Superintendent of the year expected to be sentenced today

• what Lorenzo Garcia, the former superintendent of the El Paso, Texas Independent School District, will get sentenced today for his part in a scheme which fraudulently inflated test scores in his school district.
• why The way the district did it was particularly messed-up — they held back numerous low-performing students in the ninth grade so they didn’t take part in the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test, which students take in the tenth grade. Some students were told to drop out. Even worse, Garcia benefitted financially, receiving $56,000 in bonuses for high test scores. source

» How students reacted: Hundreds of students were removed from the district during the period. “They took away my high school, my time,” explained one student, Cesar Diaz, who was kicked out of school on claims that he was living in Mexico. “I wanted to study in the U.S. because I’m a U.S. citizen. My future is in the United States.”