Recent editorials from Georgia newspapers:
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June 2
The Augusta Chronicle on the criminal conviction of an Augusta VA Medical Center staffer:
There are two stark, valuable lessons for all of us buried in the recent criminal conviction of an Augusta VA Medical Center staffer.
Cathedral Henderson, 51, a former revenue supervisor at Augusta’s Charlie Norwood VA Medical Center, was convicted of 50 counts of making a false statement - for having doctored veterans’ records to show they had received or refused care when there was actually no record of it.
Henderson, who is free on bond pending sentencing, faces up to five years in prison and fines up to $250,000.
Two weeks from taking another job in the VA system, Henderson was pressed by a superior to close out some 2,700 open consultation cases involving tests and procedures for veterans. He directed four clerks to wrongly record that the services had been provided or refused by the veterans when, in fact, there was no such record that they had.
Henderson was under the pressure because the VA nationally was under intense scrutiny in 2013 for its backlog of services to veterans. Each VA facility was given a year to close open cases - in Augusta’s case, about 30,000 of them.
One might be tempted to have some sympathy for Henderson, given the pressure coming from the top of the agency.
But herein lies lesson No. 1: No matter how acute the pressure - including threats of firing - you can’t let yourself be bullied into doing something you know is wrong. In this case, as we’ve seen, it was not only wrong but it was also quite illegal.
And even as a government bureaucrat, you also have to remind yourself, no matter how many cases or numbers or files pass by your desk, that each one represents a human being. In this case, it’s a human being in need of health care - and one who may have put his or her life on the line in the service of their country.
Combat veterans may have been asked to hold a hill or a bridge in the face of enemy fire. Is it so much to ask our government bureaucrats to hold their ground when given an illegal order?
Henderson may not be the highest-ranking VA official who needs to be held accountable. Precious few have been, in our view. But that’s not a mitigating factor in his favor. Staffers at every level have a sacred obligation to their country and to the veterans who have protected it.
The second lesson in this case, applicable to us all, is that it’s an ominous warning about a government-run single-payer health care system - which is the holy grail of American liberalism, and which the current president has us on a path to.
Some are coming to believe that Obamacare was never meant to succeed, at least not on the surface - that, in its usurping of the private health care market, it was always a Trojan horse to collapse the private system and institute government-run universal care. In either case, that’s the track we’re on.
Be careful what you wish for.
Online: https://chronicle.augusta.com/
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June 3
The Savannah Morning News on the Georgia GOP and Gov. Nathan Deal:
If Georgia Republicans want to move beyond the narrow demographic and ideological purity that constrict their party, they’ll refuse to censure Gov. Nathan Deal as a traitor, which is what some within the GOP have called him. The state party will decide today as it holds its convention in Augusta.
Claiming Deal “has abandoned our values,” Republicans at Georgia’s 3rd Congressional District convention in April overwhelmingly passed a resolution to censure the governor, according to the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.
“Governor Deal has amassed a long and terrible record of governing in association with liberal Democrats and crony capitalists,” reads the resolution.
Exhibit A on the list of betrayals is Deal’s veto of the so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which would have allowed people to refuse service to those who offend sincerely held religious beliefs. The bill didn’t name them an offending class but it was clearly aimed at lesbians, bisexuals, gays and transsexuals, or LGBT.
Exhibit B: Deal’s veto of a bill that would have allowed gun owners to carry their weapons on college campuses.
And that’s not all. The 3rd District censure resolution lists tax issues and school curriculum matters that have found Deal in the wrong camp.
Republicans in that southwest Georgia district aren’t the only ones unhappy with Deal.
Party activists in eight more congressional districts - Georgia has 14 - also passed resolutions in April chiding the governor over his veto of the “Religious Freedom” act.
The other resolutions stop short of recommending censure.
They want to rebuke Deal for understanding what they do not: if Georgia is to prosper, we’ve got to step beyond past out-dated, narrow-minded proscriptions as to what’s acceptable, what is not and what we should do about it. Whether social conservatives peeved at Deal want to embrace them or not, Georgia has thousands, perhaps millions of residents and visitors who are LGBT.
Some want to do business here. Some work and pay taxes here. Some are even Republicans. And some may be independents who’d lean Republican if they felt welcome in the GOP.
Their sexual orientation does not make them unworthy of marriage, as the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled. It does not make them worthy of shunning, as Deal has noted, quoting Jesus. It does not mean that the majority population should get a law letting it marginalize sexual minorities by asserting religious offense, as the governor pointed out in vetoing the bill.
He did so as executives in some of the world’s biggest companies urged him to.
The National Football League said Atlanta’s bid to host a future Super Bowl could be at risk. The league gave the city the nod after Deal’s veto.
Social conservatives accuse the governor of choosing commerce over principle.
They’re wrong.
He is the governor, not the state’s high priest. Boosting business, job growth and the tax digest is part of a governor’s job. So is properly extending a welcome mat, making sure Georgia is a good state in which to do business.
As for the gun bill, Deal suggested reasonable amendments that would have made him sufficiently comfortable with it to sign it into law. But this crowd stood firm and lost the governor’s signature.
