(Long Island, NY) A casual glance at the recent headlines referring to the Uniondale test cheating problem will make you think the headline writer needs to go back to school. “Probe Finds More Schools Cheating On Tests” certainly made ME double-take. The SCHOOL is cheating on the tests? What?
Yes. Turns out that the Uniondale school system is on probation because of test tampering. An earlier scandal had one teacher in Freeport adding points to exams, saying he was “worried” that his students weren’t ready for the test due to excessive absences. That’s excessive teacher absences.
Some sources say complaints of such “internal” problems has increased quite a bit in recent years, and with two school systems making the headlines, it’s enough to make you curious as to what is NOT getting reported.
At press time, the State Attorney General’s office hasn’t named any suspects in the most recent test tampering case, but it’s a worrisome issue, especially for any parent who might be vaguely curious as to whether little Johnny and Jenny are going to be truly ready for the bad, mean, competitive world out there come graduation time.
And that’s probably a symptom of the problem right there. Any parent who has to wonder, “What the hell’s going on at my kid’s damn school?” is already many steps behind.
Then again, it could be argued that the cheating, test tampering, and other shenanigans is all part of these Long Island kids’ preparation to enter life in New York. Look at my past columns over the last year; fake cop in Farmingdale, Pete McGowan and his best buddy Richard Schaffer, the Wayne Prospect bribery scandal. All of these role models! Not just for our children, but for our teachers, too.
What do the kiddies learn from all this? For starters, it’s OK to fudge the books when it suits you, when it saves your bacon, or when the sky is partly cloudy. It’s only a crime if you get caught.
Of course, what most of the people who follow in McGowan and Prospect’s footsteps fail to learn as children is that while it’s not easy to catch the bad guys, they do manage to get caught quite often…usually through their own stupidity.
Which leads us back around full circle. If the schools accused of test tampering wind up being guilty of having a combination of lax test security and the bad apples who take advantage of it, we have a self-perpetuating problem. The schools with cooked-up test results turn out substandard students. These students are ill-equipped to compete with those who had the benefit of teachers who actually care about them.
The dumbed-down kiddies wander into the world with fewer options, less of an edge. Some of them make their own way, in spite of their educations rather than because of them. Others find they feel it’s best to resort to the same tricks their early role models did. Cutting corners, taking advantage, out and out cheating. In light of this, are we really shocked at the McGowans and Prospects of this world? After all, they were just following their role models from back in the day, right?
Not all teachers are bad apples, but the ones who do ruin the system with test tampering, fudging scores, and other practices do more harm than they know. They’re setting us all up for another round of crappy scandals, lame-brain politicians, and ignorant policies made up by water-heads. If the old saying that we get the government we deserve is in any way true, we can hold the bad apple teachers responsible for some of it at the very least.
Thanks a lot, teach.
