The Necropolitan Sentinel

The fraud in the Atlanta Public Schools was pervasive, extensive, and of long duration, involving, according to the report issued by the governor’s appointed investigators, “178 educators, including 38 principals.” No word yet on whether these underpaid public servants were forced to supply their own erasers, or how many of these were consumed by the tireless educators in their efforts to raise their students’ test scores.

A Washington Post article on the recent NEA convention quoted a retired union member who referred to “the teacher who works her tail off for 14 hours a day.” If you’re a parent in Atlanta, you’ve got to wonder: how many of those teacher’s hours were spent erasing and filling in those little ovals on her illiterate, innumerate students’ standardized tests? Let’s pause in appreciation of her efforts, because all that erasing can really make your hand tired. And those teachers in Atlanta were doing this thankless job, improving their students’ work the only way they knew how, on their own time!

At Gideons Elementary, teachers sneaked tests off campus and held a weekend “changing party” at a teacher’s home in Douglas County to fix answers.

Cheating was “an open secret” at the school, the report said. The testing coordinator handed out answer-key transparencies to place over answer sheets so the job would go faster.

Was that labor-saving device required by the union?

At Venetian Hills, a group of teachers and administrators who dubbed themselves “the chosen ones” convened to change answers in the afternoons or during makeup testing days, investigators found. Principal Clarietta Davis, a testing coordinator told investigators, wore gloves while erasing to avoid leaving fingerprints on answer sheets.

But we can be sure they did it because they care about our children.

Oh, wait. This doesn’t help kids at all. In fact, it does them grievous and often irreparable harm. But it props up government schools and keeps over-paid bureaucrats and teachers’ unions in clover. Politicaljunkie Mom puts it this way:

These kids have been cheated. Robbed of an education. But the union shills still got their loyal dues.

Backyard Conservative notes the inevitable thuggish aspects, always present whenever unions are involved:

For teachers, a culture of fear ensured the deception would continue.

“APS is run like the mob,” one teacher told investigators, saying she cheated because she feared retaliation if she didn’t. [. . .]

Principal Gwendolyn Benton, who has since left, obstructed the investigation, too, the report said, when she threatened teachers by saying she would “sue them out the ass” if they “slandered” her to the GBI.

The explanation for this decade of corruption is that the standards imposed on the schools are impossibly high: Debatable. A system becomes corrupt if the people who constitute it are corruptible. Seems to me that their most important standards are abysmally low. This scandal throws into relief one of the real purposes of government “education,” which is lining the pockets of those who profit from keeping the system going—and students be damned.

Exit question: How many other school districts’ “success” is based on fraudulent test scores? A Young Conservative wonders about that, too, and encourages students as well as parents to take matters into their own hands:

As students, it’s time to say we’ve had enough. We’re not buying any more of the “it’s for the kids” crap. Any high school student in his right mind should be begging his parents to put him in private school or homeschooling. And parents should be wary of allowing the broken system to ruin their kids.

Right. Nothing is more important than your children, and it just might be that the government’s idea of what’s good for them isn’t, at all.

[Eraser image courtesy of Photography of Grace.]

Cross-posted at P&P.

Is there a huge backlash on the way this summer?

Kevin Binversie sounds the alarm in the Wisconsin Reporter:

For Wisconsin Democrats, recalls are a national fight

For liberals nationwide, the 2012 election starts this summer with nine recall elections in Wisconsin. For liberals, these recalls aren’t just about Wisconsin; they’re about the country’s very future. It’s a national fight that won’t just set the course for Wisconsin, but the course to congressional and presidential victory in 2012 and beyond.

Groups, such as We Are Wisconsin, a union front group said to have millions of dollars at its disposal, are coordinating simulated grassroots advocacy. Chief spokesman Kelly Steele holds near daily phone calls with friendly media in Washington, D.C., and other groups to explain the political layout of the land.

Yet, even with all that in its arsenal, Wisconsin liberals want more.

Wisconsin Reporter has gone over a number of websites from groups like We are Wisconsin, Defending Wisconsin and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. The groups are recruiting as many out-of-state volunteers as possible to work the upcoming recall campaigns. The sites urge volunteers to work “Virtual Phonebanking,” so they could make phone calls to Wisconsinites from the comfort of their homes anywhere in the state or across the country.

But more interesting and daring is the final-day push for volunteers. Interested volunteers are given their choice of 12 cities in any of the nine recall districts. Volunteers then are told “more information” would be sent to them about car rentals and hotels in the particular city or district of their choice. One group appears to be going as far as saying they’d work to line up lodging at members’ homes for out-of-state volunteers in these districts.

No indication is given if the volunteers would be paying for their hotel stays and car rentals, if they could arrange for payment elsewhere, by someone else, or who would be picking up the tab.

State Democratic and Republican party officials did not return calls asking whether these tactics are common or new.

The concern here is whether those who wanted to rein the unions in may be resting on their laurels; is there a sense that the fight in Wisconsin is effectively over? A lot of damage can be done with that attitude . . .

UPDATE: Professor Jacobson is concerned.

UPDATE 2: Ed Morrissey wonders Who Paid the Fleebaggers’ Expenses?

I’m still amazed that Melson has turned into a whistleblower; this is big. It looks like James Cole was in this up to his ears, and very likely Eric Holder as well. What did the President know, and when did he know it?

