16 ms·

High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

237 points by dankohn1 10y ago

itchyjunk 10y ago
Great read though the title felt a little click baity. Are credentials not verified when hiring someone? (especially for a public school) or was this a result of the board being lazy? Because if credentials are never verified, this might be hinting at a bigger problem.
- alphabettsy 10y ago
  There have been some stories about execs at very large companies lying on their resumes from small things like being in certain organizations up to completely fabricating earning a degree or attending a particular educational institution at all.
  - AndyNemmity 10y ago
    I have no college experience, and no one has ever even asked. I've never once had to justify it or discuss it in an interview. Education is no where on my resume.
    - pharrlax 10y ago
      I'm guessing you're not a high school principal.
    - jonny_eh 10y ago
      With that level of honesty you'll never be the CEO of a company like Yahoo. http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/13/technology/yahoo-ceo-out/ http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/13/technology/yahoo-ceo-out/
    - jlarocco 10y ago
      It's hard to know how impressed to be without knowing what you do ;-) Usually the only time education is important on a resume is when a person has no other relevant experience.
      - mratzloff 10y ago
        Or in academia.
        pc86 10y ago
        Or in most non-tech jobs. You can't be a nutritionist without a four-year degree in Nutrition (or I believe a few very closely related fields). There are even some fitness certifications you can't get without (any) four-year degree. No amount of self-study or exam passage will get you to be an RN. Tech is an outlier in that education is secondary to most other factors. I'm happy for that because my Political Science degree isn't worth much, but there are even tech companies that require a degree, or a STEM degree, to be software developers.
        magic_beans 10y ago
        I suspect that requirements for degrees in STEM have much more to do with weeding out "undesirables" from your hiring process. Many companies won't even take candidates from non-ivies + soft ivies (Stanford, CM, etc).
        jlarocco 10y ago
        That's a pretty strong generalization to present without evidence. I'm sure some companies favor candidates from certain schools, but I've never seen any evidence that it's a systemic problem. The one exception I can think of is high level, publicly facing positions. I could see a company choosing a CTO with a PhD from MIT over one with a PhD from somewhere else, just to impress investors, for example. For rank and file software engineer positions, alma mater isn't usually so important. As far as STEM goes, those fields require so much math and other background knowledge that it's almost unbelievable that somebody could learn it all on their own. Not that it's impossible, but it's a pretty wild claim, and it's reasonable that people would be suspicious.
    - charles-salvia 10y ago
      It doesn't seem to matter as much in the technology world. When I look at people's resumes I barely even glance over the Education section. I mean, I'll take note if it's something extreme like a 4.0 at Stanford, but for the most part nobody cares anymore.
- sampo 10y ago
  > Are credentials not verified when hiring someone? The verification work is probably outsourced to some company that does that kind of background checks. Or just takes your money and doesn't do any work, as the case might be.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    What sort of credentials are required to do background checks? Who verifies the verifiers?
    - pc86 10y ago
      There are several independent sources that will verify graduate information. They have a list of schools that work with them and get some subset of personal information (name + DOB and degree conferred, I would imagine) each quarter/year which they just keep and use to verify. National Student Clearinghouse[0] is the largest, I believe. For schools not using any of these programs, you can always just call the school. My alma mater is part of NSC but will also respond to individual requests directly. [0] http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/ http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/
- IIAOPSW 10y ago
  My high school physics teacher got fired middle of the year. Turned out he wasn't at all licensed to teach and may or may not have actually finished college. He got all the way to tenure before anyone noticed. The guy was a wonderful teacher and knew his topic insanely well. Other students hated him cause he actually held students to a standard. Dude ran a convenience store out of his class room to fund our robotics team. He convinced me to re-enroll in the AP Physics B class under the promise that I wouldn't have to show up and instead would study AP Physics C (calculus) with him during his prep time. I was then bribed into this non-existent class with pirated software (thus getting me into programming). He did all of this so that there would be enough students enrolled in the AP Physics B class. For the record I got a perfect score on my exam. The man broke every rule in the book and our lives were better for it. In conclusion, yes it happens. Yes you can be anti-rule anti-authority and still be successful and non-edgy. Fuck da police.
  - helthanatos 10y ago
