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Comments of the week: A feud over breadth of Stuy cheating

This week kicked off with a bang, as the city named its pick to lead Stuyvesant High School. It has fizzled since then, so we’re moving our regular Friday feature to today and highlighting some extra-interesting comments our readers left on the news story about the new principal, Jie Zhang. On Friday, GothamSchools will publish only if there’s breaking news.

Zhang is taking over Stuyvesant after the Department of Education’s top officials intervened in a high-profile cheating scandal at the ultra-selective school. She told reporters that she didn’t think cheating was a major problem at Stuyvesant — also her children’s school — but that she would nonetheless work immediately to establish a culture of integrity.

Our readers were divided about the scope of the cheating problem Zhang will have to confront — and about whether she could be more honest about it. In the second comment on the story, “Yes” wrote:

If there is a widespread cheating problem … and there is ……..with the NUMEROUS facebook pages with kids posting their homework….is a principal whose own children may be knee deep in it the right choice?

Another reader, posting as “ActualStudent,” expressed a similar sentiment:

To have 2 children go to this school, and think this was an isolated incident?

Either lying or entirely oblivious.

“123″ said there could be a very good reason that Zhang was out of the loop on cheating that did take place:

How is it surprising that she didn’t know?
Teenagers keep lots of secrets from their parents, and a group of cheaters is not necessarily a topic that comes up during dinner conversations.

Cheating is a dinner-table conversation for another commenter, parent, “rf486″:

My daughter will be a junior at another large specialized high school. When we discussed the cheating scandal at Stuy, as well as the market in amphetamines among high school students recently publicized in an article in the Times, she said, yes, some kids cheat, some kids take drugs to do better on tests or sell their drugs. But not all students, not most students. My guess is that it’s similar at Stuy.

ActualStudent responded with a quick rebuttal:

it’s not

Stuyvesant had plenty of cheating scandals while Jie Zhang was part of the PTA.

School wide scandals such as a departmental final examination having to be re-administered after a student obtained a copy and distributed it to the grade. These stories did not get passed around to the media, but were well known about within the school.

To be part of the PTA, and not hear about things like that…

Another commenter who said he was a Stuyvesant student, “Anonymous,” offered additional details about what cheating there looks like to him:

What’s worse is that the cheating that happens at Stuyvesant is on such a cooperative level. I remember being in classes where the entire student body worked together to cheat.

Cheating here is different from other schools, because the students are more clever in their methods of cheating.

Aside from the cheating issue, other commenters weighed in on whether Zhang was a good choice for the school. She has been a math teacher, assistant principal, principal, and network leader in the Department of Education.

One commenter, “Tim,” wrote that he was surprised more commenters did not praise that trajectory:

Any time there’s been a reason on this site to discuss a Leadership Academy or younger principal, inevitably there are comments about how principals should have extensive classroom experience, graduate to becoming an AP, and then grow into the principal’s role.

Here is someone who has taken pretty much exactly that route, and who has five years’ worth of experience as the principal of another selective exam school to boot, and in the span of four hours here we’ve seen her called a “Tweed stooge” and an “apparatchik,” and had it implied that she condones cheating and must have been a failure as a network leader.

Unbelievable.

  • Ray Brower

    It’s always cute how GS frames their “comments of the week”. Neglected above, in response to Tim’s comment regarding the choice of the new principal, were critiques of her current status as a network leader. A plush politically connected position with zero accountability–heck, most people working in schools couldn’t even tell you what the networks do, certainly nothing that has benefitted a student in a classroom. Networks are jokes. Sheer waste of money on people with undeserved six figure salaries and their fancy titles. I predict they’ll be disappearing soon along with other aspects of Bloomberg’s smoke and mirrors show.

  • Homwowk

    I scrambled the multiple choice questions, not numbered, no scantron. Open ended questions varied slightly. I handed out the tests to each student.

    I hand graded each exam, knew exactly how everyone did and they knew exactly what they needed to work on. I felt if my students could cheat on me, I was being made into a fool.

    This was chemistry. This is not rocket science.

  • http://twitter.com/nycdoenuts nycdoenuts

    I hear you on that (I think some of those comments about Network Leader accountability came from me). But this weekly post is the closest this site comes to something resembling editorializing and that’s not so bad (don’t get me wrong, I’d like to see more coverage from our side of the fence too, but they’ve covered enough in the past to garner similar complaints from the reform folks). Given the polarized atmosphere in education these days, I think ONE piece per week where they pick what they want to display isn’t so uncool.

    Now if they started deleting comments they didn’t agree with …. that’d be uncool

  • Enoughisenough

    Item 1- CSA members, including principals, are supposed to give the DOE 90 days notice of intent to retire. The fact that Teitel gave 30 days notice confirms he was pushed out- probably as part of a “we will drop this investigation if you go” type of deal.
    Item 2- The BOE and CSA used to frown on interim acting appointments for principal because it violates the open posting and c30 process by giving one person- in this case Zhang- a clear advantage over other candidates. Almost all principals who have gotten their jobs since 2010 have been appointed by Tweed with the C30 as a PEP-level formality. More top down “who u know” style from Bloomberg’s DOE.
    Item 3-It is unethical for a network leader who was supposed to be supporting schools to take one of their principal’s job- Selenikas did it and now Zhang. It is also unethical to take a principal’s job at a school your child attends unless the child is going to transfer out. This whole deal stinks.

  • Jodama

    God I hope you’re prediction is right – but as we all know many of the network people will magically reappear in whatever is the latest configuration.  Remember when we had Regions and all the network people were at the Regions?  Then Regions went away and all the people who were working in Admin positions at the Regions went into the networks.

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