In a 2009 interview after she was chosen as National Superintendent of the Year, former Atlanta Superintendent Beverly Hall was adamant that "all of our kids have to be educated to high standards" regardless of their backgrounds. "I'm very passionate about trying to get people to step out of this mindset that public education should sort and select" students for success, she told the interviewer. Hall pointed to three Atlanta schools -- Gideons, Capitol View and F.L. Stanton -- that she said proved her point.
Nearly all of the students at each school came from low-income families. And yet, she said, test scores showed that more than 90 percent of them were proficient in reading, language arts and math. What made the difference, she said, was "the quality of instruction and leadership."
The blockbuster investigative report on widespread cheating in Atlanta's public schools issued by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal on Tuesday gives a different explanation. The three schools were among 44 implicated in the report. At Gideons there was "a coordinated school wide cheating scheme" that involved at least a dozen teachers as well as the school's principal and testing supervisor. According to one teacher interviewed, the school's principal told her to "do what you need to. The kids have to pass."
The report blamed the scandal on leadership failures at every level of the system, including the office of the superintendent, although in a statement Hall's lawyer said she "definitely did not know of any cheating."
The cheating is disturbing on a number of levels. Not the least of which is that it encourages the mindset that Hall spent her entire career as a teacher, principal and superintendent in urban schools trying to change -- that poor kids really can't be expected to learn and succeed.
Between 2002 and 2009 Atlanta made the largest gains in reading among the urban school districts that reported scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Atlanta made smaller gains during that period in math. NAEP is widely regarded as an objective measure of student performance and, because of how it is administered, is difficult to game. The revelations of cheating have renewed speculation that the NAEP gains as well as the district's improved graduation rates also were manipulated. On Thursday Jack Buckley, the commissioner of the National Center on Education Statistics, which administers NAEP, told Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute that he was confident that the scores on that test were accurate.
In a 2010 interview Hall attributed the district's gains to "consistent and meaningful" comprehensive reform: standards-based instruction, challenging curriculum, professional development for teachers, strong leadership, accountability, tutoring, after school and Saturday sessions, and using data to make instructional decisions. But a closer look at the NAEP scores raises questions about the limits of this approach. The achievement gaps between Atlanta's Black and White students are shocking. In 2009, after a decade under Hall's leadership, only 13 percent of Black 4th graders were proficient in reading compared to 76 percent of White students. The gap was similar in math. Did principals and others put more energy into faking test scores than they did into addressing the real needs of these students? Would the gains have been greater had they done so?
Atlanta will be dealing with the aftermath of this educational tragedy for a long time. The acting superintendent has vowed that those implicated will never again work with students in the district. Criminal investigations and legal actions will follow. It will take years for the district to regain the trust of parents, students, and political and civic leaders.
It would be a mistake to dismiss this as merely an instance of corrupt individuals or a corrupting system. More than 40 states have adopted new, demanding national Common Core academic standards. New assessments designed to measure those standards are being developed. There is great optimism in education circles that these new policies will push the system towards better preparing students for success after high school. However, the higher standards are expected to cause test scores to fall, at least in the short term.
This will create pressure on schools, principals and teachers and some, no doubt, will resort to cheating. More can be done to ensure the integrity of the system, perhaps by creating independent state agencies to administer assessments. And policy makers, superintendents and test makers can make it clear that the way to really improve student learning is, as Hall has long argued, to provide teachers with the support and leadership they need. They also can recognize the need to experiment with other ways to improve learning, such as new school models and better use of instructional technology. What we shouldn't do is demand less of our schools or our students.
Follow Richard Lee Colvin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/R_Colvin
When statistics are analyzed by race, then grades will be inflated in minority communities with the misguided notion that it is a form of "racial justice." The term "racial justice" in itself is absurd, since our country is founded on the concept of individual, not group rights. Time and time again over the last 30 years we have seen attempts at affirmative action degenerate into academic dishonesty and rank racial quotas.
Hence parents, educators and the community must act in partnership to educate a child. Educators/teachers cannot perform the task alone.
