Examples are legion. Recall President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Switch to education and consider El Paso TX Superintendent Lorenzo Garcia who went to jail for inflating student test scores and giving a no-bid contract to his mistress.
OK, Larry, you made your point. People with smarts, power, and position caved in to their impulses. They did dumb things. Actually, I want to go beyond that self-evident point made elsewhere and say that very smart educational policymakers also engage in folly not involving sex or money. Two stories make that point. After a few years, so many students failed the test and were retained in grade that they eventually dropped out of school.
When data confirmed that outcome, the Promotional Gates program disappeared. Of that number, nearly 25, had failed the annual tests but almost a fifth of those failures occurred because of mistakes made by district officials. The Chancellor at that time quickly ended the program. Putting an untested policy into action the first time might be chalked up to error.
And then putting those same ideas into practice a second time is dumb. But a third time? The amphitheater-shaped room with half-circular rows looked down on a small stage with a lectern, a massive pull-down screen, and two large monitors suspended from the ceiling.
Administrators had designed the room for professors to enhance the delivery of lectures. For lectures, the student responder came into play. The lecturer was then able to adjust the pace and content of the lecture to this advanced interactive technology, circa , that linked students to teacher. By when I came to Stanford as a graduate student, the LGI was being used as a large lecture hall for classes from other departments. The now-disconnected keypads were toys that bored students played with during lectures.
