High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials
washingtonpost.com
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While I was in high school, my father taught at a small private college in Wisconsin, where he was on the hiring committee for the new college president. After being hired, the chosen candidate's behavior was surprisingly erratic, prompting my my father to continue researching his background.
After a bit of digging, he found that the new college president had falsified almost his entire resume. Thinking he had solid proof of this, and not being politically savvy, my father presented his evidence to the other faculty who had been on the hiring committee.
To his surprise, he (rather than the fraudster) was promptly fired from his supposedly tenured position for "gross insubordination". Shortly thereafter, the "fake" college president pocketed the proceeds from remortgaging the college dorms, drove his college provided little-red-sports-car out of town, and was never heard from again.
Embittered by the lack of backing from his purported colleagues, my father never returned to academia, and instead turned to odd jobs and house painting. Not long after, the college lost its accreditation, and went out of business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Senario_College.
So his "research" existed, at least in some form. In retrospect, I'm wondering if it was "real", but from a diploma mill. Or purchased? Or someone else's rebound? Or as real as a thesis on business administration can be, from an earlier time in his life. In retrospect I wish I'd read it a little closer so I had a better clue as to what he actually did.
Use imcognito mode to open this link to avoid possible pay wall: http://lacrossetribune.com/news/ex-candidate-cited-degrees-f...
They learned that you can demand respect all you want, but if you actually want to get respect, you have to earn it from the people you're expecting it from.
Edit: It seems like a lot of HN users have a severe aversion to authority, so I guess I've learned something new today :P
Because that's stupid. Provisional respect, sure. Continued respect after acting like a buffoon? Nah.
Of course, it might be pragmatic to continue the expected ceremonies of respect, but that ain't respect.
I've certainly had the experience of dealing with poor teachers obsessed with the ceremonies of respect though.
Edit: Well, you can go around demanding it but you're delusional if you think people actually respect you.
I don't call English "knights" Sir either, because fuck that.
Note that none of this means I'd be rude, I just wouldn't afford them any more respect than anybody else.
Not calling a knight Sir, is rude to THEM. They earned it,they were recognized for their achievement. To not call them Sir is rude.
So what of it? Knighthoods are handed out to political cronies like they're Jaffa Cakes. Besides, I'm not a subject of Her Majesty the Queen, Elizabeth Windsor. Demanding deference to the monarchy is an insult to civil society.
If someone is rude to you in your eyes and based on your standards, how you react is still on you and is your responsibility. You can still be respectful to rude to people.
Respect is a two way street.
By abandoning any pretence of objective analysis you're reducing rudeness to a meaningless concept.
They were presenting themselves as better than ours; not merely our teacher, but our superior, our better. Not as someone who would instruct and help us. And yes, it was the first day, the first attempt to make a first impression, and that impression was: I am more important than you, and I demand that you all to acknowledge it every day.
It was incredibly pompous and tone-deaf.
I'm obviously not familiar with your situation; I definitely agree with you if the teacher was intentionally being pretentious. But if he/she was just correcting students and asking them to call him/her "doctor" on the first day, I think you are overdoing it.
But it seems different for a teacher to put themselves above other teachers at the same school and expecting others to remember that?
I call people with doctoral degrees "Dr." unless I'm invited otherwise or we're in a non-professional setting. Doctoral degrees usually aren't mere pieces of paper; going out of one's way to diminish the work and sacrifice involved is kind of rude.
But I also think it's kind of snooty and ill-mannered to explicitly demand to be called Dr.
Like with table manners. It's rude to not be decent to other people at the table. But equally rude to snap at another guest for eating with his mouth open.
This example is kind of an in-between on the teacher's part, because socialization is part of education. Only parent knows whether the teacher was motivated by socializing skills or ego.
> Edit: It seems like a lot of HN users have a severe aversion to authority, so I guess I've learned something new today
As always, the aversion is slightly more nuanced than just authority. You'll find lots of respect for certain other positions of authority (eg CEO). Also, aversion to the hierarchy of schools is nothing unique to HN.
Well, it's news to me! I never noticed this thinking before, probably because it's not a common topic of discussion on HN.
