One of the defining issues of this millennium has been the bifurcation of the criminal justice system, with one set of rules for ordinary people and another for elites. We’ve learned that justice is a commodity to be purchased rather than a universal value delivered without prejudice.

That’s the proper backdrop to the news of convictions in the Atlanta test cheating case. Eleven educators were found guilty of racketeering charges — something typically reserved for organized crime — for feeding students answers to standardized tests, or changing test sheets after they were turned in.

If you don’t remember these kinds of creative prosecution strategies during the financial crisis, that’s probably because no prosecutor ever used them. Teachers ordered to falsify tests and the superiors who demanded it, amid desperation to save schools from destruction, deserve no mercy from the court. Bankers who ran a criminal enterprise to engage in the largest consumer and investing fraud in world history deserve our thanks.

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The eleven educators convicted — middle-school teachers, a principal and school administrators — were among 35 initially charged; many copped a plea. But the initial state investigation found this to be a widespread practice in the district, involving 44 schools and almost 180 education personnel. And Atlanta was not alone: There have been stories of cheating in 40 different states across the country.

We can debate the reasons why. Federal money from the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law has been tied to standardized testing. Schools that fail to meet performance levels can be shut down. Atlanta’s school superintendent implemented even more rigorous rules than the feds: Any principal not meeting achievement targets within three years would get fired, and teacher evaluations, along with bonuses, were based in part on test scores.

Many view those standards as unrealistic and utopian. In high-poverty areas with at-risk kids disinclined to performing well on standardized tests, the drive to hit those benchmarks and pressure from administrators creates huge temptations to cheat. And we’re seeing it everywhere.

As recounted by The New Yorker, at one middle school, the principal informed teachers they had to cheat to keep the school above the NCLB threshold. Dissenters were transferred to other schools or placed on a track to be terminated. The cheating became routinized, with teachers tearing open sealed test sheets with razor blades and fixing the answers. They justified it to themselves as doing it for the school, for the children even. The tests didn’t properly evaluate student performance in their view, and the kids needed stability, not upheaval through shifting schools every couple years.

None of this excuses the misconduct, it sets a context for it. And it matches almost precisely what went on at every level of the mortgage market before, during and after the housing bubble. Mortgage brokers used Wite-Out and exacto knives to falsify income tax data for unqualified borrowers to get them into loans. They employed Coke vending machines as light boards to trace forgeries, putting people into garbage loans they didn’t purchase. The loans got sold to Wall Street banks, which routinely lied to investors, who purchased bundles of mortgages packaged into securities, by telling them that the loan quality exceeded underwriting standards.

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When the loans predictably defaulted, mortgage servicing company employees were instructed to lie to customers, claim to have lost loan modification applications when they actually shredded them, and push customers into foreclosure, which maximized servicer fees. One set of workers at Bank of America testified that they received Target gift cards as bonuses for causing foreclosures among customers.

In the foreclosure process, these same companies, with help from “default services” specialists and “foreclosure mill” law firms, fabricated and forged the legal documents required to enforce the terms of the mortgage, because all that documentation was either lost or never recorded. Workers would sign each other’s names, use each other’s notary stamps, pretend to work for other companies, and assign mortgages from the company they didn’t work for to the one they did.

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