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As first appeared in Education Week, July 15, 2009
By Patrick F. Bassett, Paul D. Houston, & Rushworth M. Kidder
In a single week late last year, federal agents arrested three high-profile Americans. Then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois was rounded up for allegedly soliciting bribes to fill President Barack Obama’s vacated U.S. Senate seat. Marc S. Dreier, a respected New York lawyer, was bagged for bilking investors out of $400 million in a brazen financial scam. And Wall Street trader Bernard L. Madoff was reeled in for running a $65 billion Ponzi scheme.
Fraud, sadly, is a daily affair. What distinguished that week, however, was the sheer gall and scope of the perpetrators—and the fact that all three were so smart and successful that they could have been poster children for the nation’s schools. All they lacked was a moral compass. But personal ethics never stuck with them from their schooling—a failure that finally overshadowed and negated everything else they’d learned.
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Patrick F. Bassett is the president of the National Association of Independent Schools. Paul D. Houston recently retired as the executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. Rushworth M. Kidder is the president and founder of the Institute for Global Ethics.
Copyright 2009 © Institute for Global Ethics. All rights reserved.
