Why am I not surprised?

Was listening to the local news this morning -- the lead story was about a DeKalb School District principal who resigned and is about to lose her Georgia teaching certification because of irregularities with the CRCT procedures at her school. I can never remember what the abbreviation stands for, but it's the achievement testing all kids in Georgia are subjected to at various points in their school career. It's tied to (of course) the whole No Child Left Behind standards and whether or not schools are considered to be meeting whatever goals the schools are supposed to meet if they want to keep on receiving enough money to continue functioning.

There's been a lot of pissing and moaning about the sad state of education and teaching to test, i.e., drilling the little barracudas to spew out the right answers so they manage to color in the proper circles on the multiple choice op-scan sheets. Less attention has been paid to a couple of the inevitable consequences:  rampant cheating in various forms (letting the kids collaborate on answers, actually providing answers to the group as a whole, altering score sheets after the fact -- all of which have been well-documented in Georgia) and thinning the herd to make sure only the smart/well-trained students are still enrolled on the days the tests are administered.

This latest DeKalb scandal is an example of the latter. An elementary school principal has admitted she expelled ("unenrolled") at least 19 low-achieving students so they wouldn't be part of the officially enrolled student body on the days the CRCT was being given. The story given to the parents was their kids were being given the boot due to truancy or poor attendance, but then they were allowed to re-enroll once the testing was safely over.

You know, it doesn't surprise me at all that high schools try to skew their statistics by ejecting (or encouraging to drop out) any and all problem students (a group that can include everyone from well-behaved kids with learning disabilities to hard-core delinquents), but the idea of expelling elementary students? That is flat out wrong on so many levels. . . No wonder home schooling is a growth industry.