People would typically pay $2,500 to the scheme’s fixer, who would bribe test officials and have proxies take their certification tests, prosecutors said.
Five people have been charged in Texas with organizing and participating in an illegal cheating scheme that certified more than 200 unqualified teachers and helped the plot’s “kingpin” rake in more than $1 million, prosecutors said.
In the scheme, people would typically pay $2,500 to have proxies take certification tests for them at two testing centers in Houston. The scandal involved bribing a testing proctor to allow test applicants and their proxies to switch places, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said at a news conference Monday.
Texas needs to do what Indiana does. Any teacher shortage gets made up by promoting unqualified substitute teachers to permanent status. That’s how my daughter got a year-long substitute who did the following things, only the first of which I found out during the school year:
• She once made my daughter go out in the hall for exercising her legal right to refuse to stand up and say the pledge of allegiance (I didn’t tell her not to, she just said it was stupid to say a pledge to a flag and wouldn’t do it). I had to send her details about the SCOTUS case and tell her I would be getting a lawyer if it happened again. She apologized to me and lied that my daughter wasn’t being punished, she just wanted to make sure my daughter was okay. My daughter, of course, never got an apology. She didn’t have to say the pledge either though.
• She singled out my daughter repeatedly for being Jewish. My daughter is half-Jewish, but it really doesn’t mean anything to her because it doesn’t interest her. How did this teacher know? Because I am unmistakably Jewish-looking. The teacher never did anything bigoted, but she made sure to let my daughter know she was different.
• She told the kids that Joe Biden cheated to win the 2020 election. If I had found this part out, I would have marched over there in person.
What were her teaching qualifications? Why she ran a children’s theater in Orange County, California!
What’s she doing now? She decided that the pay was too low and is now still a teacher- at a private Christian school. I feel bad for those kids too, but they’re already fucked.
Teacher is a bully.
I think I would have demanded a Parent-Teacher-Principal meeting in which the teacher would have cried, and the Principal would have made a formal apology to me and child. If they declined my terms, for any reason, I’d go after the school board and get real nasty muck-raking their shit out in the open.
The one thing a bully understands is a bigger, meaner bully.
I should have, but I didn’t realize the extent of it. My daughter is not as talkative about this stuff as she should be no matter what happens or how much we try to convince her.
My blood boiled on your behalf.
Went through the first half of your post confused; couldn’t remember when Indiana Jones was ever a substitute teacher :V
All the problems with none of the corruption, very efficient Indiana!