Fear and Cheating in Atlanta: Evidence for the Vulnerability Thesis

In this paper I foreground the widely reported and highly visible case of cheating in Atlanta Public Schools (APS) in order to argue that the descriptions presented in the report can be taken as providing some of the missing empirical evidence for Callahan’s (1962) Vulnerability Thesis. The thesis seeks to explain why North American (US) administrators in the early 20th century gave in to demands that had little educational merit. It was Callahan’s proposal that their vulnerability to criticism and insecurity of tenure explained a significant part of the ease with which they capitulated to administrative pressure. I propose that revisiting earlier work in education and curriculum studies to provide evidence (or comment on lack of evidence) is important for the development and health of the field. Further, I suggest that, assuming that the concept of ‘vulnerability’ will be an explicit focus of work in this century, new curriculum discourses and frameworks will have to be developed in order to better study the inter-related vulnerabilities of educators as is already occurring in other fields.