State Sen. Josh McKoon, R-Columbus, sponsored the religious liberty bill and represents the 3rd Congressional District on the state party’s resolutions committee.
And yet he says, “I won’t be pushing for censure” at the state convention. In fact, he urged its defeat at the congressional district meeting.
Good for him, the Republican lawmaker seems to understand that it would be a dumb move by the GOP.
As disappointed as he was with the veto, McKoon says, “I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by going after the governor in a personal way.”
He doubts the state convention will approve the censure when it votes on proposed resolutions today.
Whatever the party does, it will do it without the governor’s presence. For the first time since Georgia elected its first modern Republican as its top office-holder, the state party will convene without its governor, who cited a longstanding scheduling conflict.
Now in his last term with no plans to run for office again, Deal is free to bypass - or even snub - a convention where he would not be entirely welcome. The shame of it is that he will miss a chance to urge fellow Republicans to open the doors to their party and to keep the state’s doors open, too.
As he said when discussing the religious liberty bill in March, his fellow Republicans should take a deep breath and “recognize that the world is changing around us.”
Online: https://savannahnow.com/
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June 4
The Marietta Daily Journal on the Milestones assessment:
Given the unfortunate rollout of the state-mandated Milestones assessment this year, it’s worth pondering whether Georgia should continue using this test.
To begin with, who benefits from it?
Not students or teachers, according to Connie Jackson, president of the Cobb County Association of Educators.
Jackson said the Milestones is not like the SAT or Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, exams that give students and schools a good idea of how they compare with the rest of the nation. So why does the state insist students take it? The politicians like it, Jackson believes, because they can say their part of Georgia performs better than another part of Georgia.
And the testing companies like the exam, because of the money. The test cost the state $25.9 million in fiscal 2015, $23.1 million in 2016 and $23.3 million in fiscal 2017, according to Matt Cardoza, spokesman for the Georgia Department of Education.
“What else would it be for? It’s not to compare ourselves with anyone outside of our state because it doesn’t do that,” Jackson said. “It only compares people in Georgia. It has no other use than to compare students and teachers and counties within Georgia.”
Prior to this test du jour, Georgia insisted on elementary and middle school students taking the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests and high schoolers taking the End of Course Tests. And before those exams, the state used the Georgia Basic Skills. And so on.
The Georgia Milestones debuted last year for a practice run, although since student scores weren’t counted, Cobb educators say students didn’t take it seriously. That lackadaisical approach better start changing though given the stakes. The exam is supposed to count for 20 percent of a student’s grade in high school, while students in grades three, five and eight must pass or face being retained.
Jackson described this year’s implementation of the Milestones as “horrific” given the Georgia Department of Education’s online platform saw lags preventing students from being able to move forward from question to question and kicking some students out of the test session altogether when administered on April 19. And the state wasn’t the only one with challenges. A number of school districts reported local problems such as internet outages, although Cobb was fortunately not among them.
The Georgia Board of Education, to its credit, waived the use of scores for promoting students in grades three, five and eight this year.
But that wasn’t the end of the headache. The testing vendor in some cases failed to grade the tests and return them to the schools before the last day of school, leaving some parents uncertain whether to move forward with vacation plans or enroll their children in summer school.
One of the reasons for moving from the CRCT/End of Course Tests to the Milestones is that the former wasn’t challenging enough, Cardoza said. CRCT scores indicated students performed at a much higher level than when measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Cardoza used the example of the Ford F-150, arguing the reason Ford made changes to its bestselling truck after a few years is because there’s always room for improvement. That’s not to say there aren’t recalls and growing pains from time to time, which is why Cardoza says the state is working to ensure a better implementation next year.
Yet Jackson doesn’t believe comparing trucks and teachers is an effective comparison, given there’s been no recent revolution in teaching.
“The basics are always the basics,” she said.
Teachers will adapt to whatever they’re told to do, but when the rules continue to change on them it becomes overwhelming.
“I think that if you look behind the veil of the constant changes in teaching and testing you will see corporations and business and politicians and not truly academics,” Jackson said. “I think that teachers have always known what good teaching is.”
Educators also have doubts about the caliber of the people grading the Milestones.
Why? While rubrics are used, grading a composition is always subjective. Educators are concerned with the consistency and accuracy of Georgia DoE’s grading of composition exams.
Lawmakers should consider whether state-mandated tests such as the Milestones are really worth the cost, not just in gold, but valuable instruction time when there are already such tests as the Iowa, PSAT, SAT and ACT, as well as class specific exams like the National Latin Exam that tell the student and school how they are doing compared to the rest of the country.
Over-testing does nothing but put undue stress on students and teachers. The pressure was so great in the case of Atlanta Public Schools that some teachers were convicted of changing test grades to avoid negative evaluations.
When students are in the classroom and rigorous instruction is taking place, learning is happening. When an endless amount of testing occurs, that learning stops. Let’s let teachers do what they do best - teach - and stop burying them and their students with costly state-mandated tests.
Online: https://www.mdjonline.com/
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