    That's not at all where I thought you were going with that. Some rule breakers are good others are bad. Some only break certain rules. I'm confused as to why he didn't finish college online or something when they found out? I've seen teachers be emergency certified in similar circumstances.
    - IIAOPSW 10y ago
      >Some rule breakers are good others are bad. True. Maybe I just idolized this guy cause he was both smart and stuck it to the man. >I'm confused as to why he didn't finish college online or something when they found out? I don't know what the rules are on that. Even if it were possible by this time he already tried to forge documents and otherwise lie his way through. Even before the fraud the man didn't really have to many allies in administration. Also the district didn't even have the balls to tell us (the students) why our teacher disappeared one day. I had to learn it through another teacher in a private conversation outside the school. Really just screw public school in general. The whole place was 95% waste of time followed by a "congratulatory" piece of paper.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
gkop 10y ago
This is the issue of the newspaper the kids published: https://issuu.com/emilysmith41/docs/march_17 https://issuu.com/emilysmith41/docs/march_17
- everybodyknows 10y ago
  There's a "Full screen" button at bottom-right of the image that improves readability.
BrandonMarc 10y ago
The articles I've found have all conveniently avoided answering the biggest question: why didn't the "adults" running the school figure this out sooner? ideally, before she was hired? That the students figured it out is proof it was certainly possible to figure out.
- notimetorelax 10y ago
  IMHO, two reasons: - Adults are not super humans and can make mistakes - and 17 year olds are as capable as adults. In engineering people frequently ask - why nobody thought about it - well because nobody did.
  - paulftw 10y ago
    Part 2 of this investigation should be "whose job it was to check new principal's credentials and and how they profited from looking the other way" Edit: was that person the only applicant? If not why did the process identify them as the most suitable candidate?
    - tbrownaw 10y ago
      Part 2 of this investigation should be "whose job it was to check new principal's credentials and and how they profited from looking the other way" That really shouldn't be taken as a given. "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence." Or by laziness, overwork, miscommunication, etc.
    - blowski 10y ago
      If you're doing root cause analysis of a system failure, you're not looking to blame an individual. If you find something malicious then, sure, deal with it. But assume good faith in all parties from the outset and you're more likely to succeed in fixing the problem.
      - trprog 10y ago
        That's no way to witch hunt.
pitaa 10y ago
And she would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!
lordnacho 10y ago
It's time consuming to chase down credentials, especially as when you're hiring someone, it always feels more likely that they aren't making it up. After all, you have a great hiring process, right? My father-in-law is a doctor, and he tells me there's been several occasions where he's thought some colleague was really quite shockingly ill informed. He's always been too timid to call the bluff, but he says it's happened a few times. Also he's had the old trick of the certificate with the the cigarette burn on the date attempted. There's probably a lot of jobs outside of the more technical fields where simply being a nice person who can read and write makes you indistinguishable from someone with an education in that field. Heck, I worked with someone with a mathematical PhD for years wondering how he'd never heard of Banach-Tarsky. Not that it's a specifically useful or necessary thing, just that you'd think a math-interested person would have come across it. Or how it could be that he thought excel was a good platform for quantitative finance. In the end I decided there were too many things that surprised him, even if he did act interested when told about them. That's not to say he didn't actually have the degree; but he certainly didn't have the skills that are supposed to go with it.
- p49k 10y ago
  Can you explain more about the cigarette burn trick? I've never heard of it.
  - jstanley 10y ago
    Presumably, make the date illegible so that you can claim whatever date you like. I don't quite see how that gets you anywhere. Maybe somebody who only just got the degree is trying to claim they got it 20 years ago and have been gaining experience ever since?
    - Retric 10y ago
      Many credentials expire at which point they earn rather difficult or expencive to get back. Consider an application with a MSCE from 2002 or something.
    - xherberta 10y ago
charlieflowers 10y ago
This is simply excellent. What a great story. I'm surprised no one has just stated that yet. Excellent.
- sebleon 10y ago
  More comments like these are needed here!
  - sebleon 10y ago
    Welp this got downvoted, I guess HN doesn't look kindly at promoting positivity here?!
    - splawn 10y ago
      First "hn rule" of the voting system... use it. (Its a good way of promoting positivity) Second "hn rule" of the voting system... don't needlessly talk about it.
      - sebleon 10y ago
        Are these rules posted somewhere? Overall, HN has some really interesting content and insight, mixed in with hateful negativity - seems like talking about the rules would be good, if we wanted to cut out the negative bits
