Judge Baxter, hyperbolic and wrong headed
The Atlanta cheating scandal involves star teachers and principals working to change test scores in order to hit federally funded milestones, keep their jobs in some cases, and potentially get pay raises attached to test scores. The more scintillating details include words and phrases like,
razor blade opening test, using steam, resealing, well-oiled cheating machine. The revelations are well covered
here.
The Atlanta educators who were convicted of racketeering in the public school cheating scandal were all sentenced today. Most of the teachers refused sentencing deals from prosecutors, allowing them the option of appealing the decision.
All but one of the 10 sentenced on Tuesday received jail time, The Associated Press reported, with sentences ranges from one to seven years.
One educator who did accept a sentencing deal negotiated overnight, Donald Bullock, a testing coordinator, was ordered to spend six months of weekends in county jail and five years on probation. He was also fined $5,000 and ordered to do 1,500 hours of community service.
Among those declining deals were three higher-level administrators, Sharon Davis-Williams, Michael Pitts and Tamara Cotman, all regional directors at Atlanta Public Schools. An irate Judge Jerry W. Baxter of Fulton County Superior Court sentenced each of them to 20 years, with seven to be served in prison, and the remainder on probation. Each must also pay a $25,000 file and perform 2,000 hours of community service.
I'm not going to condone the defendants' actions. What they did was dumb, unethical, illegal. Their feelings understandable? Maybe. But what they did was clearly not right.
Wall Street. Whether it's eating up pensions or a piece in the New York Times about how only one person has gone to jail over the man-made financial crash Wall Street, the financial sector, the white-collar criminal, is let off.
Over the past year, I’ve interviewed Wall Street traders, bank executives, defense lawyers and dozens of current and former prosecutors to understand why the largest man-made economic catastrophe since the Depression resulted in the jailing of a single investment banker — one who happened to be several rungs from the corporate suite at a second-tier financial institution. Many assume that the federal authorities simply lacked the guts to go after powerful Wall Street bankers, but that obscures a far more complicated dynamic. During the past decade, the Justice Department suffered a series of corporate prosecutorial fiascos, which led to critical changes in how it approached white-collar crime. The department began to focus on reaching settlements rather than seeking prison sentences, which over time unintentionally deprived its ranks of the experience needed to win trials against the most formidable law firms. By the time Serageldin committed his crime, Justice Department leadership, as well as prosecutors in integral United States attorney’s offices, were de-emphasizing complicated financial cases — even neglecting clues that suggested that Lehman executives knew more than they were letting on about their bank’s liquidity problem. In the mid-’90s, white-collar prosecutions represented an average of 17.6 percent of all federal cases. In the three years ending in 2012, the share was 9.4 percent.
Instead, we get Judge Baxter,
saying this:
“I think there were hundreds, thousands of children who were harmed in this city,” the judge said. “That’s what gets lost. Everybody starts crying about these educators. There were thousands of students who were harmed by this thing. This was not a victimless crime in this city.”
How these children were hurt we can debate. You know what
you can't debate?
A new report released Wednesday by the Annie E. Casey Foundation says that children have been among those hardest hit by the crisis, with the number of children living below the child poverty rate -- "a conservative measure of economic hardship" -- increasing 18% between 2000 and 2009. The report also said that a stunning 42% of the nation's children are in households struggling to make ends mean. That number was higher in California, where 44% are said to be living in poverty. (The threshold used by the study cited a family of two adults and two children living on $43,512 a year.)
The traditional media needs perspective on this case. These educators were wrong and should be punished/rehabilitated in some fashion. A discussion of how and why this happened should also take place. But let's also put it into perspective.
Full disclosure: I come from a family of educators.