Georgia just found a dozen Georgia teachers guilty of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Their crime? – cheating on student tests to make the Atlanta School District look like it was doing a better job educating their children than was in fact true. Here are the details from a CNN Facebook “alert” that a friend emailed me this morning.
All but one of 12 defendants charged with racketeering and other crimes in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal have been convicted.
A total of 35 educators, administrators and testing coordinators were indicted in 2013 on charges of racketeering and corruption following a 2009 investigation that revealed systemwide cheating in more than half the district’s elementary and middle schools on the state Criterion-Referenced Competency Test.
Twenty-one of those indicted took plea bargains. Two of the defendants, including former schools Superintendent Beverly Hall, died while under indictment.
I think I have a problem with this result. The RICO law was first dreamed up to fight organized crime and the Narcos who were using banks to launder their drug money. Murder, Mayhem, Drugs and outlawry were its targets. Its hard for me to envision a bunch of teachers in RICO’s gun-sights. Sure they were cheating kids of decent educations but their reward was a little gratitude by the Superintendent who wanted to look good. They were also likely motivated by the punitive actions of legislators who like to take funding away from failing schools which then will in all likelihood fail even more. In some perverse way it could be argued that these teachers, some of whom face twenty year jail sentences, were trying to protect their children from law makers.
Ah, but when a prosecutor wants to win a conviction the more dire the law that can be thrown at a miscreant the more successful will the prosecutor be. Like the RFRA law this was originally a bipartisan piece of legislation. How interesting to learn that it now includes teachers under its growing umbrella.