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        splawn 10y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        sebleon 10y ago
        > Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. lol
nkurz 10y ago
I don't know how common falsified credentials are in school administration, but I'll mention a parallel experience that was a formative part of my upbringing. While I was in high school, my father taught at a small private college in Wisconsin, where he was on the hiring committee for the new college president. After being hired, the chosen candidate's behavior was surprisingly erratic, prompting my my father to continue researching his background. After a bit of digging, he found that the new college president had falsified almost his entire resume. Thinking he had solid proof of this, and not being politically savvy, my father presented his evidence to the other faculty who had been on the hiring committee. To his surprise, he (rather than the fraudster) was promptly fired from his supposedly tenured position for "gross insubordination". Shortly thereafter, the "fake" college president pocketed the proceeds from remortgaging the college dorms, drove his college provided little-red-sports-car out of town, and was never heard from again. Embittered by the lack of backing from his purported colleagues, my father never returned to academia, and instead turned to odd jobs and house painting. Not long after, the college lost its accreditation, and went out of business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Senario_College https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Senario_College.
- WhiteSource1 10y ago
  But wouldn't academics have to at least show framed diplomas somewhere? Or research?
  - kevinmannix 10y ago
    A framed piece of paper? I can make you a graduate of Harvard if that's all it takes.
    - jrs235 10y ago
      Some people are willing to pay you thousands of dollars for that!
  - nkurz 10y ago
    Here's an odd part: it was a small enough college community that a "get to know you" type party was held at the president's private residence soon after his arrival. Being an asocial high-schooler dragged along, I noticed a bound copy of his PhD thesis was one of the few books on the shelf. I skimmed through it (something very verbose and academic about the theory of business administration) and found it incomprehensible. So his "research" existed, at least in some form. In retrospect, I'm wondering if it was "real", but from a diploma mill. Or purchased? Or someone else's rebound? Or as real as a thesis on business administration can be, from an earlier time in his life. In retrospect I wish I'd read it a little closer so I had a better clue as to what he actually did.
snackai 10y ago
This is how journalism should work. Not like the Washpo, acting as Jeff Bezos Anti-Trump propaganda machine. Don't get me wrong here, this is not a Trump fan writing, but I can't stand the biased bs media publishes these days.
- fahadkhan 10y ago
  "these days."? The media has always been biased.
- posguy 10y ago
  Yeah, no joke. Immediately at the end of the article, one of the suggested articles is "America is ‘over-stored’ and Payless ShoeSource is the latest victim". Looking at the other recent articles, it is a theme. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/04/05/america-is-over-stored-and-payless-shoesource-is-the-latest-victim/?utm_term=.9f7fd727c48f https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/04/0...
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  A story that comes to a conclusion you dislike is not necessarily propaganda. Nobody is immune from legitimate criticism.
LoSboccacc 10y ago
> for one, when they researched Corllins University, the private university where Robertson said she got her master’s and doctorate degrees years ago, the website didn’t work. what an amateur - this is how you do it http://bigbusinessjournal.com/ http://bigbusinessjournal.com/
- Insanity 10y ago
  I had no idea what to expect from that link but I'm happy I clicked it :D
rubyfan 10y ago
"And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids"
losteverything 10y ago
My experience with young people is they think nothing of googling someone. Example. 25yr old always G Earth the presons address, searches other sites,FB, etc As ROUTINE. New male client comes in she openly tells coworkers about her results.
- derrickdirge 10y ago
  My experience with old people is they take a shocking amount of time to consider googling something or they have me google it for them.
  - losteverything 10y ago
    I would never had thought a normal, well reared person would Google anybody just because they can. I think the net-natives think nothing of it and probably dont think it's wrong. My comment demonstrated my discovery that I am not surprised it was from a young person.
    - magic_beans 10y ago
      You haven't explained why you think it's wrong to Google someone. Note: not everyone you encounter is a "normal, well-reared" person. Googling someone is a good way to weed out the less "well-reared".
      - losteverything 10y ago
        Hmm. Googling a person is nosey. Nosey is not desireable. Nosey is not acceptable behavior I had passed on to me and I passed it on to all my children. Google lets a nosey person be nosey in private and anonymously. It is still not desireable. Young people ( and some older ones) Google everything and think it's all the same. That was my point. Nobody my age tells me or my peers "Hay, I just found out our new manager is divorced and has 3 kids,and used to work for botuniverse.com." I would directly ask that person "why on earth did you want to find that out!?!?" Perhaps this is a generational think....
