From diploma factory to jail cell

In a widely reported case last month, a judge in Atlanta, Ga., made national news by taking test score fraud seriously enough to sentence a number of teachers and administrators to lengthy terms of incarceration for it. My instinct to applaud His Honour is held in check only by a whiff of hypocrisy emanating from the sordid affair.

It’s difficult to be overly scandalized by teachers falsifying test results within systems that have all but mandated cheating. Welfare states, such as ours, see diploma factories as links in the chain of income redistribution. Fraud is institutionalized in various educational models under headings such as “social promotion,” “affirmative action,” and so on; programs, in short, that rank test results by status rather than merit.

Ironically, once in a while, our institutions balk at their own endeavours to achieve what they consider (or mistake for) social justice, and come down hard on some unlucky souls caught in the unfriendly crossfire between society’s bifurcated ethics — and a crotchety judge.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry W. Baxter spent six months getting to the bottom of what the prosecution described as an educational racket. The probe, sparked by investigative journalists at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, covered a long period. Eventually, 35 Atlanta teachers and administrators were indicted on charges of conspiring to inflate the test scores of students of low-performing public schools. Twenty two made plea-deals with the prosecutors (they weren’t exactly “plea bargains”) and 13 decided to take their chances with a jury. They shouldn’t have. At trial, their peers adopted the harsh label of the prosecutors, and found 11 of the accused guilty of racketeering (potentially 20 years in prison) as well as some lesser crimes. They acquitted only one teacher. The ranking educator in the district, ex-Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Beverly L. Hall, died before the trial began, maintaining her innocence.

A former Georgia attorneygeneral, Michael Bowers, participated in the investigation. CNN quoted him as saying that teachers held “cheating parties” to improve the students’ answers on standardized tests. Bowers said educators cheated out of pride, to earn bonuses, to enhance their careers or to keep their jobs. Bowers didn’t say, but it should surprise me, if the fraud-artists masquerading as educators, or at least some, hadn’t actually convinced themselves that they were levelling the playing field for the disadvantaged and the underprivileged.

An egalitarian resolution to let no one fall behind wouldn’t have cut any ice with Judge Baxter. He was not amused, let alone impressed, by fraud as a manifestation of social conscience. The judge ordered the cheating teachers, principals, test coordinators and school administrators to serve anywhere from one to seven years in prison. Plainly outraged, he noted that some of the promoted students in the lowperforming schools couldn’t even read. “This is not a victimless crime,” Judge Baxter said. “Search your souls.”

After pronouncing his draconian sentences, the judge took his own advice and searched his soul. It proved to be a fruitful exercise, because soon he called back three of the convicted educators he had sentenced to seven years of penal servitude a few days earlier, and reduced their sentences to three years. “I want to modify the sentence,” Judge Baxter said in court, “so that I can live with it.” If the judge was also concerned with the ability of the disgraced ex-educators to live with what were, even after the reduction, drastic penalties, he didn’t say.

What His Honour was quoted as saying was that when a judge goes home and keeps thinking over and over again that something is wrong, something is usually wrong. I wholeheartedly agree. When it comes to our education system, I think there are several things wrong. Nor can they be remedied by locking up a few cheating educators and throwing away the key.

One thing that is wrong with education, among many other things, is that it’s being used as a vehicle for social mobility.

When it comes to our education system, several things are wrong. They can’t be remedied by locking up a few teachers

There’s no doubt that education enhances mobility in the social as well as the economic sphere, but only when it does so incidentally and spontaneously. When social or economic advantage is education’s primary purpose, it creates neither social nor economic advantages. What it creates is bankrupt governments pressuring emaciated taxpayers to educate their academically disinclined children beyond their intellectual means.

As soon as a society starts educating its young, not to acquire and refine knowledge, but “to leave no child behind,” education’s social and economic advantage vanishes, to be replaced by the disadvantage of being a high-school dropout in a society that will before long require a PhD to clean a washroom.

Advantages are derived from their relative rarity. The word “glamour” goes back to medieval times and it comes from “grammar,” because in the Middle Ages, the art of reading and writing, available only to a few royal or ecclesiastical scribes, was rare enough to appear glamorous. Rudolf, the mad alchemist king of Bohemia, spent most of his life trying to turn base metals into gold. Even he had a sane moment, though, when he asked his famulus: “Tell me, if we succeed, will gold still be worth anything?” It’s a question diploma factories rarely ask.