Even when the cheating is not immediately recognized, its effects remain ruinous. It’s a betrayal — by teachers, principals and district brass — of the children given into their care and the parents who entrusted their children to the school district. Consequently, out of the perpetrators’ own now-prostituted integrity, there spreads throughout the school district and out into the community a miasma of demoralization — like that already documented among CCSD teachers.
That toxicity penetrates even deeper, as the principals and administrators who embraced the original cheats now face another existential risk: For them, honest and deeply committed teachers and other possible whistleblowers become a looming threat — constituting not only likely sources of social contempt, but also of possible public disclosure, professional disgrace and legal prosecution. Thus, these teachers, too, “need,” at the least, to be intimidated and suppressed, or even somehow expelled entirely from the school system.
It is not surprising, therefore, that America’s administrator-heavy, bureaucratic public-school systems continue, decade after decade, to fail to improve — despite the ever-increasing money routed their way.
The reason — although ostentatiously ignored for decades — is that the centralized, rule-maximizing and administrator-centric approach to education flies in the teeth of what research has long demonstrated about the characteristics of effective schools.
Way back in 1986, Eric A. Hanushek summarized the findings of key studies from 1971, 1975, 1976, 1981 and 1986, noting that they were “unequivocal: Teachers and schools differ dramatically in their effectiveness.” (Emphasis in the original.)
Yet, America’s political class — willfully indifferent and slavishly kowtowing to the existing public-school-interest groups that feed off taxpayers and fund the reelections of that same political class — has increasingly tightened a rule-maximizing, administrator-centric system that blocks effective teaching.
Indeed, this information has been known for at least a quarter century, but cynically ignored and suppressed.