One would assume that a background check would at least include determining that a claimed job or award or degree actually existed — and ditto the employer, awarder, or school.

Apparently one would be wrong.

@ Watt in re the Powerline post: amazing the amount of background information that can be found by actually checking someone’s background.
Especially the criminal charges that have nothing to do with citizenship status.

Abagnale’s opus was my first thought also.
Even if not a true story, his book and the movie were both brilliant works of the con man genre.

Talking your way into a job, especially when the employer has a serious need to fill a position, is all too easy. I’ve done it three times in the past six years.

Neo’s post title, Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (“False in one thing, false in all things”) could easily be extended to “Incompetent in One, Incompetent in All” which seems to be the governing principle for so much of what is claimed to be “education” in America. Ian Andre Roberts is today’s poster child for education industry malfeasance, but anyone who has kids in school – and I’m including private schools as well as public – and has dealt with the ingrained bureaucracies the industry is founded upon and has so throughly embraced – has to wonder about everything else the Geniuses of Education are doing.

“Oh, but my kids’ school is great/terrific/etc., and Ms. Bradford/Ms. Jones/Mr. Smith is/are great teachers.” “Teachers of what?” exactly, and how is that information delivered and the student performance improvement derived therefrom measured?

I’m firmly in the “nuke it from orbit and rebuild from scratch on fresh ground” camp on this. Too much money, and too many futures – including America’s – are at stake to ccontinue to tolerate tghe substandArd peformance that has become the default setting for educatuion in America. The idea of a “town school marm” funded by the town council was appealing a couple centuries ago, and it probably worked pretty well in a one-room schoolhouse with a few dozen students of varying ages who would head back to the farm or ranch with roughly an 8th grade education (which, it must be pointed out, was often substantially more broad and contained much more detail and skill improvement than today’s “graduating” high school seniors are capable of).

So. anyone know just how many more Ian Andre Roberts there are out in Education Land? And, just what, exactly, those dot edu agencies, departments and boards – each of which would eagerly adopt another Ian Andre Roberts if offered the opportunity – are teaching our kids, especially to what end and achievement level?