… is a school superintendent who plagiarized not only his dissertation, but just about everything else he’s written since then.

James Wasser and the other diploma mill freaks with whom he works continue to hold the Freehold New Jersey public school system captive, months and months after their fraud was exposed. But their scam operates in New Jersey, queen of the corrupt states. Freehold parents may never be able to rid their children of these grotesques.

New York, on the other hand, has dispatched its plagiarist superintendent pretty efficiently. Yes, it’s had to pay him $80,000 to go away, but that’s a small price.

The Pocantico Hills superintendent who resigned without explanation this month may have plagiarized sections of his Ph.D. dissertation word for word from various sources, and copied newsletters written by a Massachusetts principal.

On her Web page this month, the principal asked the former schools chief, Freddie D. Smith, to stop lifting her words.

“(T)o the New York superintendent, if you are reading this — thank you for the compliment, but please stop plagiarizing my work!” Linda Murdock, the interim principal at Neary Elementary School in Southborough, Mass., wrote.

A review by The Journal News also found that Smith seems to have copied a portion of an op-ed piece that he had published in this newspaper, the second instance to come to light since he left his job.

… Parts of Smith’s dissertation for the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, on a teaching method called Core Knowledge, is said to match several other academic publications that predated his. The duplication was highlighted when Smith’s paper was submitted to iThenticate, a Web-based plagiarism detection service offered by iParadigms LLC.

… The most notable of Smith’s suspicious borrowing comes from a dissertation on the same topic written four years earlier by an educator in Georgia. Overall, the software claimed a 19 percent match between the two papers: Smith’s “The Impact of the Core Knowledge Curriculum, a Comprehensive School Reform Model, on Achievement,” published in 2003; and Jerri Ann Whitehurst Hall’s “The Impact of the Core Knowledge Curriculum on the Achievement of Seventh and Eighth Grade Students,” from the University of Georgia in 1999.

… One section is said to match Hall’s paper by 43 percent; pages are virtually identical.

… The topic of his dissertation, Core Knowledge, is an educational reform campaign “based on the premise that a grade-by-grade core of common learning is necessary to ensure a sound and fair elementary education,” according to the Core Knowledge Foundation’s Web site.

The movement was started by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., the author of “Cultural Literacy,” whom Smith cites as a mentor in his dissertation. [UD had some dealings with Hirsch many years ago; she studied with him in a summer school in critical theory. This is sad news for Hirsch, and bad news for the Virginia school of education.]

In addition to the dissertation passages said to be identical to Hall’s, there are others that are said to match an academic publication by Laura Desimone titled “Making Comprehensive School Reform Work.”

… The op-ed appeared in The Journal News on March 21, 2007. One paragraph in particular corresponds to passages in a book, “Minority students in special and gifted education,” edited by Suzanne Donovan and Christopher T. Cross. Smith was not among the contributors.

Ed schools in particular need to run their dissertations through plagiarism-detection software. Plagiarism’s rampant in second-rate ed schools (just ask the president of Southern Illinois University Carbondale, or the president of Jacksonville State); now it seems to be showing up in first-rate.