Character in Education

The Dallas Morning News reports that the Dallas Independent School District engaged for years in a practice of assigning fake social security numbers to foreign citizens in order to streamline the hiring process for those individuals. Some of the numbers were real social security numbers used by other people -- making this a practice generally referred to as identity theft.

The district continued the practice even after the Texas Education Agency told them to stop. The false numbers were sometimes relied on by entities running criminal background checks on the school district employees.