As a proud parent of three children who have found success in Atlanta Public Schools, I am horrified after reading through all 413 pages of the CRCT investigative report. It’s clear that adults behaved badly and cheated the very children we pay them to serve. When that happens, our future has been cheated as well.
Those named in the report should be punished swiftly and unequivocally. And more importantly, the children potentially cheated out of a future should be identified and surrounded by every form of remediation they may so desperately need. Time is of the essence on both fronts.
Amid this current crisis, APS must work to move its culture beyond the processes that simply deliver what looks like education, and instead focus on the very outcomes desired by educating our children in the first place. To do this will require a fundamental reset of the way we currently define achievement in public education, moving us far beyond the current benchmarks of standardized testing and pay-for-performance models.
What if we looked at public education through the lens of All Children Moving Forward instead of No Child Left Behind? And what might it take to create a public education system that becomes a 13-year embrace of these young lives, so that every child who graduates is prepared to succeed in their own way, in whatever shape or form that might take?
My children have done just fine on the standardized tests. But I can tell you that achievement will mean very different things for each child as they grow up. But if you look at their test data, there’s no real difference, no nuances spoken, no individualism considered. As Atlanta weathers its role in the epicenter of the national storm over testing, it may be up to us as parents, educators and community leaders to bring new and different ideas of achievement into the discussion.
When we are driven to define achievement in education by test scores alone, that heightens the import of these scores beyond what they should necessarily be. And when the performance and compensation of educators is tied primarily to the same test scores, we create a toxic mix that promotes behavior completely unrelated to our desired goals.
As an APS parent, I’ve gotten to know many teachers, principals, school administrators and district employees, and I am blessed to call them my friends. They all share a passion for education that has nothing to do with paperwork, earning a bonus or filling out bubbles on a CRCT form. Their passion centers around making an impact on the future of every single child they serve.
So if we start with that kind of passion, and couple it with the attention, focus and cries for change brought to bear by the outcome of this horrible report, perhaps we can see our way clear to a new day for Atlanta’s public schools.
Julie D. Salisbury is a longtime APS volunteer.
