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.
If it paid better, wouldn’t more people try to bribe their way into the job? Granted, they’re have more real competition for the jobs, so just getting certified might not be good enough to get a job.
No, because if it paid more, the sector wouldn’t be as flooded with middling underperformers. No joke, I knew a young lady around 10 years ago who studied education because “it’s an easy degree and they help shove you through because the bar is so low. No one wants to be paid so little to do so much. But if you can make it through your first two years, it’s almost impossible to fire you for anything that isn’t related to sex or violence.”
Her first week as an actual teacher in her own classroom with her own students, she kept posting her daily lesson notes from her whiteboard on Facebook. It only lasted a week because she got tired of everyone correcting her spelling and dates. She was a history teacher…
ETA: Don’t get me wrong, I 100% support public education to the point that I’ve dedicated the past decade of my life to working in public education even though I find kids incredibly overwhelming. That being said, I can support something and still point out that it’s broken.
That 2 year thing is not true. Maybe if you’re a tenured professor, but other than that they can just choose not to renew your contract for the next year.
I didn’t say she was smart or right. In fact, that’s kinda the point. These are the types of candidates flooding interviews sometimes.
Depends a lot on how strong their union is.
Not really. The union can’t force the district to renew a contract. They can only protect against firing the employee.
Schools likely won’t fire teachers unless they have to because they usually have to pay out the remainder of the contract.
Public education is being eroded on purpose. Education is the last bastion of any free people.
Why would middling underperformers be willing to pay $1000’s for a job that pays worse than for the same job but paying more? You think that lady would have said “no, I don’t want this job anymore because the pay increased”?
The more workers you attract, the higher your standards for hiring can be. That goes for any job, including jobs of passion. If you need to fill three positions and get three applicants willing to do them for shit pay… odds are your applicants are shit too, or they’d be going for better paid positions.
If you offer more, people with better qualifications will be interested more. You get more applicants and can be picky who you want.
As a bonus: better paid employees have more incentive to stay and do a good job to ensure they keep their position.
I get what you’re saying, but the point of raising the pay is to push out the middling underperformers or motivate them to change. These are the same people who believe that lottery tickets are essentially investments because you gotta spend money to make money.
When you raise your wages across the board, you expand your hiring pool and begin attracting people who have the aptitude to be a teacher and the aspiration to get paid a decent wage. Once that starts happening and you get better performing employees, the ones who want to keep their jobs need to step up if they have been underperforming. If they don’t, you replace them, plain and simple.
Because the the desperation for these shit employees wouldn’t be there if career educators were able to actually afford living and staying in the sector.
Low pay means low supply means high demand means low professionalism.
But I mentioned that and the fartographer said “No”.
This is what I’m wondering. Why not pay a bribe for a certification that gets you into a higher paying job?
I was thinking the catch here would be that these people were bribing their way into schools in order to teach their own weird religious creationism shit or anti LGBT whatever.
That’s not a catch. That would improve their hire rates for Texas school districts if they listed it on their resumes.