DeKalb board chair: ‘You can’t prohibit a student from plagiarizing and then permit some staff person to do it.’

BTW: don’t overly mythologize Jim Cherry. the good old boy system run amok in DeKalb was alive and well under him. friends and family hiring practices didn’t just materialize when the racial shift happened.

the difference between the two eras is simple. Cherry & co understood their machine worked only if the system worked. the post 86 era either didn’t understand, or didn’t care.

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its amazing the idiot didn’t bother to cite. moron.

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So even the consultants hired to do the administrators’ work don’t do their own work? You can’t make this stuff up!

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I think Atkinson also needs to go. Clearly the school board has failed in its governance, as has its leader. This story churns my stomach on so many levels, and I am glad that the AJC brought it to light.

Even though the book is 7 years ago, I really encourage everyone to read Joe Williams’ book: “Cheating our Kids: How Politics & Greed Ruin Education.” I have no commercial interest in making this recommendation – the book is very “telling” about the problems with the “system.”

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“Crawford Lewis, Ramona Tyson, Cheryl Atkinson – Over the last 9 years and 3 Superintendents, Dr Atkinson has been the best/least horrific. For various reasons, hiring “good” Superintendents is not what DeKalb does. At this point in time, I doubt any respectable Superintendent would want to come here.”

Superintendents in Dekalb have to have the correct basic attributes (proper race).

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Hmmm. Walker certainly has changed his tune. A mere month or so ago, this would have been some brouhaha instigated by “disgruntled parents and employees.” Too little and most definitely too late. Yet, the inept plagiarist is “safe” and laughing all the way to the bank to collect his DCSD, superintendent-approved, administrative salary.

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” Yet, the inept plagiarist is “safe” and laughing all the way to the bank to collect his DCSD, superintendent-approved, administrative salary.”

Residents of a state can register a complaint with the Georgia Professional Standards Commission.
http://www.gapsc.com/Rules/Current/Ethics/505-6-.01.pdf

Plagiarism is an ethics offense.

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if you plagiarize, you are a plagiarist–very simple

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Plagiarism has long been endemic to K-12 education. For decades, elementary, middle school and high school social studies books often lacked bibliographies, and none of them had source-identifying footnotes or endnotes.

Their education-market authors either knew or should have known it was unprofessional if not illegal) plagiarism to write statements of fact that the authors had learned by reading others’ works.

I have one of my children’s American History books, written by college professors in the 1980s. It has no source citations. The professors were experts in two epochs of U.S. history. They may have written the period-relevant high school textbook chapters from their personal knowledge base, although that knowledge was originally obtained from reading historians’ citation-laden papers, as well as archived contemporary-to-events letters, diaries, government documents, et al. They cited their sources in their “professional-communications-to-colleagues” publications.

But beyond these two epochs, the professors had no such knowledge for time periods outside their areas of expertise, so they clearly had to read source material in compiling their high school textbook. They failed to credit their sources, i.e. honoring others’ hard work in researching the facts, organizing them, writing them, and getting them published. These source materials, when written by academic historians, contained primary and secondary source citations, of course.

The high school textbook publisher certainly knew copyright law, which allowed scholars fair-usage of scholarly works–with proper attribution.

In any event, how are children supposed to understand that when writing reports that must utilize library or internet research for their fact compilation, the students must cite their sources? How can they understand this when their own textbooks do not demonstrate this proper scholarship?

The culture of stealing others’ work for personal enrichment would appear to be ingrained in public education, at the “highest levels”.

It may be–this is ignorant speculation– that current school history textbooks contain citations (end-of-sentence / paragraph numbers and corresponding endnotes or footnotes). It is alternatively conceivable that they don’t, but publishers have obtained waivers from original-source copyright holders, either for compensatory remuneration, or gratis “in the public interest” in order to “give children knowledge maximally” by eliminating the cost of adding expensive pages to accommodate citations. It is alternatively conceivable that federal law exempts public school material from copyright-infringement or intellectual-property theft liability for textbooks plagiarism under a “public interest” rubric.

I think that it would be tawdry for such a law to exist, because textbook authors and textbook publishers do their work to make money. They aren’t putting out school textbooks as acts of charity. Perhaps someone with knowledge can clarify federal law here.

In any event, if history textbooks do not contain citations, and if this is legal, here is what I would do if my child received an “F” for plagiarism (this has occurred). I would peruse his or her history or geography book, and if it doesn’t have citations, I would take it to the principal, and say,

“How do you expect my child to understand citations in report-writing? Her books contain no citations (except for some photographs, if that). The textbook authors have written things they learned by going to the library or the internet and reading others’ work as sources, and then writing without attribution. This is plagiarism. It directly contradicts the principle the teacher is trying to instill in her students, that using other people’s ideas and writings without crediting them as sources is wrong, but, never mind, it’s fine for the students’ textbook authors to do this. This constitutes egregious hypocrisy. Erase the grade, or I’m hiring a lawyer, and taking this travesty public.”

I say this, having been dunned for plagiarism in 6th grade. I trudged to the city library, I even wrote to government officials in Puerto Rico to get information for my assigned paper, of 8 pages, on that country. This was no modern “sleazy, easy” internet copy and paste job. The teacher didn’t give me an “F”, but he wrote in red-pen, “This is plagiarism!” and held me after school to discuss the error of my ways. (He only demanded a bibliography, not numbered footnotes, so I typed one that night, and he accepted it.) I read about one teacher who gave “F’s” to 15 students and parents raised a ruckus. She was terminated at the end of the year.

With our kids, we bought college-reading-ability history books when they were in late childhood and thereafter. We deliberately looked for books with citations and endnotes, and our kids learned that credible and professional historians, journalists and free-lance history writers used this methodology. So when the kids had to write reports, they had a long-studied operating framework to apply. We took them to the university library to examine many cited materials to show them what the research-based writing process was about.

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@ Home-tutoring parent. Textbooks and scholarly books are very different in purpose and in audience; and the question of plagiarism doesn’t seem very relevant to textbooks.

Textbooks are the distillation of general knowledge in some field by a published expert in that field, who is likely to know all of the related fields as well. This knowledge is gained through the writer’s own education, research, and scholarship which should go far beyond the Internet. Publishers don’t give them contracts unless they have already proved their expertise through prior publications. Textbooks are not intended to provide original research. Their audience is students, and students certainly are not going to read textbooks bristling with citations and footnotes.

Scholarly books (or consultants’ reports), being the product of original research and individual data-searching, do require citations and endnotes/footnotes. Their audience is other experts who already know the generalized background, and who are likely to explore the citations out of scholarly curiosity. The citations provide evidence for materials that are not generally known and may be questioned.

The copying of other writers’ words in either case is certainly plagiarism, but copying is not really what you are describing in your post above.

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Well, Clayton County, you have been warned. And kudos to the person(s) who dropped a dime on this fraud of a “doctor.”

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