Newsweek on MCPS - What Happens When Role Models Teach Dishonesty

Superintendent Jerry Weast's first year in Montgomery County was not his first year as a Superintendent. When he arrived at MCPS he had been a Superintendent for over 20 years.

With all of that experience, how did he handle a major cheating scandal at the end of his first year here? Read the Newsweek article that detailed how he handled the crisis, and how the students involved were treated.

Newsweek - Bitter Lessons: The Kids Were The Heroes In The Scandal At Potomac Elementary. What Happens When Role Models Teach Dishonesty

By EVAN THOMAS AND PAT WINGERT | NEWSWEEK

The first hints of something wrong at Potomac Elementary came from the kids. Whispering to one another in the hallways and on the playground, then telling their parents after school, a few fifth graders began describing the peculiar behavior of their principal...

...But on a deeper level, the Potomac scandal is a morality play with a disturbing twist: the heroes were the children who had the courage to question the ethics of the very people who were supposed to be teaching them the values of honesty and integrity...

...The kids were bothered and confused. "Some kids were saying to each other, 'I don't think she's allowed to do that'," one fifth grader told NEWSWEEK. The student, a 10-year-old boy, recounted that he was given extra time on the math test...

...In their public pronouncements, school-district administrators [Blog Note: The MCPS Superintendent was Jerry Weast] seemed more embarrassed by the negative publicity than ashamed of the cheating. The school appeared to approach the incident more as an exercise in damage control than as an opportunity to teach right from wrong...

...They weren't always on top. In 1998 Potomac finished a mere seventh in the county on the MSPAP. In the fall of 1999 Montgomery's new school superintendent, Jerry Weast, prepared a "productivity map" showing how each of the county's schools scored. He told newspaper reporters that the map would help him identify and weed out principals whose schools were performing poorly. Potomac Elementary was rated "less productive" because its scores had leveled off in recent years. A few months later, when the 1999 MSPAP results came out, Potomac had vault-ed to No. 1...