Multiple choice: Are you [a] incompetent [b] dishonest [c] blindly arrogant [d] all of the above?

High CRCT test scores trumped honesty | ajc.com

The schools cited in the cheating investigation serve mostly poor neighborhoods and have long histories of substandard academic performance. Many of their students come from single-parent homes and lack support from family members in pursuing their studies. But their higher scores of recent years gave credence to a view promoted by Atlanta’s superintendent, Beverly Hall, that all children, even those from the poorest homes, are “educable.”

Now, emerging evidence of widespread cheating suggests some Atlanta educators either were determined to prove Hall right or were convinced that, without cheating, they couldn’t.

These are the people into whose hands you put your children's future. "All children are educable." The tyranny of low expectations. Perhaps we ought to put that phrase somewhere in the Pledge of Allegiance.

12 Atlanta principals reassigned, among 108 employees to face state review in test scandal | ajc.com

The schools include Gideons, Usher, Peyton Forest, Perkerson, Venetian Hills, Scott, Connally, Dunbar, F.L. Stanton and Capitol View elementary schools as well as Parks Middle. Bromery could not identify the 12th school, which is affected because its principal previously led a now-defunct school, Blalock Elementary, listed in the report as having had a serious problem.

Well, so long as you don't actually say his name.

All the principals reassigned Friday led the 12 schools which appeared to have widespread problems. They will be moved temporarily to jobs in the system's central office, Bromery said.

Where they can't possibly do any harm -- which is to say, speak to any reporters or parents. APS really needs to avoid the temptation to conclude that dealing with the principal = dealing with the problem. Some principals, like administrators and middle-managers in any industry, have less influence over their subordinates than they think.

It's worth noting that the interim principals were actually put in place a week or two ago, before the specifics of The Investigation were made public, so this isn't quite as last-minute as it appears.

See also Throwing them under the bus or cleaning house? | ajc.com

For this, I actually bought a copy of the Sunday AJC. It did my heart good to see the story on the front page, and the two-page spread to which it continued, the newspaper equivalent of "twenty-seven eight by ten colored glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence." Local news will save newspapers, of that I am sure.

Well, that and comic strips printed large enough to read.