[1] RFC 1122 § 1.2.2: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send"
I would say a lot of HN users have an aversion to blind submission to authority.
Falsified credentials are surprisingly common. I encounter them frequently when trying to staff various positions and have even come across them a half dozen times among co-workers during my career. The reasons for the falsification are quite varied as well, but I've typically encountered them among people going for senior positions for some reason.
To this day, it's nearly impossible to find any account of these events. It's really hard to imagine that someone could commit such outright blatant theft and get away without so much as a hit on Google.
Was the con artist ever tracked down?
I don't think anyone believed that he had any sort of legal title, rather that through some combination of forgery and fraud he managed to convince someone that he had the right to make the transaction. If you haven't experienced one personally, you may be underestimating the persuasive power of a talented psychopath.
The events happened in the early 1990's, just prior to the advent of the internet. The false resume and the firing are the parts of the story that I have personal knowledge of. The financial allegations are third hand, but I believe them to be true. It's possible that recent events have better coverage, but I'd guess that even now there is a lot of crime and fraud that is never reported.
Was the con artist ever tracked down?
Not to my knowledge, although I'm no longer close to the community. I've occasionally wondered whether this might be because someone took matters into their own hands, and he's dead and buried in the woods somewhere. Googling now, I was surprised to learn that a janitor at the college was recently convicted of a 30-year-old murder of the mother of one of my classmates: http://chippewa.com/news/guilty-verdict-in-old-ladysmith-kil.... But I suspect that instead he's likely on to a new scheme somewhere else.
Ah, makes a lot more sense. I was assuming some time in the early naughts given the school's timeline, and was disappointed I couldn't find a detailed account.
> The false resume and the firing are the parts of the story that I have personal knowledge of. The financial allegations are third hand, but I believe them to be true.
To clarify, I don't doubt this happened :)
> I've occasionally wondered whether this might be because someone took matters into their own hands, and he's dead and buried in the woods somewhere.
What a wild world we live in. Who needs television when you can read about the intrigues of failed liberal arts colleges.
A few years ago, I could have used some advice from someone who is more politically savvy.
I received a tip a while ago that a then-sitting member of the United States Congress did not possess a degree listed on his website on congress.gov (and repeated elsewhere). I looked into it, and sure enough, I do not believe he received the degree in question. The congressman was not incredibly famous, but would make the news now and then. He is no longer in office.
What was the correct course of action, if I wish(ed) to stay anonymous? Tip off a reporter? Post on reddit?
1 - Tip off reporters nationally and most importantly, locally in the Congress person's home district.
2 - Level 23 move, tip off his/her opposition in the campaign both in the primary / general. Also tip off the Congressperson's opposing party heads. Example, if the CP was a Republican tip off the local DNC and if Democrat, tip off the RNC. This is one way the Clinton's got their opposition research.
However, I must mention that I been in contact with so many really bad HS staff (teachers, principals..) all with legitimate credentials, that I am starting to wonder about their significance? A principal should probably have some teaching experience, but seems to be like more of an MBA/business type of background?
Also, let me clarify I was not one to get into trouble and had very good grades in HS. I can really remember 2 really good teachers, and the rest ... quite mediocre at best. I also dated a HS teacher (as an adult,much later on) so I've seen firsthand the inner workings of teaching 'system'.
This might sound nit-picky but I think we all (Americans) value education as a whole. We just don't care (as a whole) about education for others outside of our sphere.
When you have the ability to move to better school system or to pay for private school attendance, you have no need to improve public schools. Not all public school systems are bad. I image that everyone can think of one relatively close school that they can unequivocally call a good/great school system where they expect most student to exceed by some set of positive metrics
As long as the people who can fix it (no matter if its more staff, better pay, better resources or whatever change necessary) can place their children into C-Level Preparatory Academy, Dumpster Fire High School probably won't see much improvement.
Everything you wrote after that sounds exactly like we don't value education as a whole. We individually value getting a good education but far too frequently ignore how education as a whole is beneficial to society.
