Teacher admits helping students on FCAT

“Gemini Elementary School teacher Stacy Stinson told school officials she gave assistance to her fifth-grade students on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, citing the extreme pressure teachers and students are under to perform well on the test.”

—Teacher admits helping students on FCAT Florida Today)

When teachers cheat to help their students (and thus protect their job), what kind of messge are they sending about the value of an education? We need more heroes like Christine Pelton, who failed a quarter of her students for copying sentences or paragraphs from web sites and submitting them as their own work. (One student who says he split a sentence he found on a website into two shorter sentences says that shouldn’t count as plagiarism, since he didn’t use the sentence word-for-word.) Pelton resigned from her teaching job, and the last I heard she was opening a daycare center in her home. What a loss to the students who might otherwise have been in her class, and what a loss to the society those students will one day join.