By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

EL PASO, Texas – Earlier this month, former El Paso schools superintendent Lorenzo Garcia was sentenced to three years and six months in a federal prison for his role in an elaborate cheating scandal, which inflated school test scores by removing low-performing students from the classroom on test day.

“Students identified as low-performing were transferred to charter schools, discouraged from enrolling in school or were visited at home by truant officers and told not to go to school on the test day,” reports the New York Times.

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Since the state test only involved sophomores, Garcia worked with a handful of school administrators to change the high school credits of some students “from passing to failing or from failing to passing so they could be reclassified as freshmen or juniors,” the Times reports.

The scheme lasted for six years, and resulted in a large number of El Paso students being pushed out of the school system.

“(This) is by far the worst education scandal in the country,” said Eliot Shapleigh, a former state senator who is credited with bringing the scandal to light. “In Atlanta, the students were helped on tests by teachers. The next day, the students were in class. Here, the students were disappeared right out of the classroom.”

For example, in the fall 2007, El Paso’s Bowie High School had 381 freshmen. By the following year, the sophomore class only had only 170 students, reports the Times.

The missing students became known by parents and students as “the disappeared.”

One “former principal … said he knew of six students who had been pushed out of school and had not pursued an education since,” the Times reports.

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Linda Hernandez-Romero told the paper that her daughter was one of the victims.

“She always tells me: ‘Mom, I got kicked out of school because I wasn’t smart. I guess I’m not, Mom, look at me.’ There’s not a way of expressing how bad it feels, because it’s so bad. Seeing one of your children fail and knowing that it was not all her doing is worse,” Hernandez-Romero told the Times.

The paper notes that court documents list six unindicted co-conspirators who assisted Garcia, which means there may be more arrests in the near future.

Considering that Garcia and company not only defrauded taxpayers out of untold thousands of dollars in performance bonuses, but that they also destroyed the futures of hundreds of El Paso students, we hope heads continue to roll – both for the sake of justice and to serve as a deterrent for other school leaders who may be enticed into cheating on state tests.