About Flagpole. (Athens, Ga.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (July 13, 2011)
SCANDAL SHOWS SCHOOL PROBLEMS MURDOCH'S TROIKA You could cite many reasons for the cheat ing scandal that has blown up the Atlanta public school system and given Georgia another black eye in the national media. The major reason, however, was probably the ego and arrogance of the now-departed superin tendent, Beverly Hall, and the culture within the school system that she perpetuated. Hall evidently cared little about actually providing children with an education. She wanted the ego gratification that came with "reforming" an urban school system and figured the best way to do it was by boosting student scores on standardized tests. It didn't matter how those test results were achieved, either. Many admin- : strators and teachers, under enor mous pressure to bolster scores, took part in schemes to erase and change answers on test forms so ;hat they could bring the results up to Hall's standards. The report compiled by state investigators expressed it this way: "APS became such a 'data- driven' system, with unreasonable and excessive pressure to meet targets, that Beverly Hall and her senior cabinet lost sight of conducting tests with integrity... In sum, a culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation permeated the APS system from the highest ranks down," the report said. The final tally: 178 educators, including 38 principals, took part in cheating. More than 80 of those educators confessed. Cheating was confirmed at 44 of the 56 schools that were investigated. In some ways, the Atlanta school system mess is an outgrowth of bad policy decisions made at the federal and state levels more than a decade ago. George W. Bush, first as governor of Texas and then as president, initi ated an education reform program now called "No Child Left Behind" that requires extensive testing of students in grades K-12. Schools whose students do not achieve federally mandated test scores can be penalized or shut down. Roy Barnes was enamored of the Bush school program and used it as the model for his own "A-Plus" education reform proposal that he pushed through the General Assembly while he was governor. School testing is important as a way of measuring a student's improvement, or lack of it, and pinpointing areas where more teaching might be needed. But programs like "No Child Left Behind" put so much emphasis on test ing that educators are driven to "teach to the test" rather than focus on the subject matter students really need to learn. When you take an egotist like Beverly Hall and combine her with an education program where so much of your success depends upon test scores, you wind up with cheating scandals like the one that has all but destroyed the Atlanta school system. This is not a problem isolated just to Atlanta. State investiga tors are still examining similar cur riculum test cheating allegations in the Dougherty County (Albany) school system. School systems in other states have been caught up in cheating scandals, including Baltimore, Houston, Michigan and Florida. In Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee was praised for the improved test scores that were seen at some underperforming schools while she was the superintendent there. Questions were raised and schools were flagged for high numbers of test questions that were changed from the wrong to the right answer. Elected leaders at both the federal and state levels should take a hard look at get ting back to a system that puts more focus on teaching subjects like reading, math and science and less emphasis on getting students ready for tests. Our kids deserve much better. The troika hurtles across the frozen plain. The wolves are close behind, and from time to time a peasant is hurled from the sleigh in the hope of letting the more important people escape. But nothing distracts the pack for long, not even when the occupants of the sleigh move up the pecking order and throw a couple of minor aristocrats to the wolves. Wait! What's this? They have thrown a newspaper to the wolves? An entire newspa per, with two hundred full-time employees and hundreds more freelance contributors? How do they think that that will help them to get away? The troika is called News International, the newspaper wing of Rupert Murdoch's globe- spanning media empire. The paper that has justbeen sacrificed is the News of the World, a Sunday tabloid that claims to have more readers than any other paper in the English- speaking world. The NoW makes a tidy profit, but this Sunday's edi tion will be its last. After 168 years, the institution that pioneered the art of persuad ing the emerging class of semi-literate English people to buy newspapers has been shut down by its owners. Semi-literates were con sumers too. If it took a steady diet of salacious and scandalous stories about the rich and/or famous to get them to read a newspaper, the publishers of the NoW were always willing to provide it. The advertisers flocked in and the "News of the Screws," as the magazine Private Eye dubbed it in the 