White Collar Crime
A grade fixing scandal emerged at William Cullen Bryant High School in Long Island City in 2015. The principal of the school, Namita Dwarka, had been adamant with teachers that they help students to pass so that they can meet their graduation quotas (Gonen, Edelman & Golding, 2015). Several teachers and some students began to speak out about the pressure they were getting from the principal. Mary Bozoyan was one of them. She blew the whistle on what became known as the grade fixing scandal at William Cullen Bryant. Her reward was retaliation from the principal (Edelman, 2015). This paper will describe the issues and criminal activity that really goes all the way up the chain of command to the Department of Education. The major issues concern falsifying student grades but more importantly the quid pro quo conditions placed on schools and states by the federal government, which wants to show the public that it is improving America’s schools through its Education policies. The reality is that there are many stakeholders who are complicit in this crime of fraud and what amounts to bribery on the part of the US government: it promises federal money to states if they will show that they are meeting the Department of Education’s graduation goals. Dwarka was just a cog in the machine—and Bozoyan did said what everyone already knew was happening. The problem is that most people do not care. They accept the situation and its corruption for what it is—the way of the world. At the end of the day, that is the effect of white collar crime on society: it creates a culture of cynicism and acceptance of the misdeeds that trickle down from the top, infecting everyone at the bottom so that crime is heaped upon crime and the only ones punished are those who dare to object.

Part of the problem is that Dwarka was not applying pressure on teachers to pass failing students because she wanted to make herself look good. She was doing it because she was getting pressure from the district and the state, both of which had to produce the number of graduations needed to get federal money from the Department of Education. That federal agency placed stipulations on subsidies—arbitrarily and without real sense of what the reality at the local level is or was. By producing a quid pro quo type of environment, however, the problem that Bozoyan ultimately blew the whistle on was one that originated at the top with the federal government creating...…no real education. Colleges are forced to dumb down their curriculum in order to accommodate uneducated students, and so college graduates are entering the workforce having essentially been handed everything. Businesses do not want these workers so they look elsewhere for talent—i.e., outside the country, where students are less privileged and entitled and have had to work for their degrees. Without jobs growing in the US, the economy becomes dependent on dollars printed by the Federal Reserve, which is just another act of fraud that goes unpunished because it is all part of the same system of organizational crime. Society as a whole becomes used to this type of fraud and deceit and accepts it as the way things go. Yet as they see the value of their dollar declining as housing rates soar, education costs soar, medical costs soar, and the stock market soars making the rich richer, they become angry. From Occupy Wall Street to the election of Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president one thing is clear—the public is angry about the fraud and deception going on. And yet the system is so big that it is unlikely it will be changed. The organization of crime running the country is in firm control of all the levers.