At the Quick and the Ed, Kevin Carey explains that plagiarism is not such a big deal, if the documents you plagiarize are thoughtful and considered documents. It also is in your favor, apparently, if you work for an elected official and you are writing on educational policy.
Now call me an old-fashioned moralist if you like, but when I grade student papers I do not spend a lot of time evaluating the quality of the plagiarized texts. Good, bad or ugly, the result is the same: an ‘F’ on the paper.
The universal standard for such matters, in everything from high school term papers to public policy documents, is that when you run across some really neat and thoughtful idea or policy proposal in someone else’s work, you can copy it – surrounded by quotation marks, and with an appropriate footnote indicating its source. It is standard taught at the start of a high school education, and reinforced again and again, at every level of education.
Quite frankly, the fact that those responsible for education policy in the administration of the Washington DC Mayor’s office would plagiarize the Mayor’s proposals for the reform of DC schools tell us two things, both of which should give some considerable pause before turning the governance of schools over to them. First, they could care less about the standards of scholarly integrity which are at the very heart of the educational enterprise. And second, their reform proposals have been put together the way a student who has not done his homework and research throws together a term paper, cutting and pasting like mad the night before it is due. When an author has properly synthesized the material in a field, he does not plagiarize entire sections of his paper.
