In 1963, Davey Moore, an American boxer, lost a fight due to a technical knock-out. He left the ring complaining of a headache and died of inoperable brain injuries 4 days later. He was 30 years old. That same year, Bob Dylan wrote a song “Who Killed Davey Moore?” in which he questioned the entire boxing industry, from the fans to the managers and everyone in between. Who DID kill Davey Moore? Dylan’s line of inquiry was designed to examine the morality of a sport in which many people benefitted greatly at the expense of a few athletes willing to risk their lives.
Each stanza of the song presents the perspective of various parties involved in the industry:
“Not I”, said the referee
“Don’t point your finger at me
I could’ve stopped it in the eighth
An’ maybe kept him from his fate
But the crowd would’ve booed, I’m sure
At not gettin’ their money’s worth”
The crowd absolves itself of blame as well:
“Not us”, said the angry crowd
Whose screams filled the arena loud
“It’s too bad he died that night
But we just like to see a fight”
We cheat our students every minute we spend practicing for a test that does not measure what we believe to be the essential qualities and habits of educated citizens. Parents cheat their children every single time they send them to school to sit, still, for a standardized test. Principals cheat their families every time they implore them to send their kids to school for testing in the name of higher school letter grades. Governors cheat their states by racing to the top in order to receive millions of dollars for their schools.
And the US Department of Education has stolen our schools from us too, by bullying top school administrators into high stakes assessments that do not measure the standards we believe in.
It would be foolish for any of us to believe that the Atlanta educators were the only ones. What they did was wrong, indeed. But the system has been carefully designed to engender such desperate behavior.
When Davey Moore was complaining of that headache after his knockout, no one paid attention. It was just the cost of doing business. Each and every one of us is suffering from a horrendous headache right now. The students from staring at their screens and filling in bubbles; the teachers from the pressure off losing employment; parents from sending their kids to unhappy environments; top school administrators from creating systemically toxic cultures.
There’s no easy fix for this headache; but we do need to stop cheating.
Comments 5
Thanks Eve. I think it’s going to take a big fight to get the sound back into teacher’s voices.
Well said! Thank you. What they did in Atlanta was wrong. What was/is DONE TO Atlanta (and to every school in our country) to bring on that behavior was/is even more ‘wrong’.
I am frustrated at what is going on. We set up an environment where one can easily see how this happened. There is no excuse for cheating and what these teachers did was wrong. But we are holding these teachers to a higher standard than we hold ourselves or other community/business leaders.
Thank you for this piece! It is infuriating to know what I need to do as opposed to what I am required to do. All things considered, I refuse to compromise my ethics and values. Again, thank you for this perspective.
NPR’s Anya Kamenitz in her book The Test: Why Are Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing – But You Don’t Have to Be http://amzn.to/1IoNWPk talks about cheating as one of the natural outcomes of the testing culture. My own take is that by being so draconian in the sentencing, the courts have put teachers on the defensive and instead of shaming those who cheated we’re commenting on the sentences.