How do you guys feel about this story regarding cheating?

I read the article and my one line opinion is this:

No wonder our children are growing up and are realizing that cheating is okay.

Is the Federal Government directly responsible for the cheating, by holding out funds to school systems, that have students who do not excel? Or, was this a power struggle between teachers just in that one school?

Allowing the teachers to resign or go on pension was not punishment. It was using the “good ol’ boy system”. You can beleive the students took notice of this. Today’s children are smart and intelligent and they learn by what they see and hear, especially in their classrooms.

No Child Left Behind leads to cheating by teachers to get their bonuses. I so didn’t see that coming. /sarcasm

This just proves how the system is set up now not to teach, but to push children through like a factory. Education budget cuts lead to less teachers in the classroom, thus giving teachers less time to teach (especially those students who are struggling). It’s alright though, those students who will be incapable of doing anything else once they are pushed through the system will be able to join the military (AKA, where all the money that should go to funding education ends up).

There is so much that needs to be changed with our education system, I’m not sure where to start. The teachers obviously shouldn’t have been doing this, but in today’s world I can hardly blame them. Their entire livelihood, and also the quality of education coming to their students (even those they didn’t have to cheat for) was at stake. If their schools didn’t perform, they didn’t get money to keep paying teachers, people get cut, quality of education goes down for the kids… the problem gets worse.

It’s a mess.

Yes it is terrible. I think the worst part is that the parents were deceived about their children’s progress academically. The test may have said that they were doing average or above average, when in reality they may have needed extra help to supplement their learning. I would be outraged if that had happened in my community.

It is depressing, but preditctable.

Teaching to the test leads to cheating on the test so you can get a $2000 bonus. No Child Left Untested has always been a disastrous approach to measuring progress. However, no one had any money to implement a system that would work. Besides which, Americans are lazy. They’ll go for the easiest system they can sell. Whether it works or not is of no concern. At least, not to Republicans who want to look like they care about education, but don’t actually care about class issues, which are the real problem.