That's a bunch of crap. If we (Americans) valued education as a whole, we wouldn't vote for leaders who continually cut education budgets. It's very simple: we as a society do not care about education. It's not a top political issue ever, unlike abortion, defense spending, guns, and who uses what bathroom. We keep school funding and administration at the local level because we don't want "our money" going to "those kids" (i.e. poor kids) in some other district, so we all end up with terrible schools and horribly inconsistent results school-to-school. Public education in this country is completely broken, and there's absolutely no political will to change it, and voters don't make it an issue because they're more worried about Planned Parenthood and terrorists.
> We individually value getting a good education but far too frequently ignore how education as a whole is beneficial to society.
Education is the third-biggest item of (combined) US government spending, after healthcare and pensions. Defense is fourth. It accounts for roughly 15% of total spending and 5% of GDP. I found this history of education spending informative regarding "leaders who continually cut education budgets": http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending
Perhaps Politifact can be used as a barometer of "issues" during elections. They have rated 954 statements about education, 415 about guns, 390 about the military, 377 about terrorism, 316 about abortion, 64 about sexuality (including "bathroom bills"), and 20 or so about Planned Parenthood. Even statements about the federal budget in general (which include many of the previous issues) only totaled 938 items.
The system is setup very defensively to protect the problem teachers from responsibility.
It seems like it is less of a problem than it used to be. The biggest issue is that the districts with failing schools (who need the best, most experienced teachers) tend to be the districts least able to recruit those kinds of teachers.
> The system is setup very defensively to protect the problem teachers from responsibility.
The same system also protects the good teachers from problem parents and administrators.
The US spends more per student than any other developed world.
I'd say we're paying plenty.
Perks teachers enjoy are variant as you mention, but tend to be solid. My GF is a teacher, her perks are: Contracted for 38 hours / week, 15 sick days a year that roll-over (I think there's some limit), something like 3 weeks of vacation during the school year, summer vacation, pension program, good health insurance, very difficult to be fired from the job.
Also, when looking at teacher salary vs median, realize that they are working a lot less of the year than other people. I did the math between my GF and I and once you account for all her time off, she makes slightly less than I do.
[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_211.60.a... [1]: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... [2]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
The important bit here isn't which particular certification this person did or didn't have; it's the fact that it was fraudulent, and that they lied about it.
Teacher raises and admin positions are all about box-ticking with the right pieces of paper. It's typical (though not universal) for admin to do the minimum time teaching (half-assing it, obviously) they need to for any kind of higher degree/cert they want (I want to say for a lot of programs it's 2 years or something like that) then move on, so yeah, many have little teaching experience—ask any teacher, nearly all teachers suck and don't know what they're doing the first couple years, that's just how it is, so you don't get good in that time, and you probably also don't get a sense of how periodic curriculum shakeups and such screw with teachers doing their jobs (not to mention their private lives, when they lose their evenings to some stupid new paperwork that you've introduced which could have been derived from other data you already have if you weren't a moron).
Education, Ed. Admin, and related higher degrees are ridiculous. You'd probably have to dig hard to find a program that's not a joke. The reason is that schools give zero shits about where your degree is from or what the program's like, just that you have one (and maybe your GPA, if it's for hiring—if it's just for a pay bump, they don't care about that, either, it's just automatic). There are lots of teachers/school admin. Consequently, many universities, even otherwise kinda-decent ones, have joke master's and PhD programs for teachers/admin, to rake in that sweet sweet teacher money, since the teachers/admin mostly just want 1) easy, 2) convenient (online or evenings/weekends, and as few hours as possible), and 3) cheap enough to justify the effort in a direct cost/benefit way (trivial to calculate from pay scales). The classes are nearly pure busy work.
If they don't just want to tick a box to get a raise or to go into admin and actually want to learn something, they get a non-education higher degree (usually in a content area of some kind—English, Mathematics, that kind of thing)
Source: am married to a teacher and, not through her, good friends with several others.
My father-in-law is a doctor, and he tells me there's been several occasions where he's thought some colleague was really quite shockingly ill informed. He's always been too timid to call the bluff, but he says it's happened a few times. Also he's had the old trick of the certificate with the the cigarette burn on the date attempted.
There's probably a lot of jobs outside of the more technical fields where simply being a nice person who can read and write makes you indistinguishable from someone with an education in that field.
