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High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

washingtonpost.com

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Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#21

Post by blowski »

paulftw wrote: post #17
notimetorelax wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, two reasons: - 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.

Part 2 of this investigation should be "whose job it was to check new principal's credentials and and how they profited from looking the other way" Edit: was that person the only applicant? If not why did the process identify them as the most suitable candidate?

If you're doing root cause analysis of a system failure, you're not looking to blame an individual. If you find something malicious then, sure, deal with it. But assume good faith in all parties from the outset and you're more likely to succeed in fixing the problem.

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#22

Post by trprog »

blowski wrote: post #21
paulftw wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part 2 of this investigation should be "whose job it was to check new principal's credentials and and how they profited from looking the other way" Edit: was that person the only applicant? If not why did the process identify them as the most suitable candidate?

If you're doing root cause analysis of a system failure, you're not looking to blame an individual. If you find something malicious then, sure, deal with it. But assume good faith in all parties from the outset and you're more likely to succeed in fixing the problem.

That's no way to witch hunt.

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#24

Post by mratzloff »

jlarocco wrote: post #10
AndyNemmity wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no college experience, and no one has ever even asked. I've never once had to justify it or discuss it in an interview. Education is no where on my resume.

It's hard to know how impressed to be without knowing what you do ;-) Usually the only time education is important on a resume is when a person has no other relevant experience.

Or in academia.

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#25

Post by lordnacho »

It's time consuming to chase down credentials, especially as when you're hiring someone, it always feels more likely that they aren't making it up. After all, you have a great hiring process, right?

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.

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#26

Post by DanBC »

paulftw wrote: post #17
notimetorelax wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, two reasons: - 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.

Part 2 of this investigation should be "whose job it was to check new principal's credentials and and how they profited from looking the other way" Edit: was that person the only applicant? If not why did the process identify them as the most suitable candidate?

> If not why did the process identify them as the most suitable candidate?

Because hiring is entirely broken in many industries.

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#27

Post by IIAOPSW »

teslabox wrote: post #18
IIAOPSW wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Some rule breakers are good others are bad. 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…

> 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 s…

Public schools serve one primary purpose. They free up women to work in the labour market. It turns out that having every kid attended to one-on-one by their mother was a terribly inefficient system compared to just shoving them all in a room and letting one person look after ~20. The fact that any sort of education happens is just a nice add-on after the fact. School also does a fantastic job of preparing you to submit to the arbitrary demands of authority figures. Today its the teacher, tomorrow its the cop.

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.

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#29

Post by nkurz »

I don't know how common falsified credentials are in school administration, but I'll mention a parallel experience that was a formative part of my upbringing.

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.

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#30

Post by mschuster91 »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #27
teslabox wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

Public schools serve one primary purpose. They free up women to work in the labour market. It turns out that having every kid attended to one-on-one by their mother was a terribly inefficient system compared to just shoving them all in a room and letting one person look after ~20. The fact that any sort of education happens is just a nice add-on after the fact. School also does a fantastic job of preparing you to sub…

Nice narrative, and especially the "bend and break the kids to conform with mainstream" rings a bell.

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.

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