The Cheating in Our Public Schools
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One of the sad commentaries about education in America is the cheating in our public schools that has shifted to avalanche proportions. It is near at an all-time high in the educational world, not just with the students, but it can be blamed on the standards, the administrations, the teachers, and the whole educational establishment as well. It seems that cheating has significantly replaced true studying.
There are all types of cheating going on with the students in public schools—the use of plagiarism, cell phones, iPods, grade changing by altering electronic records, copying others’ work, cribbing notes anywhere and everywhere, etc. In fact, many students are more concerned with learning to beat the system than honestly learning the academic material. Today’s students are more academically dishonest than earlier generations. It has been observed that, “ forty to sixty percent admitted to cheating at least once, compared with only eighteen to twenty-three percent in a 1941 study, and half of those students are cheating on a regular basis.” (writing.markfullmer.com-10/28/09). A bad picture!
Mark Fullmer also observed: “In the United States, teaching morals to children in public schools was one way to keep cheating in check. President Theodore Roosevelt supported moral education, declaring: “To educate a man in mind and not morals is to educate a menace to society.” In fact, teaching of morals was a major part of children’s education in America until the second half of the 20th century. The colonial schools were originally established to teach children to read so they could study the Bible. (writing.markfullmer.com-10/28/09).
In the 1950’s, our nation led the world in educational achievement. The Christian influence was very much related to public education. II Timothy 2:15 says to “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” The Greek word which the King James version translates as “study” means to “give diligence to,” which amplifies the force of the call of God to diligently study the whole realm of truth.
The epistles to Timothy were written before the New Testament was compiled, so I believe that this doesn’t just apply to the studying of the Bible. The Bible uses the concept “truth” in the general factual sense, true in contrast to the false, although it to goes on the fact that God is the truth and we are to pursue that truth, particularly as it is revealed in Jesus Christ, who affirmed that he was “the way, the truth, and the life.” He is the Truth personified!
Even as late as the 1920s, the nation’s most widely used schoolbooks, McGuffey’s Readers, were filled with Bible stories and moral lessons. But attitudes about religion in schools began to change during the 1960s, after the Supreme Court ruled that school prayer and Bible readings were unconstitutional. Many teachers interpreted the ruling as outlawing moral education altogether, and traditional moral instruction began disappearing from public schools. This hits the nail on the head!
It was brought out that: “While cheating isn’t new, the scope of the problem is. Throughout the 1990s, studies consistently found that more than seventy-five percent of college undergraduates had cheated at least once — an all-time high — and twenty to thirty percent regularly. The problem is even worse in high schools, where the slackers aren’t the only ones cheating. Honor students are as likely as low-achievers to cheat; girls now cheat as much as boys and — alarmingly — medical and engineering students are as likely to cheat as liberal arts students. In its last annual survey of 700,000 top students, Who’s Who Among American High School Students found that eighty percent of the high-achievers admitted to cheating, the highest percentage in the survey’s twenty-nine-year history.” (writing.markfullmer.com-10/28/09)
However, it is not only the students that are to blame, but the teachers and administrators as well. In 2011, a USA Today investigation showed a huge amount of wrong-to-right answer sheet erasures at more than half of Washington DC schools, and their inquiry didn’t include charter schools. Schools in Connecticut, Florida, New York, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, and other states have discovered teachers or administrators seeking to improve performance by either changing answers or encouraging students to change their answers.
On the statewide tests in New York City, investigators found fifty-two educators at thirty-two schools were cheating (USA Today, 3/30/11). At least 178 teachers and principals in Atlanta, Georgia, public schools cheated to raise student scores on high-stakes standardized tests, according to a report from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Teaching and administrative “cheating was widespread and systemic.” (The America’s Biggest Teacher and Principal Cheating Scandal Unfolds in Atlanta– By Patrik Jonsoon, July 5, 2011)
In the Atlanta situation, the high scores enabled Superintendent Beverly L. Hall to collect $600,000 in performance bonuses over 10 years to supplement her $400,000 annual salary. Phyllis Schlafly wrote that according to the 413 report released by Georgia Governor Nathan Deal, Hall and her top staff “created a culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation,” concealed by “a conspiracy of silence and deniability,” that allowed “cheating at all levels to go unchecked for years.” (“Meet the Extremist Group in Charge of Teaching your Children,” Phyllis Schlafly, Whistle Blower- November 11, 2011). Hall lost her job, but who knows about how much academic cheating by the teachers and administrators to placate the politicians is still in place not just in Atlanta, Georgia, but elsewhere. Public Education in some areas has become an educational cheating game!
In the Alliance for Excellent Education Fact Sheet (March 2008) it was brought out that American educational progress has stagnated and that we are near the bottom among the developed nations. In fact, “on virtually every international assessment of academic proficiency, American secondary school students’ performance varies from mediocre to poor.” In reading literacy we ranked 15th out of the twenty-nine OCED (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations in 2003 and things have not seemed to improve. In scientific literacy our nation ranked 21st, as in fact about “one quarter of the U.S. fifteen-year-olds did not reach the baseline of scientific achievement.”
America ranked 25th in mathematics literacy and 24th in problems solving. It was noted, however, that the U.S. was about average in respect to the number of students scoring at the top and the bottom. Much of this drop in educational achievement, I believe, is to be blamed on the cheating in our public schools.
The freedom one can know in Christ is a responsible freedom, which cheating would totally contradict. James 1:25 says: “But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.” Education founded on the relationship with God in Christ brings a freedom to learning, where without this moral foundation, it can easily slip into falsehood and pursue its support by dishonesty or cheating. Much of our decline in educational achievement can be blamed in various degrees on our removal of the moral foundation –the Judeo-Christian ethic — that was basic to the formation of this land in the name of multiculturalism, global education, and political activism. A godless freedom becomes a form of license that will lead to destruction.
II Timothy 2:22 gives the direction to “Flee also youthful lusts: but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart.” Biblical training helped our youth overall in this nation for the first 150 years to develop more honest lifestyles, realizing that although not being observed by people, we all we under the all-seeing eye of God. It was a call to discipline and honesty, and cheating contradicts this! In public schooling in America, it is the head and not the heart that matters, so much so that the moral life of our youth is slowly dying!
The true way to instill morality into learning, the religious and the secular learning, is to find that focus through Jesus Christ, who has been subtracted from American Public education and increasingly is being attacked as part of the political direction of America. The Cheating in Our Public Schools and the associated drop in academic achievement is to a great extent is the result of the de-Christianizing elements that have taken hold in the power structures of education in America!
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by Joe Renfro, Ed.D., Educational Columnist, Radio Evangelist, Retired Teacher and Pastor, 5931 West Avenue, Lavonia, Georgia 30553, 706-356-4173, joerenfro@windstream.net
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