bane 10y ago
Turns out, for U.S. institutions, and a little information on the subject, it's pretty easy to get educational verification on candidate's claims. Many companies with well run hiring operations just use this service as a matter of course. https://nscverifications.org/ https://nscverifications.org/ http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/ http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/
kelvin0 10y ago
I applaud the budding journalists persistence, and certainly having someone falsify their credentials is a really terrible start into such an important position. However, I must mention that I been in contact with so many really bad HS staff (teachers, principals..) all with legitimate credentials, that I am starting to wonder about their significance? A principal should probably have some teaching experience, but seems to be like more of an MBA/business type of background? Also, let me clarify I was not one to get into trouble and had very good grades in HS. I can really remember 2 really good teachers, and the rest ... quite mediocre at best. I also dated a HS teacher (as an adult,much later on) so I've seen firsthand the inner workings of teaching 'system'.
- ryanmarsh 10y ago
  In the US I feel like the primary education system is simply childcare for the working class. My experience with teacher quality was just like yours.
  - cwingrav 10y ago
    We don't pay them well so we get what we pay for. The exceptions are those that love to teach and love students. You can't run an organization via exceptions however. It's really a shame we don't value education more.
    - noxToken 10y ago
      > It's really a shame we don't value education more. This might sound nit-picky but I think we all (Americans) value education as a whole. We just don't care (as a whole) about education for others outside of our sphere. When you have the ability to move to better school system or to pay for private school attendance, you have no need to improve public schools. Not all public school systems are bad. I image that everyone can think of one relatively close school that they can unequivocally call a good/great school system where they expect most student to exceed by some set of positive metrics As long as the people who can fix it (no matter if its more staff, better pay, better resources or whatever change necessary) can place their children into C-Level Preparatory Academy, Dumpster Fire High School probably won't see much improvement.
wheelerwj 10y ago
This just in, there have been a surprising number of resignations from Faculty members all across the nation. In unrelated news, student journalist have begun investigating administrators credentials as projects for their school papers. Seriously, this is remarkable. That kids today have the power to effect this level of change is nothing short of incredible.
secfirstmd 10y ago
This happen in my school in Ireland also - with false credentials. This part of the story I really respect: "Under Kansas law, high school journalists are protected from administrative censorship. “The kids are treated as professionals,” Smith said. But with that freedom came a major responsibility to get the story right, Smith said. It also meant overcoming a natural hesitancy many students have to question authority."
- jawns 10y ago
  Unfortunately, not all U.S. states give students this right. When I was co-editor of my high school's student newspaper, every issue was subject to administrative review. Our principal literally read every issue prior to publication and told us what could and couldn't be run.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    > When I was co-editor of my high school's student newspaper, every issue was subject to administrative review. Our principal literally read every issue prior to publication and told us what could and couldn't be run. No different from any "real" newspaper.
    - eli 10y ago
      That's incorrect.
    - jawns 10y ago
      It's true that publishers of "real" newspapers sometimes exert this sort of influence, which is unfortunate. But those publishers aren't subject to the First Amendment, because they're not government-run. In the case of a school newspaper, however, the school is run by the state, and so First Amendment issues definitely do come into play.
    - ballenf 10y ago
      I worked on school papers high school through college. Administrative review served a very useful purpose and kept the quality of the papers higher. I respected every administrator I dealt with. They have a much harder job than it might appear at first blush -- even the slightest hint of repressing a valid story turns a very harsh spotlight on them.
maxerickson 10y ago
I've had a conversation with a well credentialed school principal that had, uh, lost track of the concept of the multiplication table.
panzagl 10y ago
This isn't doing much to dispel my feeling that the entire field of Human Resources is a farce.
neap24 10y ago
Great journalism by the students. What I fear just as much as unaccredited "diploma mill" universities are the accredited ones that hand out education degrees just as easily. It seems like anyone can pay for an education masters (or PhD) these days.
herbst 10y ago
I love stories like this. Look into 'Gerd postel' if you like that stuff. He imposted as director of a medical clinic for years and is very outspoken about it. Narcissism at its best