Heck, I worked with someone with a mathematical PhD for years wondering how he'd never heard of Banach-Tarsky. Not that it's a specifically useful or necessary thing, just that you'd think a math-interested person would have come across it. Or how it could be that he thought excel was a good platform for quantitative finance. In the end I decided there were too many things that surprised him, even if he did act interested when told about them. That's not to say he didn't actually have the degree; but he certainly didn't have the skills that are supposed to go with it.
Math is huge. If he does have a Ph.D., he has probably forgotten more named theorems than either of us know. Banach-Tarski is one of those results that, for a pragmatic mathematician who doesn't know it's a meme-y theorem, could go in one ear and out the other.
I'd bet the average avid HN comment reader knows more about Goedel's incompleteness theorems than a big percentage of math phds.
> Or how it could be that he thought excel was a good platform for quantitative finance.
That's not surprising at all. Why would a math Ph.D. have any clue what-so-ever about how to build quantitative finance software?
Perhaps it's worth me specifying that we were sitting in a quantitative hedge fund, building financial software.
It seems a bit hard to believe. I've had to apply for medical licenses in 3 states, and it was a colossal pain the ass for each. Took 4 months the first time; and I have a completely clean record. Getting hospital privileges takes forever, too.
If fact, I think it should be easier, especially for those of us who did medical school, residency, and exams in the US.
Best doctor that I know failed 2 of his USMLE exams.
He's retired so not his problem anymore.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-07/doctors-identity-alleg...
Math is a big place. Most of us will have at least heard of it, just because it is counter-intuitive and easy to describe. Some might only remember it as "oh, yeah, that sphere thing".
Yes exactly. I haven't got a clue how to prove it either, but just like with Godel, I'm not going to drop my jaw on the ground when you state the conclusion.
- Adults are not super humans and can make mistakes
- and 17 year olds are as capable as adults.
In engineering people frequently ask - why nobody thought about it - well because nobody did.
Edit: was that person the only applicant? If not why did the process identify them as the most suitable candidate?
That really shouldn't be taken as a given.
"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence." Or by laziness, overwork, miscommunication, etc.
Because hiring is entirely broken in many industries.
He describes a very poor practice that they still failed to follow.
The hiring committee probably had deadlines for researching the candidates and making final decisions, whereas the students didn't have the same sort of time constraints. (I don't mean to minimize the achievement of the students! But you asked for factors that could have allowed the adults to miss this one.)
The woman was probably fairly charismatic to pull this off. The hiring committee surely had several face-to-face meetings with her and was swayed by her charm. The students would have seen her 'fake principal' self rather than her 'job interview' self. They didn't get the full snow job, so they were perhaps freer to think more objectively.
Also, I'm sure there's a false sense of safety in numbers for the hiring committee: if one person (or every person) had vague doubts, they might think, "Oh well, everyone else seems to think she's okay."
So if this decision was made by the Board without staff assistance, I can see them being swayed heavily by a female candidate who had international experience. It's the ol' out-of-town expert bias.
This part of the story I really respect:
"Under Kansas law, high school journalists are protected from administrative censorship. “The kids are treated as professionals,” Smith said. But with that freedom came a major responsibility to get the story right, Smith said. It also meant overcoming a natural hesitancy many students have to question authority."
When I was co-editor of my high school's student newspaper, every issue was subject to administrative review. Our principal literally read every issue prior to publication and told us what could and couldn't be run.
No different from any "real" newspaper.
But those publishers aren't subject to the First Amendment, because they're not government-run.
In the case of a school newspaper, however, the school is run by the state, and so First Amendment issues definitely do come into play.
They have a much harder job than it might appear at first blush -- even the slightest hint of repressing a valid story turns a very harsh spotlight on them.
Of course, a school intent on interfering with a newspaper is probably not going to make that part of the curriculum.
There is a New Voices movement in multiple states to strengthen students' rights regarding school newspapers: http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/new_voices_campaign...
Example. 25yr old always G Earth the presons address, searches other sites,FB, etc As ROUTINE. New male client comes in she openly tells coworkers about her results.
My comment demonstrated my discovery that I am not surprised it was from a young person.
