Is it a Scandal?

Indiana's former State Superintendent of Education, Tony Bennett (not the singer), was defeated in last year's election by a teacher's union activist, Glenda Ritz.  Although it was close, the election loss for Bennett illustrated the power of the teacher's union in Indiana.

It didn't take long for emails from Bennett's tenure to get leaked and widely reported as a scandal, claiming that Bennett improperly changed a grade of "C" to "A" for a Charter School opened by a well-known philanthropist who is being characterized as a major Republican campaign donor, Christel DeHaan.

The most comprehensive published report I could find came from Stacy Teicher Khadaroo at the Christian Science Monitor.

The story creates mostly questions for me.  Tony of course has taken the position that it was a politically-motivated leak of an email out of context with the actual story.  Certainly it is politically motivated.  Glenda Ritz is a major opponent to the School Choice laws as well as any process that attempts to evaluate schools and teachers based on the performance of students.  So it's easy to imagine that her first day in office, Ritz ordered some of her staffers to dig deep into the email archives to see if they can find something they can use against her predecessor.

Naturally, the left-leaning press is playing into Ritz's agenda by demanding the grading system for schools be scrapped.  Anyone with half a brain understands that whether Bennett changed the grade for Cristel House for good or bad reasons, that single event neither validates nor invalidates the idea of grading schools.  Ritz and the teachers who support her want no grading or evaluation of teachers, period.  She was in Columbus recently delivering a message of "trust us, we're the professionals".

I don't know whether Bennett changed Christel House's grade out of a corrupt need to protect a donor and/or protect his educational evaluation programs at all cost, or there was an objective reason for changing the grade, which generated a "C" because of a low score in Algebra by students in that school.  If, as the story seems to suggest, Bennett simply changed the formula used to assign the grade, and that new formula was applied equally to all Indiana schools, then he did nothing wrong.

It's not clear that we'll ever find out the truth of the matter, even though Bennett has called for a thorough investigation into the matter by the State of Indiana.  If Bennett's actions were not corrupt, then he shouldn't have resigned from his job in Florida.  That's a source of concern for me, so I'd like to see Indiana go ahead and investigate the charges and publish their findings.  Unfortunately, even if the State does investigate, we'll never hear about their results if those results exhonerate Bennett.