How Come Klein Remains A Hero While Atlanta Schools Chief Resigns In Disgrace?

The NY Times reported in October that even as Bloomberg and Klein were touting the "education miracle" here in NYC from 2006-2009, they knew the test scores were inflated and phony.

Even when the scores were revealed to be phony this year, the editorial boards of all the major NYC papers continue to hail Klein as a hero even though the achievement gap between white and Asian and black and Hispanic students was now larger than before he took power of the schools.

It seems that fraudulent hailing and hawking of test scores is not a crime in NYC.

However in Atlanta, it is:

Atlanta Schools Supt. Beverly Hall today bowed to calls for her to step down following a standardized-testing scandal, saying she would not return next school year.

A statement from her office said that Hall, who has been superintendent for 11 years, had notified school board members that she won't seek another contract when her current contract expires June 30.

Calls for her resignation had been growing louder because of a scandal reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the latest scores on the state's Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests. The newspaper reported that many increases in state scores reported in districts across the state seemed “statistically improbable.”

Klein gets a multimillion dollar job working for Rupert Murdoch, Hall resigns in disgrace.

It's true that Hall has been caught more nakedly in hiding the test score fraud, but if reporters were to dig just a little deeper into Mr. Klein's record, they'd find similar awareness by both he and his boss.