whole lot of kids with special needs or that they dump inconvenient kids back into the public schools.

Nope, we all suck, and we all ought to be fired. That headline ought to be enough evidence for anyone. The FBI? That's some serious stuff right there. They don't come out just for fun. We're under some serious scrutiny now, and if we weren't all criminals, why would they need to call the FBI? But wait, if you read the actual story, you start to notice things:

Holden turned over records compiled by former and current faculty members at Maspeth High School in Queens, where teachers say administrators encouraged cheating on exams, enforced a “no-fail policy,” and retaliated against staffers who didn’t play ball.

Haven't we heard about that school before? Is this not, in fact, a new scandal? And hey, if it's so "deep-rooted" in NYC "schools," why is there only one school mentioned? Doesn't "deep-rooted" mean widespread? And then there's this:

In Atlanta, eight educators were convicted under a RICO statute of manipulating student test scores and sentenced to prison in 2015.

I'm not exactly sure that eight indicates, "deep-rooted." Nonetheless, I'm assuming that means in CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Today in Creative Headlines