Craig Witherspoon, superintendent of Birmingham City Schools.
Tom Arenberg, sports editor for the Birmingham News, is critical of the Birmingham School System report on Eric Bledsoe, writing Sunday that the system did whatever it could not to change Bledsoe’s transcript.
An excerpt:
But the biggest head-scratcher is this: It is understandable that the Algebra 3 teacher wouldn’t have documentation of the makeup work two years later when he unexpectedly has to talk to an investigator, but I surmise that if the teacher had offered any specific, convincing verbal recollections to the investigators, they would have included that in their report. There are none of those.
And:
It does not matter whether the school board changes Bledsoe’s transcript. As I said, this isn’t about Eric Bledsoe. But it would behoove the system and benefit its students in the long run to figure out if any employees indeed engaged in academic fraud and if so take action that would send out the right, intended message.
My take is that Arenberg is probably on the mark. The last thing a school system wants is a lawsuit, which would have no doubt happened had the system ruled that Bledsoe’s grade was fabricated. Any objective reader of the report would have to admit there are numerous holes and gaps in Bledsoe’s academic record. Thus, the investigation played it both ways saying that the grade change was “not credible” but choosing not to take action to reverse the transcript.
All along, there was never any inkling that UK had anything to do with any possible shenanigans in Birmingham. If Bledsoe had been deemed ineligible by the Birmingham schools, the ball would have been in the NCAA’s court, and today we would be hotly debating strict liability and the hypocrisy of the NCAA Eligbility Center. At least Friday’s Birmingham Schools ruling saved us from that.
