Category Archives: morality

More than just Cheating

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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported last Sunday the results of its extensive investigation into standardized testing results across the country, and its discoveries were appalling.  The links under “Related” in the left margin tell the tale (read them all; the series is illuminating).  I’ll just offer a few highlights.  It’s important to note that the AJC makes no bones about their analysis: the statistical results do not prove cheating.  However, the results to demonstrate utterly anomalous test scores and score movements from year to year.

Extreme swings in test scores, the paper reported,

occurred in several major urban school systems, including Baltimore, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles and Mobile County, Alabama.

In Houston,

test results for entire grades of students jumped two, three or more times the amount expected in one year, the analysis shows.  When children moved to a new grade the next year, their scores plummeted[.]

One particularly egregious example occurred at Patrick Henry Downtown Academy in St. Louis. MO.  The AJC reported that in 2010 42% of fourth-graders passed the state’s math test (an appalling teaching performance in its own right). The following year, just 4% of those same students passed the state’s math test when they took it as fifth-graders.  The AJC added that while the 2011 tests were administered, the school was under intense scrutiny as a result of earlier cheating allegations.

Dr Andres Alonso, Chief Executive Officer of the Baltimore, MD, school district, noted that the AJC’s analysis found very large year-on-year changes that, in general, were score reductions following intensified efforts by his staff to prevent cheating in his Baltimore schools.  That intensified effort was a result of Alonso’s own investigation, triggered by a complaint at a PTA meeting.

Others, though, like Nashville, TN, district officials, responded by challenging the AJC’s methodology.  These officials emphasize both the high turnover of children in and out of their districts and that for many of their children English is not the primary language.  The AJC, though, while addressing Nashville’s concerns, points out that lots of other districts—vis., Chicago, Los Angeles, Amarillo, Texas—have similarly high student turnover, and similarly high numbers of students for whom English is not their primary language, and these districts did not have a similarly high incidence of suspicious test results.

There also are the usual cop-out excuses from those more interested in turning a blind eye to the problem than in doing the hard work of actually solving it.  Standardized test scores, they complain, put undue pressure on the teachers to do their jobs.  It’s true enough that test scores typically inform teacher evaluations and/or bonuses.  Other, more interested, educators correctly point out, however, that “cheating is a moral choice.”  No one stuck guns in these cheaters’ ears’, if cheating is what’s going on, and forced the misbehaving educators to misbehave and shortchange our children and their education.

Indeed, the objections to the analysis outcomes do not serve to deny that any cheating is occurring.  The objections instead center on three items: a) justification of the behavior because the teachers are under so much pressure; b) objection to the analysis’ methodology, as with Nashville above; and c) denial of the results.  Detroit, for instance, insisted that its scores were not “unusual or out of line in any way.”

Overall, the AJC reports, 196 of the nation’s 3,125 largest school districts had tests results whose odds of occurring by chance alone were less than 1 in 1,000.  That’s fully 6% of those largest districts.

Cheating on this scale, if that’s what is behind those suspicious scores, is more than just cheating.  These cheaters are doing more than just defrauding you and I out of our tax money.  These cheaters are doing worse than short-changing our children.  These cheaters are doing worse than abusing our children.  These cheaters are setting a devastating moral example for our children.  These cheaters also are threatening our nation’s security—and threatening the welfare of those children’s children thereby.

How is our nation supposed to compete in the world when our citizens are just adult ignoramuses because teacher and school administrator organizations like this make no effort at all actually to educate our children?  How is our nation supposed to compete in the world—or set an example for it—when tomorrow’s adults are morally destitute?

Bookkeeping

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Related to the Health and Human Services mandate to provide—and so to buy—contraception and abortion health insurance coverage at no cost to the “purchaser” is another final rule from HHS that requires those plans that cover abortion to collect a separate fee of $1 or more directly from the policy customers, with the money collected being used for abortion coverage.  The administration’s claim is that doing it this way means that abortions are not subsidized with taxpayer subsidies.

However.

Congressman Chris Smith (R, NJ) correctly observes,

Requiring the segregation of funds into allocation accounts—a mere bookkeeping exercise, is a cheap political trick designed to circumvent longstanding prohibitions on taxpayer funding of abortion.

Moreover, as Smith also notes, the rule pushes insurance companies obscure information about the surcharge in their benefits materials, so that customers are not readily able to discriminate among policies that do and do not cover abortions.  We’re all still subsidizing abortions, which violates the consciences and religious teachings of many of us.

With regard to the government as middleman denial, we’re all taxpayers—at least those of us who work and so must buy these policies and this coverage under that other HHS rule.  The idea that the Federal government isn’t acting as middleman in the collection and transfer of the funds doesn’t alter at all the fact that it is us taxpayers’ money that’s being used to subsidize abortion coverage.  But the premise that government isn’t middleman in this set of transactions is itself fictitious: it’s government that’s mandating the funds transfer; it is the necessary middleman here.

Finally, the dishonesty of this bookkeeping separation of the money is easily illustrated with a thought experiment.  Imagine a woman who has, in her mind, three needs: pay the rent, buy food, and get an abortion.  Imagine further that each of these items costs $1 and that the woman has only $2 to her name.  Now imagine a government man approaches the woman and says to her, “Here’s $1.  The only string attached is that you may not use this dollar to get an abortion.”  With the $3 the woman now has, she goes out and gets all three: she pays the rent, buys food, and get the abortion.  Prove the taxpayers’ dollar, which the government man gave the woman, was not used to get the abortion, when without that third dollar, she could not get all three, and with it, she actually did get all three.  That third dollar made it possible.

A Thought on Morality

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In late February, Archbishop Francis Cardinal George summarized the choices President Obama’s contraceptives mandate presents to Catholic service organizations—and by extension, to all faith-based service organizations.  Under the existing Health and Human Services regulations (which remain unchanged, despite Obama’s promised “accommodation”—an adjustment that only pushes the contraceptives-for-free mandate onto faith-based insurance organizations like GuideStone Financial Services, anyway), the choices are these:

  • abandon church teachings and oversight, or
  • pay annual fines that are “not economically sustainable” [which is the point of the fines—to coerce the organization into contravening its own conscious and religious teachings], or
  • sell their hospitals and charities to non-Catholic groups and local governments, or
  • “close down.”

Thus, Obama’s “decisions about medical care should be made by a woman and her doctor, not a woman and her boss,” thesis, often expressed through his Press Secretary, Jay Carney, doesn’t apply where it contradicts Boss Government’s demands.

But this is the position of the present administration.  Jim Towey, President of Ave Maria University, which is suing the government over Obama’s contraception mandate, describes that position this way:

Democratic and Republican presidents alike—nobody would cross this line until now.  There was always respect for conscience rights, and the fact that maybe government didn’t have the only voice on moral issues like this.

And that’s what it’s come to.  The present administration is presuming to inject the Federal government into fundamental matters of conscience, of morality.  That same administration, an administration of moral equivalence, is insisting that its version of morality is more equivalent than others’, and it seeks to impose its version on all of us.  Not by conversation, or debate, or the President’s bully pulpit—all of which would be legitimate venues for discourse and persuasion—but by Federal fiat.

Where’s the morality in that?