Atlanta Teachers Get Sentences Longer Than Some Mobsters...

If Black Teachers Should Get 20 Years In Prison for Helping Students Cheat on Tests in Atlanta, How Much Time Should Bureaucrats at the U.S. Department of Education and various State and District Boards of Education Get for Cheating Black Children Out of a Decent Education for 150 Years? "Don 't Hate the Playa--Hate the Game!" - Brittney Cooper    ---------------------------------------------------------------------- America is criminalizing Black teachers: Atlanta's cheating scandal and the racist underbelly of education reform Our educational system stacks the deck against Black children -- now we're throwing their teachers in jail (Opinion of The Black Star Project) - Irony is Black women guards are forced to take away a Black woman teacher for "cheating" Black children. By Brittney Cooper April 8, 2015 Last week, an Atlanta jury convicted 11 teachers and school administrators of racketeering in a system-wide cheating scandal. Yes, you read that correctly. Teachers and administrators inflating student scores on standardized tests is now considered "organized crime" in this country, and is punishable by more 20 years in prison, in these cases. I am an educator. I am a Black woman who may someday mother a Black child. I have taught other Black mothers' children. Much of my educational success in elementary school is directly attributable to high performance on standardized tests that caused my white teachers to notice me and intervene on my behalf to get me "tracked" into higher-achieving classrooms. I believe all children deserve access to a good, high-quality,public education. Therefore, I don't have to condone cheating in any form (and I don't) to assert that what has happened in Atlanta to these teachers is a travesty. The pictures that emerged last week of handcuffed Black schoolteachers being led out of Southern courtrooms in one of the country's largest urban Black school systems were absolutely heartbreaking. Scapegoating Black teachers for failing in a system that is designed for Black children, in particular, not to succeed is the real corruption here. Since the early 1990s, we have watched the deprofessionalization of teaching, achieved through the proliferation of "teacher fellow" programs and the massive conservative-led effort to defund public education in major urban areas throughout the country. There is no longer a consensus that a good public education - a hallmark of American democracy - should be considered a public good. Black children have for generations been the primary victims of this continuing social mendacity about the national value of education. More than 51 percent of children who attend public schools live in poverty. In Georgia, the percentage of Black children living in poverty hovers right around 39 percent. For Latino children, the number is consistently over 40 percent. Nationally, the number for Black children is 39 percent, according to most recent data, and 33 percent for Latino youth. Eighty percent of children in Atlanta Public Schools are Black. Eleven percent are white and 3 percent are Latino. However, only 50 percent of children in Atlanta's Gifted and Talented programs are Black, whereas 40 percent are white. More disturbingly, 98 percent of all students expelled from Atlanta public schools during the 2009-2010 academic school year were Black. These numbers taken together paint an abysmal picture of students who are disproportionately poor, over-disciplined, and systematically "tracked" out of high-performing classrooms. And yet we expect teachers to work magic in conditions that are set up for failure. But now we are expected to believe that prosecuting these teachers as racketeers is an act of justice. Nothing is just about making Black women sacrificial lambs of an educational system hellbent on throwing Black children away. The images of their handcuffed Black bodies being led in shame from the courtroom gives Black parents angry about the miseducation of their children a convenient target for their angst and outrage over a failing system.  Meanwhile, the real racket - privatization and defunding of public schools, diversion of taxpayer resources away from education, and increasing political clout and payouts for school reformers proselytizing the false gospel of high stakes testing - gets obscured. And white children still get educated well, either in private schools or in suburban schools funded through a solid property tax base. Click Here to Read Full Story