The keepers of Atlanta's image have good reason to worry about their own — and an excellent opportunity to make amends.
A report Sunday by the AJC’s Bill Torpy confirmed what many of us long suspected: Members of Atlanta’s business community tried to whitewash widespread cheating in the city’s public schools. Right in the thick of it was the Metro Atlanta Chamber.
No chamber of commerce would welcome such a controversy. It’s easier to sell prospective businesses and residents on success than on “Atlanta: We’re cleaning up the mess as fast as we can find it!”
Still, if good reputations are hard-won and easily lost, the reverse is true for bad reputations. Efforts by some business leaders to help APS officials conceal the extent of the cheating will not be easily or quickly forgotten.
But redemption is possible, even with regard to the business community’s involvement in education. My own recommendation has less to do with who should be in charge than with what they should try to do next.
A chamber of commerce is in the business of recruiting companies to its area, identifying industries with potential for growth, encouraging local entrepreneurs and start-ups, and seeking public policy changes that help the other tasks.
If ever there was a need for that kind of work to be done outside the usual confines of the business world, it’s with education in metro Atlanta. In recent years, we’ve seen implosions of public school leadership not just in Atlanta, but in DeKalb and Clayton counties.
Our public schools need strengthening, but that does not mean reinforcing them as they’ve always existed.
As regular readers of this page know, I believe students and parents need to have choices, and that public education funds should follow them to the schools they choose. But that’s hardly all we need to do.
Even within school systems, there is room for a variety of approaches to education and running schools. The charter school model, in which an outside nonprofit or company receives local authority and funding to operate a school in a more flexible manner as long as it produces better student results, is already common in Atlanta. There’s no reason it should be the exception rather than the rule.
It could hardly be any less efficient. In the 2012 budget year, the most recent for which complete data are available, APS outspent the state average for instruction by about $1,000 per pupil. But it outspent the state average for administration by nearly $2,000 per pupil. The only systems that came close to that level of administrative spending were in small counties that often have fewer students in the whole district than APS has at many individual schools.
In fact, between 2007 and 2012, instructional spending per pupil at APS fell by $788. But administrative spending per pupil rose by almost the same amount: $755. (People wonder where a for-profit school operator would cut back to make its money. That’s where.)
The business community should be highly interested in recruiting to Atlanta education innovators who have been successful elsewhere. And in encouraging school officials to be more aggressive about giving them the reins and then overseeing their work.
Could an outside entity be tempted to cheat to produce better results, as a grand jury has accused APS of doing under indicted former Superintendent Beverly Hall? It’s possible. But a network of loosely connected entities would be less likely to coordinate the kind of pervasive cheating we saw in APS during the past decade.
An Atlanta that led in developing a 21st century model for delivering public education would deserve a good reputation proclaimed from the tops of its skyscrapers. A metro chamber that helped pave the way would have earned back its good name, too.