It is disturbing that educators do not understand their role in educating children. There is no excuse for cheating either on the part of teachers or students. If it is that teachers cheated,then they should be sent on leave without pay and counseled...before returning to class. Teachers are a rare breed of professionals, and they should be penalized, cautioned and counseled instead of being fired.
The hidden and largely unspoken implication is that there may be racial differences in black students that become painfully obvious when any kind of testing or measuring of achievement is used. I was a civil rights worker in the 1960s and this is certainly not the direction I want to see this issue take. It may be the case that black education needs to be rethought from the ground up, perhaps to help overcome cultural differences, and may require more intense preparation in the elementary grades as well as a refocusing of values in the black community to enhance the importance of grades, education and achievement.
The world is going to become intensely more competitive in the future as populations surge and resources diminish. Affirmative action and racial preferences can only go so far. As other ethnicities and cultures move into American society it may be the case that they will deeply resent the preferences they may sense on behalf of black seekers for education, jobs, resources and status. This needs to be solved now.
However, I believe many of the crises of incompetent leadership endemic to cities like Atlanta (Grady Hospital, MARTA, Atlanta Public schools, et al.), are cultivated by a wholesale misapprehension of the fundamentals of affirmative action.
Properly implemented, affirmative action allows historically-excluded populations to interact at a peer level with the existing hegemony of competent executives, administrators, and professionals--bringing some equity to the distribution of the skillsets required of these functionaries. The failure of so many highly-visible organizations in metro Atlanta to observe this crucial element of affirmative action condemns said organizations to be led by administrative coteries that flounder without benefit of an institutional memory--a knowledge of the basic standards and practices necessary to properly conduct their executive functions.
Its supporters need to recognize--quickly--that a pococurante implementation of affirmative action creates consequences that threaten its existence.
But when you tell people that you're going to hold them accountable (not poor-report-in-your-file accountable, but possibly lose-your-job accountable) for test scores that are mostly a reflection of what goes on at home, not what goes on in school, you can sort of see why they might cheat. Give a person a job to do that's possible, and set up an accountability system that's accurate, and they'll probably work hard at the job. Give them a job to do that's impossible and set up an accountability system that has little to do with how well they do that job, and they're going to try to game the system.
Education is a public resource, a core component of a democratic society, not a private commodity to be merchandised by private interest corporations.
It is obvious from their own position statements that a number of obscenely well-funded forces are striving to inject market psychology into people's hearts and minds for the express purpose of doing away with universal free public education. Other people may be drawn into the game from a lack of information about its ultimate purpose. As with any astroturf pyramid scheme, it is always hard to draw a hard and fast line between the shills and the marks, but I do not believe the great majority of people would be happy with the consequences if they could see where the con is headed.
Look how well the for profit business has worked for healthcare.
No Patient Left Behind.
I am much more worried about the "criminal" use of tests to "fail" our public schools. The real "criminals" are the ones who profit from testing our kids to death and closing community schools,firing experienced teachers, and bringing in charter hucksters. Why do you expect? From the superintendent on down if jobs, insurance, homes, etc., are put on the line by some arbitrary test to destroy the public schools yes folks will do what they have to to survive. It is a disgrace that the Obama DOE has continued this assault on public schools.
Teachers are stuck in the middle. The government places unrealistic expectations on the administrators, and in turn, the administrators push it onto teachers who must deliver or lose their jobs in an economy and budget-cutting landscape that would make it difficult to find new jobs.
NCLB is not working. The mandate that schools achieve scores at the 100% proficiency mark by 2014 is not possible. It ignores so many crucial factors like poverty, broken families, students with learning disabilities, and the bell curve of human intelligence, to name but a few.
Talk to real classroom teachers about what they are up against, and you'll get a very different picture than the one presented here and elsewhere of unethical teachers cheating willy-nilly. Again, not excusing it, but saying this is gray, not black and white.
We've got a big problem on our hands, and it's far more complex than incidents of school districts cheating on test scores. The kids should be the focus, and I see a lot of blame games and not a lot of *viable* solutions.
Saying "achieve these test scores or else," when it is not possible, places a lot of school personnel in untenable positions.