People would typically pay $2,500 to the scheme’s fixer, who would bribe test officials and have proxies take their certification tests, prosecutors said.
Five people have been charged in Texas with organizing and participating in an illegal cheating scheme that certified more than 200 unqualified teachers and helped the plot’s “kingpin” rake in more than $1 million, prosecutors said.
In the scheme, people would typically pay $2,500 to have proxies take certification tests for them at two testing centers in Houston. The scandal involved bribing a testing proctor to allow test applicants and their proxies to switch places, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said at a news conference Monday.
When you don’t pay teachers what they are worth, this is what you are left with applying for these jobs.
Texas needs to do what Indiana does. Any teacher shortage gets made up by promoting unqualified substitute teachers to permanent status. That’s how my daughter got a year-long substitute who did the following things, only the first of which I found out during the school year:
• She once made my daughter go out in the hall for exercising her legal right to refuse to stand up and say the pledge of allegiance (I didn’t tell her not to, she just said it was stupid to say a pledge to a flag and wouldn’t do it). I had to send her details about the SCOTUS case and tell her I would be getting a lawyer if it happened again. She apologized to me and lied that my daughter wasn’t being punished, she just wanted to make sure my daughter was okay. My daughter, of course, never got an apology. She didn’t have to say the pledge either though.
• She singled out my daughter repeatedly for being Jewish. My daughter is half-Jewish, but it really doesn’t mean anything to her because it doesn’t interest her. How did this teacher know? Because I am unmistakably Jewish-looking. The teacher never did anything bigoted, but she made sure to let my daughter know she was different.
• She told the kids that Joe Biden cheated to win the 2020 election. If I had found this part out, I would have marched over there in person.
What were her teaching qualifications? Why she ran a children’s theater in Orange County, California!
What’s she doing now? She decided that the pay was too low and is now still a teacher- at a private Christian school. I feel bad for those kids too, but they’re already fucked.
All the problems with none of the corruption, very efficient Indiana!
Teacher is a bully.
I think I would have demanded a Parent-Teacher-Principal meeting in which the teacher would have cried, and the Principal would have made a formal apology to me and child. If they declined my terms, for any reason, I’d go after the school board and get real nasty muck-raking their shit out in the open.
The one thing a bully understands is a bigger, meaner bully.
I should have, but I didn’t realize the extent of it. My daughter is not as talkative about this stuff as she should be no matter what happens or how much we try to convince her.
My blood boiled on your behalf.
Went through the first half of your post confused; couldn’t remember when Indiana Jones was ever a substitute teacher :V
If it paid better, wouldn’t more people try to bribe their way into the job? Granted, they’re have more real competition for the jobs, so just getting certified might not be good enough to get a job.
No, because if it paid more, the sector wouldn’t be as flooded with middling underperformers. No joke, I knew a young lady around 10 years ago who studied education because “it’s an easy degree and they help shove you through because the bar is so low. No one wants to be paid so little to do so much. But if you can make it through your first two years, it’s almost impossible to fire you for anything that isn’t related to sex or violence.”
Her first week as an actual teacher in her own classroom with her own students, she kept posting her daily lesson notes from her whiteboard on Facebook. It only lasted a week because she got tired of everyone correcting her spelling and dates. She was a history teacher…
ETA: Don’t get me wrong, I 100% support public education to the point that I’ve dedicated the past decade of my life to working in public education even though I find kids incredibly overwhelming. That being said, I can support something and still point out that it’s broken.
That 2 year thing is not true. Maybe if you’re a tenured professor, but other than that they can just choose not to renew your contract for the next year.
I didn’t say she was smart or right. In fact, that’s kinda the point. These are the types of candidates flooding interviews sometimes.
Depends a lot on how strong their union is.
Not really. The union can’t force the district to renew a contract. They can only protect against firing the employee.
Schools likely won’t fire teachers unless they have to because they usually have to pay out the remainder of the contract.
Public education is being eroded on purpose. Education is the last bastion of any free people.
Why would middling underperformers be willing to pay $1000’s for a job that pays worse than for the same job but paying more? You think that lady would have said “no, I don’t want this job anymore because the pay increased”?
The more workers you attract, the higher your standards for hiring can be. That goes for any job, including jobs of passion. If you need to fill three positions and get three applicants willing to do them for shit pay… odds are your applicants are shit too, or they’d be going for better paid positions.
If you offer more, people with better qualifications will be interested more. You get more applicants and can be picky who you want.
As a bonus: better paid employees have more incentive to stay and do a good job to ensure they keep their position.
I get what you’re saying, but the point of raising the pay is to push out the middling underperformers or motivate them to change. These are the same people who believe that lottery tickets are essentially investments because you gotta spend money to make money.
When you raise your wages across the board, you expand your hiring pool and begin attracting people who have the aptitude to be a teacher and the aspiration to get paid a decent wage. Once that starts happening and you get better performing employees, the ones who want to keep their jobs need to step up if they have been underperforming. If they don’t, you replace them, plain and simple.
Because the the desperation for these shit employees wouldn’t be there if career educators were able to actually afford living and staying in the sector.
Low pay means low supply means high demand means low professionalism.
But I mentioned that and the fartographer said “No”.
This is what I’m wondering. Why not pay a bribe for a certification that gets you into a higher paying job?
I was thinking the catch here would be that these people were bribing their way into schools in order to teach their own weird religious creationism shit or anti LGBT whatever.
That’s not a catch. That would improve their hire rates for Texas school districts if they listed it on their resumes.