There’s success, and then there’s the illusion of success, and you confuse them at your peril.
That’s the lesson being hammered home again and again as the Atlanta public schools scandal plays itself out. Success is hard, slow and rare, particularly in education, but once achieved it creates a solid foundation to be built upon. The illusion of success, as we’ve discovered, is brittle, cheap and temporary.
In a compelling story published Sunday, AJC reporter Bill Torpy laid out the role played by Metro Atlanta Chamber leadership and the Atlanta business community in the testing scandal. As Torpy documented, when serious questions arose about the validity of rapidly rising student test scores, the chamber and its allies sought to squelch those concerns. When public agencies, including the governor, began to press for investigations, the chamber and its allies plotted ways to frustrate and undermine those investigations. Like many within the district, business leaders lost focus on the primary mission of educating children.
The obvious question is why, and the obvious answer is that chamber officials saw APS Superintendent Beverly Hall and her glowing national reputation as economic assets that had to be protected. Hall’s success became part of Atlanta’s brand as a Southern, up-and-coming, majority-black city that was making education work for inner-city students, and that reputation in turn made Atlanta an easier sell to corporate officials who were looking to relocate or expand.
But to be fair, the story is also more complicated than that. In circling the wagons around Hall, the Atlanta Chamber and its president, Sam Williams, were also acting out of a justified pride of authorship, so to speak.
Back in the mid to late ’90s, the Atlanta public school system had been a total mess, with little public demand or support for reforming it. Schools were falling apart, literally as well as figuratively, and much of the system itself was operated as a friends-and-family employment agency for those who had connections. The school board at the time was more dysfunctional than those in either Clayton or DeKalb counties in recent years.
The chamber and the business community, to their credit, undertook an campaign to change all that. They recruited, supported and helped to elect reform-minded, more-sophisticated school board candidates, who in turn hired and supported Hall as a reform-minded superintendent. Hall in turn achieved significant progress at making the district more efficient and education-oriented, and more professional in its hiring practices.
With all that has happened since, most notably Hall’s indictment, it is easy to forget that those early successes were real, and that they paid dividends for Atlanta students as well as for taxpayers. For all of its many continuing problems, the district today is better run and far more mission-focused than it was 15 years ago, and Hall and the business community share credit for that.
The problem is, the chamber and its business allies became enthralled with that success and began to take an ownership interest in it. What should have been a temporary intervention became a permanent occupation of sorts. They saw themselves as Hall’s active partners, ensuring that that the school board remained docile and supportive, and that she had the resources and political clout to win every battle. There’s a narrow, ill-defined but essential line between ensuring that a reform-minded superintendent has the backing that she needs to force change, and giving that superintendent the kind of unchecked authority that leads to trouble.
By the time that trouble broke, Williams and other business leaders had become too heavily invested in the illusion of success to acknowledge that a good portion of it wasn’t real. They could not admit, or allow others to discover, that the claims of educational progress had been exaggerated, and that each increasingly outlandish claim had created pressure for still more exaggeration.
Like the city as a whole, they had used Hall’s reputation to enhance their own, and now have to share in its decline as well.
