Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 172 posts

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

#51

Post by cpr »

mschuster91 wrote: post #30
IIAOPSW wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, especia…

Compulsory public education was a late 19th century event, close enough to universal suffrage.

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

#52

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

snackai wrote: post #39

This is how journalism should work. Not like the Washpo, acting as Jeff Bezos Anti-Trump propaganda machine. Don't get me wrong here, this is not a Trump fan writing, but I can't stand the biased bs media publishes these days.

A story that comes to a conclusion you dislike is not necessarily propaganda. Nobody is immune from legitimate criticism.

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

#53

Post by deadbunny »

notimetorelax wrote: post #16
BrandonMarc wrote: post #15

The articles I've found have all conveniently avoided answering the biggest question: why didn't the "adults" running the school figure this out sooner? ideally, before she was hired? That the students figured it out is proof it was certainly possible to figure out.

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.

Also they said there were a group of students taking weeks to research this, compared with overworked people involved in the hiring process.

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

#54

Post by derrickdirge »

losteverything wrote: post #50

My experience with young people is they think nothing of googling someone. 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 experience with old people is they take a shocking amount of time to consider googling something or they have me google it for them.

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

#55

Post by derrickdirge »

caf wrote: post #20
BrandonMarc wrote: post #15

The articles I've found have all conveniently avoided answering the biggest question: why didn't the "adults" running the school figure this out sooner? ideally, before she was hired? That the students figured it out is proof it was certainly possible to figure out.

This article ( http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-06/principal-resigns-afte... ) has a quote from Superintendent Destry Brown: "He said the district, which does not typically ask for official transcripts until after a hiring decision has been made, will likely change its vetting process."

What an excuse.

He describes a very poor practice that they still failed to follow.

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

#56

Post by bane »

Turns out, for U.S. institutions, and a little information on the subject, it's pretty easy to get educational verification on candidate's claims. Many companies with well run hiring operations just use this service as a matter of course.

https://nscverifications.org/

http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/

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

#57

Post by bane »

nkurz wrote: post #29

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 cont…

It may be that other members of the college were in on the graft as well if it was known that the school was in a bad financial situation.

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.

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

#58

Post by Insanity »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #43

> for one, when they researched Corllins University, the private university where Robertson said she got her master’s and doctorate degrees years ago, the website didn’t work. what an amateur - this is how you do it http://bigbusinessjournal.com/

I had no idea what to expect from that link but I'm happy I clicked it :D

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

#59

Post by TillE »

DanBC wrote: post #26
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 not why did the process identify them as the most suitable candidate? Because hiring is entirely broken in many industries.

Yeah, but that's just an arbitrary subset of "nearly all processes are broken in most industries".

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

#60

Post by jessaustin »

sampo wrote: post #7
itchyjunk wrote: post #2

Great read though the title felt a little click baity. 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.

> Are credentials not verified when hiring someone? 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.

What sort of credentials are required to do background checks? Who verifies the verifiers?
Post reply on HN