237 points by dankohn1 10y ago

Great read though the title felt a little click baity. Are credentials not verified when hiring someone? (especially for a public school) or was this a result of the board being lazy? Because if credentials are never verified, this might be hinting at a bigger problem.

alphabettsy 10y ago
There have been some stories about execs at very large companies lying on their resumes from small things like being in certain organizations up to completely fabricating earning a degree or attending a particular educational institution at all.
- AndyNemmity 10y ago
  I have no college experience, and no one has ever even asked. I've never once had to justify it or discuss it in an interview. Education is no where on my resume.
  - pharrlax 10y ago
    I'm guessing you're not a high school principal.
  - jonny_eh 10y ago
    With that level of honesty you'll never be the CEO of a company like Yahoo. http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/13/technology/yahoo-ceo-out/ http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/13/technology/yahoo-ceo-out/
  - jlarocco 10y ago
    It's hard to know how impressed to be without knowing what you do ;-) Usually the only time education is important on a resume is when a person has no other relevant experience.
    - mratzloff 10y ago
      Or in academia.
      - pc86 10y ago
        Or in most non-tech jobs. You can't be a nutritionist without a four-year degree in Nutrition (or I believe a few very closely related fields). There are even some fitness certifications you can't get without (any) four-year degree. No amount of self-study or exam passage will get you to be an RN. Tech is an outlier in that education is secondary to most other factors. I'm happy for that because my Political Science degree isn't worth much, but there are even tech companies that require a degree, or a STEM degree, to be software developers.
        magic_beans 10y ago
        I suspect that requirements for degrees in STEM have much more to do with weeding out "undesirables" from your hiring process. Many companies won't even take candidates from non-ivies + soft ivies (Stanford, CM, etc).
        jlarocco 10y ago
        That's a pretty strong generalization to present without evidence. I'm sure some companies favor candidates from certain schools, but I've never seen any evidence that it's a systemic problem. The one exception I can think of is high level, publicly facing positions. I could see a company choosing a CTO with a PhD from MIT over one with a PhD from somewhere else, just to impress investors, for example. For rank and file software engineer positions, alma mater isn't usually so important. As far as STEM goes, those fields require so much math and other background knowledge that it's almost unbelievable that somebody could learn it all on their own. Not that it's impossible, but it's a pretty wild claim, and it's reasonable that people would be suspicious.
  - charles-salvia 10y ago
    It doesn't seem to matter as much in the technology world. When I look at people's resumes I barely even glance over the Education section. I mean, I'll take note if it's something extreme like a 4.0 at Stanford, but for the most part nobody cares anymore.
sampo 10y ago
> Are credentials not verified when hiring someone? The verification work is probably outsourced to some company that does that kind of background checks. Or just takes your money and doesn't do any work, as the case might be.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  What sort of credentials are required to do background checks? Who verifies the verifiers?
  - pc86 10y ago
    There are several independent sources that will verify graduate information. They have a list of schools that work with them and get some subset of personal information (name + DOB and degree conferred, I would imagine) each quarter/year which they just keep and use to verify. National Student Clearinghouse[0] is the largest, I believe. For schools not using any of these programs, you can always just call the school. My alma mater is part of NSC but will also respond to individual requests directly. [0] http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/ http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/
IIAOPSW 10y ago
My high school physics teacher got fired middle of the year. Turned out he wasn't at all licensed to teach and may or may not have actually finished college. He got all the way to tenure before anyone noticed. The guy was a wonderful teacher and knew his topic insanely well. Other students hated him cause he actually held students to a standard. Dude ran a convenience store out of his class room to fund our robotics team. He convinced me to re-enroll in the AP Physics B class under the promise that I wouldn't have to show up and instead would study AP Physics C (calculus) with him during his prep time. I was then bribed into this non-existent class with pirated software (thus getting me into programming). He did all of this so that there would be enough students enrolled in the AP Physics B class. For the record I got a perfect score on my exam. The man broke every rule in the book and our lives were better for it. In conclusion, yes it happens. Yes you can be anti-rule anti-authority and still be successful and non-edgy. Fuck da police.
- helthanatos 10y ago
  That's not at all where I thought you were going with that. Some rule breakers are good others are bad. Some only break certain rules. I'm confused as to why he didn't finish college online or something when they found out? I've seen teachers be emergency certified in similar circumstances.
  - IIAOPSW 10y ago
    >Some rule breakers are good others are bad. True. Maybe I just idolized this guy cause he was both smart and stuck it to the man. >I'm confused as to why he didn't finish college online or something when they found out? I don't know what the rules are on that. Even if it were possible by this time he already tried to forge documents and otherwise lie his way through. Even before the fraud the man didn't really have to many allies in administration. Also the district didn't even have the balls to tell us (the students) why our teacher disappeared one day. I had to learn it through another teacher in a private conversation outside the school. Really just screw public school in general. The whole place was 95% waste of time followed by a "congratulatory" piece of paper.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

