Moral Education

From the AFTBlog: "Yes, deliberately falsifying documents is wrong, but...."

Rule of thumb in sentence construction: the word "but" does not belong after the words "falsifying documents is wrong." Whatever you're writing is sure to go downhill from there.

In this case, AFTie Beth is excusing a California school district that appears to have engaged in some paperwork shenanigans in order to get more class-size reduction money out of the state. Beth's excuse--and the district's--seems to begin and end with "we needed the money."

Back when I was assistant state budget director in Indiana, one of my jobs was to look after the giant pot of money the state set aside to support K-12 education. Every two years, the legislature would appropriate that money based on a projection of how many students would be enrolled in each school district. If the actual enrollment was higher than the projection, the legislature would either have to appropriate extra money (which it didn't like) or pro-rate funding distributions to districts (which they liked even less).

One year the actual enrollments came in unusually high, and when we looked to see where we'd gone wrong, we found a district where, despite the fact that enrollment had been declining steadily for years, over 1,000 new students had suddenly been added to the rolls.

Expect they hadn't, really. It turns out the district had discovered a loophole in the state funding law that was designed to foster cooperation between public and private schools. Some small private schools--particularly low-revenue parochial schools--don't have the resources to hire teachers for, say, AP Physics. So the state allowed districts to adjust their enrollment counts upward if they helped out and enrolled private school students in public courses.

This district had cut a deal with a local private school whereby it would provide mini-courses lasting two weeks to 1,000 students, putting the state on the hook for something like $10 million in extra funding.

Another district tried to count a 16-year old girl who had dropped out of school after having a baby as a student, on the grounds that she was engaged in "self-directed study" at home. The subject she was allegedly studying? Child care.

In each case, their excuse was, "we needed the money." Which was true, but not an excuse, any more than it would have been if the superintendant had knocked over a bank on the way into work. For some things, right is right and wrong is wrong. Isn't that what we teach in school?