Re: the teachers who ceated on test scores. What really happened here is simple: Most if not all of these teachers and administration got their jobs and no doubt their degrees largely thanks to affirmative action. They don't really know how to turn around these failing schools and failing students. Their own experience is pretty much "it doesn't matter" just fake the data and push them through with affirmative action. When you add in the very real risk that having these students fail would result in possibly firing the teachers and most certainly no bonus for the teachers than the incentive to give these students what they didn't earn is great. There are two huge failings here; the teaching and meeting the students need. But also the failure that is affirmative action. Would you go under the knife of a surgeon who got his job through affirmative action? Well, there is a good chance that someday you will. And the same blinders will be in place that allowed these teachers to pass the students through without actually teaching them anything. Once that student enters medical school the school will bend over backwards to make sure they graduate. They want and need the money, they don't need the negative attention that flunking them out would bring so they WILL graduate. Once they have become a doctor who is going to come forward and say they are incompetent? So until they have screwed up enough times such that they cannot be ignored they will keep their jobs. Essentially this is what happened to the teachers and admnistrators. Do you think for a moment that this problem has been fixed? Not on your life. What has been "fixed" is that now every teacher knows that they will need to be more careful and cover their tracks to keep from getting caught. For all the good these trials are doing we might just as well let them go back to teaching. We are treating the symptom and not the problem.

Two thumbs up.