gkop 10y ago

This is the issue of the newspaper the kids published: https://issuu.com/emilysmith41/docs/march_17 https://issuu.com/emilysmith41/docs/march_17

everybodyknows 10y ago
There's a "Full screen" button at bottom-right of the image that improves readability.

BrandonMarc 10y ago

The articles I've found have all conveniently avoided answering the biggest question: why didn't the "adults" running the school figure this out sooner? ideally, before she was hired? That the students figured it out is proof it was certainly possible to figure out.

notimetorelax 10y ago
IMHO, two reasons: - Adults are not super humans and can make mistakes - and 17 year olds are as capable as adults. In engineering people frequently ask - why nobody thought about it - well because nobody did.
- paulftw 10y ago
  Part 2 of this investigation should be "whose job it was to check new principal's credentials and and how they profited from looking the other way" Edit: was that person the only applicant? If not why did the process identify them as the most suitable candidate?
  - tbrownaw 10y ago
    Part 2 of this investigation should be "whose job it was to check new principal's credentials and and how they profited from looking the other way" That really shouldn't be taken as a given. "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence." Or by laziness, overwork, miscommunication, etc.
  - blowski 10y ago
    If you're doing root cause analysis of a system failure, you're not looking to blame an individual. If you find something malicious then, sure, deal with it. But assume good faith in all parties from the outset and you're more likely to succeed in fixing the problem.
    - trprog 10y ago
      That's no way to witch hunt.

pitaa 10y ago

And she would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!

lordnacho 10y ago

It's time consuming to chase down credentials, especially as when you're hiring someone, it always feels more likely that they aren't making it up. After all, you have a great hiring process, right? My father-in-law is a doctor, and he tells me there's been several occasions where he's thought some colleague was really quite shockingly ill informed. He's always been too timid to call the bluff, but he says it's happened a few times. Also he's had the old trick of the certificate with the the cigarette burn on the date attempted. There's probably a lot of jobs outside of the more technical fields where simply being a nice person who can read and write makes you indistinguishable from someone with an education in that field. Heck, I worked with someone with a mathematical PhD for years wondering how he'd never heard of Banach-Tarsky. Not that it's a specifically useful or necessary thing, just that you'd think a math-interested person would have come across it. Or how it could be that he thought excel was a good platform for quantitative finance. In the end I decided there were too many things that surprised him, even if he did act interested when told about them. That's not to say he didn't actually have the degree; but he certainly didn't have the skills that are supposed to go with it.

p49k 10y ago
Can you explain more about the cigarette burn trick? I've never heard of it.
- jstanley 10y ago
  Presumably, make the date illegible so that you can claim whatever date you like. I don't quite see how that gets you anywhere. Maybe somebody who only just got the degree is trying to claim they got it 20 years ago and have been gaining experience ever since?
  - Retric 10y ago
    Many credentials expire at which point they earn rather difficult or expencive to get back. Consider an application with a MSCE from 2002 or something.
  - xherberta 10y ago

charlieflowers 10y ago

This is simply excellent. What a great story. I'm surprised no one has just stated that yet. Excellent.

