High crimes and misdemeanors ... in an Atlanta middle school?

The older I get, the less I find most of the happenings in the world to be Manichean, binary, as in good or bad. Of course, there are instances when I have no doubts whatsoever--like how President "Dubya" Bush and his minions ought to be tried for war crimes and torture.

However, we hoi polloi don't get to positions of power and privilege, which means we have no idea how we might act if we, too, could bomb a country back to the Middle Age.  Criminal acts and high offices go together, I suppose!

Now, it is not as if we do not face moral questions day in and day out; we do.  It is just that our decisions influence the lives of very few others and, thus, we don't get accused of war crimes.

I urge you to read this essay in the New Yorker and judge for yourself whether the various characters mentioned there are guilty or innocent.  It is not an essay that deals with war. Nor is it about any form of violence as we would typically define violence.  It is all about a middle school cheating scandal.
(Btw, the magazine has opened up its entire content, archives included, in a summer-free-for-all. Read up all you can before the paywall goes up.)

So, a cheating scandal at a middle school. Given that it is a middle school, what can be the biggest scandal there that could merit a lengthy essay in the New Yorker?  It is not about misappropriation of money.  It is not about sex.  It is about, get ready, teachers and administrators fudging and manipulating the standardized testing so that their schools will not be dinged, and that the teachers and principals will not be fired from their jobs.  Slate described the plot well:

The story paints a portrait of how the pressure to meet unreal expectations on standardized tests drove teachers to cheat in order to save their jobs and prevent their school from shutting down.

If it were a work of fiction, we would refer to the teacher, Damany Lewis, as a protagonist.  Is he a hero?  A bad guy?  Do not jump into any conclusion until you have read that essay.  To quote from Slate, again:

Teachers at Parks Middle like Aviv’s protagonist, Damany Lewis, were forced to recalibrate their moral compasses to justify changing test answers on student papers or giving them test questions in advance.

Yep, "forced to recalibrate their moral compasses" because of the standardized tests that resulted from the highly controversial No Child Left Behind, which was the passionate domestic project of the war criminal, er, Bush.

Those war criminals didn't even get a rap on their knuckles, thanks to the snooper-in-chief who declared that "we need to look forward."  But, of course, the protagonist in this story loses his job, his marriage, his home ...

Lewis was the first to be fired. “I felt like someone had hit me with the butt end of an axe,” he said. He shaved off his dreadlocks, which, in Rastafarian tradition—a culture with which he sporadically associated—signalled the loss of a child. What troubled him most, he said, was that “I was fired for doing something that I didn’t even believe in.”
He applied for jobs at charter and alternative schools, community centers, and jails, but he didn’t get any of them. “Education let me go,” he finally concluded. He broadened his search, applying for positions that required manual labor. In interviews, he promised employers that he had the “persistence and tough skin of a middle-school teacher to bring to the workforce.” He applied for a job installing cable, and, after getting a nearly perfect score on the applicant test, he daydreamed about how he would use his teaching skills to help employees streamline the process. But a few days later the company told him that he didn’t have enough experience.
His house was foreclosed on and his car was repossessed. ... He supported his wife, their newborn son, and his daughter from his previous marriage by working as an auto mechanic.

Meanwhile, those war criminals are enjoying luxurious lives and spending hours painting awful art pieces!

Whoever said life is fair, eh!

No child left behind ... without a college diploma!

I have often remarked, cynically, that kids in elementary school are brainwashed into believing that the whole point of first grade is to get on that preparatory path to college.  In this modern world, the college degree is the holy grail.

My grandmother always reminded us about not joking about important things in life, especially cynically, because she believed that eventually they will come true.  Yes, some twisted logic about causation that is, but, hey, in this case it has come true!  An annual year-end kindergarten show has been canceled at a New York school (ht) because--hold on to your chairs, and look away from the screen if you are feeling queasy:

The reason for eliminating the Kindergarten show is simple. We are responsible for preparing children for college and career with valuable lifelong skills ...

So, it turns out that I was wrong.  The brainwashing does not start with the first grade, but right at kindergarten.  Hey little boys and girls, can you say SAT?

What the hell is wrong with the system, you ask?

It is simple, dear reader.

This didn’t come out of the blue. Kindergarten (and even preschool) has increasingly become academic — at the expense of things such as recess and the arts — in this era of standardized test-based school reform. In most states, educators are evaluated in large part on test scores of students (sometimes students they don’t have) and on showing that their students are “college and career ready,” the mantra of the Obama administration’s education initiatives.

Yep. As simple as that.  The George Obama presidencies effectively want to make sure that no child is left behind without a college degree.  Johnny may not be able to write or think, and may not be interested at all in going to college, but, by golly, we will make sure that a college diploma is had by all!

That letter to parents informing them about the cancellation ends with this:

Please do not fault us for making professional decisions that we know will never be able to please everyone. But know that we are making these decisions with the interests of all children in mind.

Oh yeah, in the best interests of all children.

If only the kindergarteners knew the real story that college screws everyone, not only the athletes

"Failure is not an option." well, it is.

We have reshaped the education system—largely through federal legislation—to an approach of "right answers, right answers, right answers." But life's not like that. We're putting a tremendous amount of value on being able to pick the right one out of four little bubbles. But this turns out not to be a very valuable skill. You can't take this skill out into the workplace and get paid for it.
My research assistant did a blog for the Washington Post about this mantra of "Failure Is Not an Option." Her point was, you can't learn anything unless you fail. Failure has to be an option. What does success mean if there's no failure? It just means that you've dropped the bar so low that everyone can walk over it.

That is Diane Ravitch speaking of her Damascene conversion of sorts on public education and No Child Left Behind.  I am reminded of Robert McNamara admitting much later in life about how wrong he was on the Vietnam War.
Finally, ...

If you could hear someone else interviewed about wrongness, who would it be?
That's a hard one. Donald Rumsfeld said he was wrong, but I don't even want to hear from him. [Former Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs Co-Chair, and former Citigroup Chair] Bob Rubin would be interesting, but he'll never admit he was wrong. Right now what's coming to mind are people who have never admitted that they're wrong about anything.
Like who?
Like basically everybody I've been associated with for the last 20 years.

No Test Left Behind :)