Passing the buck #2

The Atlanta Public Schools' teacher-cheating scandal has now hit the national news -- New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, USA Today.

And, with it, the focus expands to include the effect on the business community's efforts to recruit executives or even new businesses.

It seems that there was a strong alliance between Superintendent Hall and the business community. She spoke the language of corporate America, the business leaders respected her emphasis on data and marketing strategies, and they supported her efforts to get grants from corporate America -- most notably General Electric, whose chief executive became the head of an advisory committee that helped get big grants for scholarships and programs.

When the scandal first broke, it was the business community that organized and conducted the Blue Ribbon Commission that "investigated" the charges of cheating. It's report was mainly an attempt to finesse the issue as far as Dr. Hall was concerned, to whitewash her and blame it on the few bad apples lower down. There is an incriminating email that speaks of hoping that they can get Gov. Sonny Purdue to accept the report and put an end to the story.

It didn't work, mainly because Gov. Purdue did not accept the report and instead mandated a real investigation; and it is that investigative report that has just been released and blown the scandal wide open, bringing accusations against Dr. Hall and other higher officials.

Now the news is full of how the scandal is going to affect the business community and its recruitment efforts for years to come.

Education is vital to a community. It is one of the things people look at when they decide whether to choose Atlanta or Charlotte or Denver for their next location. It's the very reason the business community supported Dr. Hall in the first place and why they tried to help conceal it initially.

Cheating "worked" in the short term -- a national award for Dr. Hall and wide recognition of the dramatic turn-around of Atlanta schools. The business community reaped advantages too. But then it failed, mainly because Dr. Hall and her staff overshot the mark.

If the "results" hadn't been quite so spectacular and brought quite so much attention to Dr. Hall's "achievement," it might have snuck by for another year or two. The Atlanta Journal Constitution, began the investigation -- and deserves the main credit for exposing the scandal -- because the results were just "too good to be true" and hence aroused suspicion.

Isn't that the reason flawed leaders usually are brought down? By their own hubris leading them to reach too far, claim too much, and thereby expose the falsity of it all? That's what the Greeks knew in writing their tragedies. Aristotle knew it, Sophocles knew it.

But it seems that every generation has to learn it all over again.

Ralph