When you red the following e-mails from Tony Bennett to his staff so he could have the grade of a donor’s charter school raised, think about them this way. Imagine instead they are from a principal who had been talking about a scholar athlete in his school and then suddenly he realized the kid was a C student. Imagine then that the principal wanted to protect his reputation at all costs.
"They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work,"
"This will be a HUGE problem for us," Bennett wrote in a Sept. 12, 2012, email to Neal.
Neal fired back a few minutes later, "Oh, crap. We cannot release until this is resolved."
"I am more than a little miffed about this," Bennett wrote. "I hope we come to the meeting today with solutions and not excuses and/or explanations for me to wiggle myself out of the repeated lies I have told over the past six months."
When Bennett requested a status update Sept. 14, his staff alerted him that the new school grade, a 3.50, was painfully close to an "A." Then-deputy chief of staff Marcie Brown wrote that the state might not be able to "legally" change the cutoff for an "A."
"We can revise the rule," Bennett responded.
Do you feel a little dirty? Do you think the principal would be allowed to keep his job?
How Jeb Bush can defend the indefensible is beyond me.
To read more, click the link, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/07/29/us/ap-us-indiana-school-grades.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
