Archive for March 16th, 2006

Cheating teachers

Thursday, March 16th, 2006

From CNN, 32 teachers lose their jobs in Florida for buying fake transcripts.

While I sympathize with the idea that continuing ed classes can be a burden on teachers who more often than not already have way too much to do, buying fake credits to cheat your way around the requirements crosses the line.

You wouldn’t accept faked work from your students, why should your students accept it from you?

The punishments stem from a scam run by former high school teacher William McCoggle, who claimed to offer continuing-education classes through a private company. McCoggle pleaded guilty to fraud in November, admitting he did little more than sell transcripts, requiring no tests, homework or other academic work.

Oddly,

dozens of students and parents defended the teachers who lost their jobs, saying that removing them in the middle of the school year would be too disruptive.

On the other hand, it does send the message that cheating will not be tolerated. From anyone.

Here’s more from the Miami Herald

”You don’t know me,” said Currais, one of 32 teachers who was fired or forced to resign for participating in Miami-Dade’s continuing-education credit-buying scandal.“You don’t know anything about me except the one mistake you saw on that paper.”

This is often the reaction I’ve gotten from students who were caught cheating on assignments.

Here’s more.

Many of the teachers who would comment said they never tried to submit the MOTET classes when they renewed their licenses.

”When I realized it didn’t seem like a normal education program, I refused to use the credits I received,” [Maria] Dominguez said. “If the School Board is going to terminate my employment, I will file an appeal and take it to a hearing with the UTD’s support.”

And hopefully this reacher will win the appeal, or not have to go through it in the first place. It’s certainly possible that some of these teachers didn’t know it was a scam until the scammer got their money and they got a transcript without having done any work. My next step might have been to sue the pants off the scammer.

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Kansas again

Thursday, March 16th, 2006

This post is about Kansas education. No, it’s not evolution this time, though – it’s sex ed that’s under the gun this time.

School districts in Kansas must get parents’ written permission before teaching their children sex education

So … special permission is required to teach sex ed now. One wonders if this will increase the teen pregnancy rate in Kansas, snce it’s likely to reduce the number of kids getting sex ed classes. (Of course, if they were “abstinence only” classes, it might not make much of a difference.) Perhaps for an encore, the Kansas school board can require parental consent before teaching evolution in biology class or atomic theory in chemistry – both as controversial as sex ed is with some religious folks.

“It’s about empowering parents. That’s the bottom line,” said board chairman Steve Abrams.

No, it’s about making it more of a chore to have sex ed classes – so more kide won’t have them. After all, if we don’t teach kids what sex is, there is just no way for them to find out what it is on their own. (Oops – I just blew another sarcasm meter there.)

I look at it this way – do you want your kids to learn about sex from you and a curriculum at school that you have access to, or do you want them to learn it “on their own” from the seedier side of the internet?

One board member wants the new policy to go further and require abstinence-only courses. “We need to send the correct message,” Kathy Martin said.

Under her proposal, a school could lose its state accreditation if it did not offer nine weeks of instruction on “abstinence until marriage” at least once in grades 6-9.

The “correct message” being that they want teenaged boys and girls to get sexually transmitted diseases? Because that abstinence instruction isn’t going to magically turn off the hormones. It may make it more likely that those hormone-filled teens won’t use any protection, though.

(… and I fail to see how an “abstinence only” message would require nine weeks of instruction. Here, I’ll give it in one sentence. “Not having sex is the only 100% effective way to avoid pregnancy. So don’t have sex.”)

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