Snapshots Of Corruption

A former colleague once told me about a story involving her mother, a public school teacher. After having conducted a national achievement test in the school, the principal ordered the faculty, including the mother, to take home the exam papers of the students. The purpose: to alter the answers of the papers. The reason: so the students will get better results in the test. Why? That's to give the impression that the school is indeed performing and also to aid the case of the principal, who was due for promotion.

So my colleague's mother obliged. Upon arriving home, her husband - my colleague's father - was furious and demanded that the papers be returned to the school. Of course, in the end, the principal still got her promotion. 

But it begs the question of how supposedly professional teachers could be so subservient to such a blatant request to defraud. It also begs the question of why it took a third party, the father, to knock some sense into my colleague's mother. Finally, it begs the question of why checks weren't in place to prevent such anomalies.

Another story involves my mother's colleague, a high school teacher. 

The teacher told Mama how he was among the top performers during his high school years. Because of this, he was often assigned to take exams in other schools. This alone would be regular if not for one thing: he was to take these exams using another person's name. As it turned out, these exams were tools to measure the aptitude of the students of a particular school and, in extension, the performance of that school as a whole. Showing good results in the exams spoke well of the faculty and, to do so, the faculty sent over their top students, again and again, in the guise of different names, to take these exams .

My cousin rants about a certain public school official who buys airline tickets from their office. The woman, tasked with this administrative affair, never fails to pad the expenses, with the extra "commission" going straight into her pocket. The education budget is already measly as it is now. But the woman has no qualms whatsoever of taking a bit more.

There are many more instances of public school teachers breaching ethics and shamelessly using students as their means. It's no wonder that, for all the public school teachers out there who are doing a decent job, the image of public school teaching is still far from unsullied.