Katie Pavlich at Townhall has more details:

Yesterday, Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson answered questions from Rep. Darrell Issa and Senator Charles Grassley surrounding Operation Fast and Furious. Melson voluntarily participated in the interview and appeared with personal counsel, meaning although the Justice Department has prohibited Melson to testify before Congress on behalf of the DOJ about the scandal, he can in fact come forward with information as an individual informant outside of the DOJ and separate from DOJ interests.

In a letter sent to Attorney General Eric Holder, Issa and Grassley expressed disappointment in the DOJ limiting and controlling Melson’s communication and interaction with Congress surrounding the scandal but called the information Melson presented yesterday “extremely helpful” to the investigation.

Melson revealed the scope of Operation Fast and Furious reaches far beyond ATF and the Justice Department. He said the FBI, DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) and other agencies were heavily involved.

We have very real indications from several sources that some of the gun trafficking “higher-ups” that the ATF sought to identify were already known to other agencies and may even have been paid as informants. The Acting Director said that ATF was kept in the dark about certain activities of other agencies, including DEA and FBI. Mr.Melson said that he learned from ATF agents in the field that information obtained by these agencies could have had a material impact on the Fast and Furious investigation as far back as late 2009 or early 2010. After learning about the possible role of DEA and FBI, he testified that he reported this information in April 2011 to the Acting Inspector General and directly to then-Acting Deputy Attorney General James Cole on June 16, 2011.

According to the letter, the Justice Department continues to obstruct the independent House Oversight Committee Investigation . . .

There’s more at the link, including video.

UPDATE: The Mudville Gazette reminds us what thse people were sort-of thinking (in all likelihood) when they started this fiasco. The New York Post has a summary in its usual breathless style. And Power Line has more excerpts from the letter, along with a link to the original.

Here’s what it would have been like if your DI had been a headbanger:

Was that a bit much for this time of day? Okay: here’s the softer side of the Corps:

U.S.M.C. Team Leader Howling at the Moon has a personal appeal on behalf of Operation Valour-IT, and I want to remind everyone that 100% of the funds raised between now and July 14th–which you will help to raise, and which will total $100,000 between all four branches of the armed forces–goes to technology to assist wounded warriers: none of it is spent on administrative costs. None.

The total campaign is at $15,510 now, as I write this.

Team Army: $5,036
Team U.S.M.C. $5,781
Team U.S.N.: $2,071
Team U.S.A.F.: $1,316

So, go here and donate to your favorite branch of the Armed Forces. Your favorite branch of the Armed Forces will have this little symbol, which I’m providing for handy reference:

(Cross-posted at Little Miss Attila, which is a place I used to blog at that is now occupied by tumbleweeds and boarded-up storefronts. Actually, you know what? I’ll cross-post it tomorrow. Send money to Soldiers’ Angels. Goodnight.)

Well, for one thing, the greenie extremists like to “parrot” their talking points, but–there’s more.

Steven Hayward, at Power Line:

Why Climate Change Has Become the “Dead Parrot Sketch” of American Politics

For years now the climate campaign and the politicized science community has been complaining that it has a “communications problem,” which can be solved if only they shout louder, or get the human car alarm former Vice President Al Gore to make an Oscar-winning documentary film or something. Because, after all, it’s just so easy for a billion-dollar effort at pushing the climate crisis to be undone by a handful of discredited “skeptics” with only at tiny fraction of the resources environmental groups have spent. The whole spectacle would be pitiful if it wasn’t so pathetic, not to mention risible. . . .

[T]he whole farce is starting to remind me of Monty Python’s “dead parrot” sketch—the climate crisis isn’t dead, it’s just restin’. A new paper just out from the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale University has a supremely inconvenient truth for the die-hard climate campaigners. The opening sentences of the abstract pour cold water in the whole “communications problem” excuse:

The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public understanding: limited popular knowledge of science, the inability of ordinary citizens to assess technical information, and the resulting widespread use of unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. A large survey of U.S. adults (N = 1540) found little support for this account. On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones.

Whoa there: The more science you know about climate change, the less likely you are to think it is a crisis? This suggest that all the money environmentalists have spent (I think the Environmental Defense Fund has spent $300 million alone on climate change) has had a negative effect on public opinion, and it offers the ironic possibility that the best thing Al Gore could do to advance his cause is shut up and grow his beard back in a Tibetan monastery.

This is by no means the first social science survey to reach an inconvenient finding like this. The journal Risk Analysis published a similar article in 2008. From the abstract:

By examining the results of a survey on an original and representative sample of Americans, we find that these three forces—informedness, confidence in scientists, and personal efficacy—are related in interesting and unexpected ways, and exert significant influence on risk assessments of global warming and climate change. In particular, more informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming. We also find that confidence in scientists has unexpected effects: respondents with high confidence in scientists feel less responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming.

The authors were clearly dismayed by their findings, writing in the conclusion: “Perhaps ironically, and certainly contrary to the assumptions underlying the knowledge-deficit model, as well as the marketing of movies like Ice Age and An Inconvenient Truth, the effects of information on both concern for global warming and responsibility for it are exactly the opposite of what were expected. . . [I]t can not be comforting to the researchers in the scientific community that the more trust people have in them as scientists, the less concerned they are about their findings.”

Read the whole thing.