There are avenues and ways to affect change in regards to standardized testing; conspiring to change scores to pass under-prepared students and inflate school achievement numbers isn't one of them. Backing what they did and on the scale they did it is as shitty and wrong as that approach to teacher/student assessment. What's worse, by dragging this along as far as this handful of pig-headed dumbasses did, they lost the chance for that dialogue. Remember, when this all started back in 2011, there were 216 (!) teachers and administrators implicated in the scandal. Most quickly admitted to what they had done and all of them faced paltry punishment in comparison to today's sentencing.


But for four years now, the remaining few were offered ranges of deals by the state that they refused to listen to, and Cotmam in particular wasted so much of the county's time and money with frivolous motions. Even after their verdicts, they refused to take the last-second deals on offer despite Baxter and the DA pleading for them to do so multiple times. Had they entered guilty please way back in 2011 or fessed up like so many of their colleagues did, this would already be past them.

So, no. I really don't give a damn other than the amount of time and money the county is going to have to waste, again, hearing the appeals.