Google lets a nosey person be nosey in private and anonymously. It is still not desireable.
Young people ( and some older ones) Google everything and think it's all the same. That was my point. Nobody my age tells me or my peers "Hay, I just found out our new manager is divorced and has 3 kids,and used to work for botuniverse.com."
I would directly ask that person "why on earth did you want to find that out!?!?"
Perhaps this is a generational think....
Privacy has been dead for a while. What you call nosy, I call cautious, curious and well-informed.
Would it surprise you, that I, for example, looked up judiciary cases on some of my employees?
Do you find that gauche as well?
Your staff using client information to look up non-necessary information about them to satisfy their interests is a massive breach of privacy. In most places with an official privacy policy, that would violate it. Particularly just to gossip with coworkers!
I hope I never do business with your office. Just ick.
Sometimes she does it on her own time. Often though she will at home off the clock.
Makes is sick actually. We never share any thing personal,ever.
Excellent.
Second "hn rule" of the voting system... don't needlessly talk about it.
lol
Seriously, this is remarkable. That kids today have the power to effect this level of change is nothing short of incredible.
what an amateur - this is how you do it http://bigbusinessjournal.com/
Are credentials not verified when hiring someone? (especially for a public school) or was this a result of the board being lazy? Because if credentials are never verified, this might be hinting at a bigger problem.
Usually the only time education is important on a resume is when a person has no other relevant experience.
Tech is an outlier in that education is secondary to most other factors. I'm happy for that because my Political Science degree isn't worth much, but there are even tech companies that require a degree, or a STEM degree, to be software developers.
I'm sure some companies favor candidates from certain schools, but I've never seen any evidence that it's a systemic problem. The one exception I can think of is high level, publicly facing positions. I could see a company choosing a CTO with a PhD from MIT over one with a PhD from somewhere else, just to impress investors, for example. For rank and file software engineer positions, alma mater isn't usually so important.
As far as STEM goes, those fields require so much math and other background knowledge that it's almost unbelievable that somebody could learn it all on their own. Not that it's impossible, but it's a pretty wild claim, and it's reasonable that people would be suspicious.
The verification work is probably outsourced to some company that does that kind of background checks. Or just takes your money and doesn't do any work, as the case might be.
For schools not using any of these programs, you can always just call the school. My alma mater is part of NSC but will also respond to individual requests directly.
In conclusion, yes it happens. Yes you can be anti-rule anti-authority and still be successful and non-edgy. Fuck da police.
True. Maybe I just idolized this guy cause he was both smart and stuck it to the man.
>I'm confused as to why he didn't finish college online or something when they found out?
I don't know what the rules are on that. Even if it were possible by this time he already tried to forge documents and otherwise lie his way through. Even before the fraud the man didn't really have to many allies in administration.
Also the district didn't even have the balls to tell us (the students) why our teacher disappeared one day. I had to learn it through another teacher in a private conversation outside the school.
Really just screw public school in general. The whole place was 95% waste of time followed by a "congratulatory" piece of paper.
John Taylor Gatto (and John Holt, and many others) say "wasting time" is the whole point of compulsory education.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto#Main_thesis
"Against School: How Public Education Criples our Kids, and Why" - http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm
Archive.org should have the complete text of "The Underground History of American Education", which was formerly posted in its entirety at http://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com
Also search for "I quit, I think", and ... "The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher"... several copies of these essays are scattered around the internet.
Edit: favorite'd your earlier comment, as I like how your teacher was good at teaching physics in spite of not having a congratulatory paper from a "higher education" establishment.
Society is a well oiled machine from cradle to college to job to marriage to suburban home to grave. Sadly I'm too much of a fan of indoor plumbing to consider the alternative. We're all just cogs in the machine.
Yet I don't believe the major driving force is to free up women as laborers - schools have been existing way before women had the right to work or vote.
In my opinion schools and universities rather serve to breed out worker drones and the curriculums are based on corporate needs, not society's. And this has, especially in the last two decades, been visible in the EU with the Bologna reform. Classes with no direct economical advantage (arts!) are falling way behind classes in the STEM field.
The media has always been biased.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/04/0...