sebleon 10y ago
More comments like these are needed here!
- sebleon 10y ago
  Welp this got downvoted, I guess HN doesn't look kindly at promoting positivity here?!
  - splawn 10y ago
    First "hn rule" of the voting system... use it. (Its a good way of promoting positivity) Second "hn rule" of the voting system... don't needlessly talk about it.
    - sebleon 10y ago
      Are these rules posted somewhere? Overall, HN has some really interesting content and insight, mixed in with hateful negativity - seems like talking about the rules would be good, if we wanted to cut out the negative bits
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - splawn 10y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        sebleon 10y ago
        > Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. lol

nkurz 10y ago

I don't know how common falsified credentials are in school administration, but I'll mention a parallel experience that was a formative part of my upbringing. While I was in high school, my father taught at a small private college in Wisconsin, where he was on the hiring committee for the new college president. After being hired, the chosen candidate's behavior was surprisingly erratic, prompting my my father to continue researching his background. After a bit of digging, he found that the new college president had falsified almost his entire resume. Thinking he had solid proof of this, and not being politically savvy, my father presented his evidence to the other faculty who had been on the hiring committee. To his surprise, he (rather than the fraudster) was promptly fired from his supposedly tenured position for "gross insubordination". Shortly thereafter, the "fake" college president pocketed the proceeds from remortgaging the college dorms, drove his college provided little-red-sports-car out of town, and was never heard from again. Embittered by the lack of backing from his purported colleagues, my father never returned to academia, and instead turned to odd jobs and house painting. Not long after, the college lost its accreditation, and went out of business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Senario_College https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Senario_College.

WhiteSource1 10y ago
But wouldn't academics have to at least show framed diplomas somewhere? Or research?
- kevinmannix 10y ago
  A framed piece of paper? I can make you a graduate of Harvard if that's all it takes.
  - jrs235 10y ago
    Some people are willing to pay you thousands of dollars for that!
- nkurz 10y ago
  Here's an odd part: it was a small enough college community that a "get to know you" type party was held at the president's private residence soon after his arrival. Being an asocial high-schooler dragged along, I noticed a bound copy of his PhD thesis was one of the few books on the shelf. I skimmed through it (something very verbose and academic about the theory of business administration) and found it incomprehensible. So his "research" existed, at least in some form. In retrospect, I'm wondering if it was "real", but from a diploma mill. Or purchased? Or someone else's rebound? Or as real as a thesis on business administration can be, from an earlier time in his life. In retrospect I wish I'd read it a little closer so I had a better clue as to what he actually did.

snackai 10y ago

This is how journalism should work. Not like the Washpo, acting as Jeff Bezos Anti-Trump propaganda machine. Don't get me wrong here, this is not a Trump fan writing, but I can't stand the biased bs media publishes these days.

fahadkhan 10y ago
"these days."? The media has always been biased.
posguy 10y ago
Yeah, no joke. Immediately at the end of the article, one of the suggested articles is "America is ‘over-stored’ and Payless ShoeSource is the latest victim". Looking at the other recent articles, it is a theme. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/04/05/america-is-over-stored-and-payless-shoesource-is-the-latest-victim/?utm_term=.9f7fd727c48f https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/04/0...
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
A story that comes to a conclusion you dislike is not necessarily propaganda. Nobody is immune from legitimate criticism.

LoSboccacc 10y ago

> for one, when they researched Corllins University, the private university where Robertson said she got her master’s and doctorate degrees years ago, the website didn’t work. what an amateur - this is how you do it http://bigbusinessjournal.com/ http://bigbusinessjournal.com/

Insanity 10y ago
I had no idea what to expect from that link but I'm happy I clicked it :D

rubyfan 10y ago

"And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids"

losteverything 10y ago

My experience with young people is they think nothing of googling someone. Example. 25yr old always G Earth the presons address, searches other sites,FB, etc As ROUTINE. New male client comes in she openly tells coworkers about her results.

derrickdirge 10y ago
My experience with old people is they take a shocking amount of time to consider googling something or they have me google it for them.
- losteverything 10y ago
  I would never had thought a normal, well reared person would Google anybody just because they can. I think the net-natives think nothing of it and probably dont think it's wrong. My comment demonstrated my discovery that I am not surprised it was from a young person.
  - magic_beans 10y ago
    You haven't explained why you think it's wrong to Google someone. Note: not everyone you encounter is a "normal, well-reared" person. Googling someone is a good way to weed out the less "well-reared".
    - losteverything 10y ago
      Hmm. Googling a person is nosey. Nosey is not desireable. Nosey is not acceptable behavior I had passed on to me and I passed it on to all my children. Google lets a nosey person be nosey in private and anonymously. It is still not desireable. Young people ( and some older ones) Google everything and think it's all the same. That was my point. Nobody my age tells me or my peers "Hay, I just found out our new manager is divorced and has 3 kids,and used to work for botuniverse.com." I would directly ask that person "why on earth did you want to find that out!?!?" Perhaps this is a generational think....