1970s, flour ished like the green bay tree. It used to get its salacious and scandalous stories by paying celebrities' friends to betray them, or just by going through celebrities' garbage in search of letters, receipts, etc. Starting as long ago as the late 1990s, how ever, the NoW also started hacking new com munications technologies, even though that was against the law. Over the past decade the NoW has paid var ious shady characters to hack the voice-mails, emails and other electronic data of literally thousands of people, from members of the British royal family to Z-list celebrities. A few of them, suspecting they had been hacked, launched lawsuits against the paper, and the whole shabby enterprise began to unravel. The first peasants to be thrown from the troika were the NoWs royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, and the private eye he had paid to hack into the royal family's phone messages, Glenn Mulcaire. Both men went to prison in 2007. The management at the NoW insisted that they were just a couple of "bad apples"—but it paid their legal expenses, and probably much more besides, in order to buy their silence about any further hacking. The stone-walling worked for a while, as the police soft-pedaled the investigation (the NoW had been paying them for stories, after all). But details of the hacking continued to leak out anyway, and during this year sev eral more senior NoW journalists have been arrested for questioning, including former edi tor Andy Coulson. James Murdoch, the 80-year-old Rupert's son and heir apparent, was moved from London to New York in March, at least partly to put him beyond easy reach of the British legal system. (He was ultimately responsible for the NoW at the time of the crimes.) Last week it was revealed that the NoW had been hacking not only celebrities' voice-mails, but also those of a murdered schoolgirl, of the grieving families of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan and of victims of the terrorist attack in London in 2005. Public disgust was intense, and it was clearly time to throw the wolves a really big meal. The obvious candidate was Rebekah Brooks, who was the editor of the NoW in the early years of phone hacking (2000-03). She is now the chief executive of News International, and a close personal friend of Rupert Murdoch, so firing her would create the impression that Murdoch's empire was serious about cleaning house. Instead, Rupert Murdoch closed the News of the World itself down. His son James made the announcement, lamenting the loss of a paper with a "proud history of fighting crime, exposing wrong doing and regularly setting the news agenda for the nation." How true. Why, in its last edi tion it had a front-page story about Florence Brudenell-Bruce's revelation that her new boy friend, Prince Harry, was "fantastic in bed." The only picture they could find to illustrate the story, alas, showed her in her underwear. News International isn't really going to lose money by closing the NoW. It will be replaced almost immediately by a new Sunday edition of its weekday stable-mate, the Sun: new web addresses for thesunonsunday.com and TheSunOnSunday.co.uk were registered last week. As British Justice Secretary Ken Clarke said: "All they're going to do is rebrand it." But why didn't they just blame it all on Rebekah Brooks and fire Her? Because if Rebekah Brooks goes down, the next person in the line of fire will inevitably be James Murdoch himself. That cannot be allowed to happen, because he is leading News Corporation's bid for control of British Sky Broadcasting, which would give it utter domi nance in the British media and huge profits. So, leave Brooks out there to draw fire at least until the British government approves the BSkyB takeover bid. Then, if necessary, she can be thrown out of the troika, too. Gwynne Dyer Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journal ist whose articles are published in 45 countries. Tom Crawford tcrawford@gareport.com I W3CYCOA LW133 c.n SALUTATIONS, SENTlENTS.' OUR TOP STORY THIS NANOSECOND: DUE TO A PENDING LEGISLATIVE FORMALITY, OUR LAND MASS FACES AN IMMI NENT ACCOUNTING CRISIS'. SUPREME LEADER ORZAK MAS SIG NALLED HIS WILLINGNESS TO COM PROMISE—AGAIN AND AGAIN-- —AND AGAIN—\J—AND AGAIN'. AND IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING THAT WE CANNOT SOLVE THE ACCOUNTING CRISIS BY REDUCING THE BUDGET OF THE WARRIOR CASTE! SO CLEARLY THE REST of US ARE GOING TO HAVE TO CONTRACT OUR DIGESTIVE POUCHES AND MAKE Do WITH LESS! EXCEPT FOR THE WARRIOR CASTE, AND THE UPPER MOST ACCUMU LATORS Of SHINY STONESJ MX MXVMVl BUT OPPOSITION PARTY OVERLORDS CONTINUE TO RESIST THE IDEA Of A TAX INCREASE ON EVEN THE WEALTHIEST of sentients.' THEY SHOULD NOT BE PUNISHED For their | DEXTERITY IN ACCUMU LATING SHINY STONES. 1 COMING UP NEXT*. SHOULD WE resolve the Accounting crisis BY ABANDONING THE £l0£fli.Y ON THE NORTHERNMOST PLAINS—TO BE CONSUMED BY THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE BEASTS WHICH ROAM THERE? q FIRST THESE MESSAGES FROM THE MERCHANT CASTE. 8 FLAGPOLE.COM-JULY 13. 2011
