The worst thing about what is bound to be known as the Hinshaw Report isn’t that it revealed Collier County students getting credit for courses that don’t exist.

It isn’t that it uncovered students washing towels and carrying water given credit for supposed classes in peer tutoring and leadership development.

It isn’t that it fueled School Board member Richard Calabrese’s unremitting effort to get rid of Superintendent Ray Baker.

It isn’t that a TV station in Rockford, Ill., somehow wedded the two together and produced a report stating that a Collier School Board member had offered Baker’s job to the school superintendent in that community.

The most disturbing thing to come out of the Hinshaw Report, an indictment of school policies in the wake of students’ complaints that their class standing was being damaged by unfair practices, is the effort it took to bring it about in the first place.

Hearing credible accounts that students sitting side-by-side in the same classroom covering the same material were getting different course credit, faced with the mathematical certainty that such a practice would give one student an edge over another, Baker and a determined minority of the board fought independent investigation as if they were fighting for their professional and political lives.

At an April 10 meeting when the board first voted to hire an outside entity to investigate its curriculum practices, board member Kathleen Curatolo was incredulous.

“So what you’re saying is enable the vice chair to determine an individual to audit?” she asked, as if the concept of independent review was alien to her.

“Is there a problem?” Calabrese, an advocate of outside scrutiny, replied.

“Oh, I have a problem, absolutely,” Curatolo answered, adding later, “I am appalled.”

At a May 8 meeting, as the board was on the verge of hiring Hinshaw and Culbertson from a group of interested law firms, board member Pat Carroll tried unsuccessfully to stop the process in its tracks with a motion to quash an outside investigation.

“This whole meeting makes me very uncomfortable. I cannot support any of the firms presented,” she said.

Finally, Baker weighed in. “I have some very serious concerns in regard to the board’s authority to take this type of action. I am the one you’re supposed to depend on. We (school system administrators) know what the rules are. We understand,” he said near the end of the May 8 meeting.

Ultimately, what Curatolo ought to find appalling, what ought to make Carroll uncomfortable and what should be of serious concern to Baker are the findings of the Hinshaw Report, which state, in part,  “The academic integrity of the schools is called into question by the practice of awarding different credit to students who are enrolled in the same class, receiving the same instruction, doing the same work, taking the same exams, yet receive credit for a different course.”

One final thought: Since his election last year, Calabrese has been lobbying unsuccessfully for an outside audit of district finances. Does the experience of the Hinshaw Report offer a clue as to why Baker and his allies on the board have doggedly resisted that effort, too?

E-mail Brent Batten at bebatten@naplesnews.com