“I didn’t take the deal because I’m innocent. I didn’t cheat. I’m not a racketeer.” – Diane Buckner-Webb, a former elementary teacher sentenced to a year in prison plus four years of probation.
This April, just one month after an onslaught of corporate-backed standardized tests being administered across the country were met with mass protest by students, parents, and teachers alike; 11 African American teachers and school administrators in Atlanta were convicted of racketeering in a so-called system-wide cheating scandal.
The “organized crime” of inflating student test scores is punishable up to 20 years in prison. These educators deemed criminals will be serving between one and seven years in prison for the crime of falsifying information in order to tip the scale in favor of their students in an education system designed to fail both students and teachers.
Large corporations managed by the capitalist government are taking over the education system with the false pretense of reform. Those in charge like the Education Secretary of New Mexico, Hanna Skandera, create testing policy, but also have a hand in the testing profit cookie jar. If reform by testing is so effective, why haven’t students improved? Who is to blame? The media and new policies blame teachers.
Atlanta is neither the beginning nor the end to this witch-hunt.
The demonization of our teachers has saturated the media in many forms. So why have these Atlanta teachers been made an example of with jail time?
Judge Jerry Baxter, as he demanded apologies from the teachers in the Atlanta case, went on record saying, “It’s the sickest thing that’s ever happened to this town.” Never mind that Atlanta is home to a history of slavery and segregation, somehow teachers fighting for their students and themselves is deemed an inexplicably egregious act.
This is best summarized by Brittney Cooper, a Black woman educator and author of America is criminalizing Black teachers: Atlanta’s cheating scandal and the racist underbelly of education reform, who writes:
“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.”
Studies have time and again shown that poverty plays a huge role in student performance. Poverty and race, sadly, go hand in hand. This fact is widely ignored in reform efforts. Simply stated corporate reform is a farce. And high-stakes standardized testing has become a tool to privatizing public education in Black and Brown communities across the country.
Privatization means profit. Our children have become dollar signs. This all began in 2001 when both George W. Bush’s conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats under Senator Ted Kennedy worked together to implement “No Child Left Behind,” a plan that essentially exacerbated a phony educational system crisis in order to profit from it. Current educational reform is a program of crisis-creation which has been backed by Wall Street, by banksters and hedge fund types, by giant corporations like Wal-Mart and powerful right wing interest groups. Make no mistake, this epidemic has been perpetuated into the “Yes we can” Obama administration with the “run a school like a business,” Race to the Top program.
It’s important to note that presidential hopeful Hilary Clinton backed No Child Left Behind and was actually more concerned with the welfare of suburban children than those suffering from poverty when the bill went into effect.
No one is suggesting that teachers not be held accountable for their teaching. All professions require accountability. Are teachers are being held to a higher moral standard than anyone else? Fraud, falsified information, and lack of ethical limits for profit tore apart the very fabric of this capitalist
system in 2008 and yet not one Wall St. bankster was prosecuted. Rather, these criminals were rewarded for their insidious acts while middle income families experienced foreclosure at record rates, and the poor, not unlike those in Atlanta, got poorer.
The problem is systemic. The issue is not bad teachers but a system perpetuated by racism, exploitation and oppression. The people need to stand together against it.
