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Tuesday, October 30, 2012

UPDATE: Should a teacher lose job for urging kids to check answers? | Get Schooled

Should a teacher lose job for urging kids to check answers? | Get Schooled:


Should a teacher lose job for urging kids to check answers?

Precious Moon, APS tribunal photo
Kent D. Johnson, kdjohnson@ajc.com
Precious Moon testifies during her tribunal Oct. 29, 2012. Moon, a teacher and CRCT test administrator at M.A. Jones Elementary School, is accused of prompting students to change the answers on their tests when she knew they had marked an incorrect answer. She also allegedly provided the students with the correct answers on the tests, and received outside awards and bonuses worth $3,000, based on students improved scores on the CRCT.

As demonstrated with North Atlanta High School, APS chief Erroll Davis is fond of the emphatic gesture. That was also evident when he suspended all the educators implicated in the cheating investigation by Gov. Sonny Perdue.
But some of those educators are winning back their jobs as a tribunal sorts through the evidence against them and finds it wanting.
One of those may be Precious Moon. Her case seems among the murkiest, given the lack of evidence against her. Take a look at the AJC story on this week’s hearing and let us know what you think.
Atlanta Public Schools pressed its case Monday to terminate M. A. Jones Elementary School 5th-grade teacher Precious Moon for her alleged involvement in the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test cheating scandal that has implicated about 180 educators.
APS Superintendent Erroll Davis testified before a three-person tribunal that he had lost 


Candidate takes fake Twitter account in stride even though it’s designed to miff teachers

GOP House District 81 candidate Chris Boedeker is not losing sleep over a fake Twitter account that someone started last week, even though the spoof tweets about education are clearly designed to provoke educators.
“I looked at it briefly,” he told me on the phone today. “I noticed it over the weekend and I faxed in the identifying stuff to Twitter to get it taken down.”
Boedeker has no idea who created the fake account, but says Twitter has not played a big role