bane 10y ago

Turns out, for U.S. institutions, and a little information on the subject, it's pretty easy to get educational verification on candidate's claims. Many companies with well run hiring operations just use this service as a matter of course. https://nscverifications.org/ https://nscverifications.org/ http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/ http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/

kelvin0 10y ago

I applaud the budding journalists persistence, and certainly having someone falsify their credentials is a really terrible start into such an important position. However, I must mention that I been in contact with so many really bad HS staff (teachers, principals..) all with legitimate credentials, that I am starting to wonder about their significance? A principal should probably have some teaching experience, but seems to be like more of an MBA/business type of background? Also, let me clarify I was not one to get into trouble and had very good grades in HS. I can really remember 2 really good teachers, and the rest ... quite mediocre at best. I also dated a HS teacher (as an adult,much later on) so I've seen firsthand the inner workings of teaching 'system'.

ryanmarsh 10y ago
In the US I feel like the primary education system is simply childcare for the working class. My experience with teacher quality was just like yours.
- cwingrav 10y ago
  We don't pay them well so we get what we pay for. The exceptions are those that love to teach and love students. You can't run an organization via exceptions however. It's really a shame we don't value education more.
  - noxToken 10y ago
    > It's really a shame we don't value education more. This might sound nit-picky but I think we all (Americans) value education as a whole. We just don't care (as a whole) about education for others outside of our sphere. When you have the ability to move to better school system or to pay for private school attendance, you have no need to improve public schools. Not all public school systems are bad. I image that everyone can think of one relatively close school that they can unequivocally call a good/great school system where they expect most student to exceed by some set of positive metrics As long as the people who can fix it (no matter if its more staff, better pay, better resources or whatever change necessary) can place their children into C-Level Preparatory Academy, Dumpster Fire High School probably won't see much improvement.

wheelerwj 10y ago

This just in, there have been a surprising number of resignations from Faculty members all across the nation. In unrelated news, student journalist have begun investigating administrators credentials as projects for their school papers. Seriously, this is remarkable. That kids today have the power to effect this level of change is nothing short of incredible.

secfirstmd 10y ago

This happen in my school in Ireland also - with false credentials. This part of the story I really respect: "Under Kansas law, high school journalists are protected from administrative censorship. “The kids are treated as professionals,” Smith said. But with that freedom came a major responsibility to get the story right, Smith said. It also meant overcoming a natural hesitancy many students have to question authority."

jawns 10y ago
Unfortunately, not all U.S. states give students this right. When I was co-editor of my high school's student newspaper, every issue was subject to administrative review. Our principal literally read every issue prior to publication and told us what could and couldn't be run.
- ams6110 10y ago
  > When I was co-editor of my high school's student newspaper, every issue was subject to administrative review. Our principal literally read every issue prior to publication and told us what could and couldn't be run. No different from any "real" newspaper.
  - eli 10y ago
    That's incorrect.
  - jawns 10y ago
    It's true that publishers of "real" newspapers sometimes exert this sort of influence, which is unfortunate. But those publishers aren't subject to the First Amendment, because they're not government-run. In the case of a school newspaper, however, the school is run by the state, and so First Amendment issues definitely do come into play.
  - ballenf 10y ago
    I worked on school papers high school through college. Administrative review served a very useful purpose and kept the quality of the papers higher. I respected every administrator I dealt with. They have a much harder job than it might appear at first blush -- even the slightest hint of repressing a valid story turns a very harsh spotlight on them.

maxerickson 10y ago

I've had a conversation with a well credentialed school principal that had, uh, lost track of the concept of the multiplication table.

panzagl 10y ago

This isn't doing much to dispel my feeling that the entire field of Human Resources is a farce.

neap24 10y ago

Great journalism by the students. What I fear just as much as unaccredited "diploma mill" universities are the accredited ones that hand out education degrees just as easily. It seems like anyone can pay for an education masters (or PhD) these days.

herbst 10y ago

I love stories like this. Look into 'Gerd postel' if you like that stuff. He imposted as director of a medical clinic for years and is very outspoken about it. Narcissism at its best