Great entities sometimes face hard tests. The kind that determine whether they rise to deep challenges. Or stumble into that slide called decline.
Metro Atlanta will enter such a moment Monday as the long-in-coming trial of 12 Atlanta Public Schools educators begins in a Fulton County courtroom.
A sworn jury will determine the legal outcome. No matter the verdict, a watching nation and world will judge Atlanta by what we do next.
Even as the names of defendants and schools quickly dart behind memory’s dark veil after the trial, the fundamental, stubborn issue will remain of just how to educate the most at-risk of children in our midst. Among the first questions on this national exam must be how to appropriately, accurately and truthfully measure students’ educational progress over time. The current national fetish over high-stakes standardized testing has fallen well short in this regard.
The astounding accusations of cheating at APS and elsewhere around Georgia and the U.S. shows that simplistic, haphazard solutions too often yield unacceptable results. That is the simple, yet powerful conclusion resulting from the long community process that began when The Atlanta Journal-Constitution began its reporting on statistical irregularities around CRCT testing at some schools in APS and other districts.
The aftermath shows there are no easy, rapid answers to sustainably improving educational achievement. Which is not to say there are no answers. We don’t believe that. No one can who believes in Atlanta’s future.
Getting to better answers requires honestly staring down the full, painful truth of where APS and, by inference, American public education, went astray.
The criminal trial can provide a necessary lens through which to examine this question.
After all of the denials and obfuscation, if not outright lies, Atlanta needs to know as much about what really happened as the law can allow.
That respected, well-educated professionals believed they had no other choice but to cheat says something profoundly sad about the environment in which they worked and the tenor of our test-driven age. This horribly toxic mix of unrealistic, unrelenting demands and misguided metrics overpowered human frailty for some educators. And that triggered tragic results for students and careers alike, while also overshadowing or tarnishing legitimate educational progress at APS.
Accepting all of that can take us into a low, humbling place.
That may be the best place to face truth.
At best, too many people at too many levels saw only what they wanted to see and acted on what they desperately wanted to believe at APS.
At worst, well, draw your own, gut-level conclusions.
The actual truth may rest most anywhere along that continuum. Determining all that requires that this criminal trial play out in a public courtroom.
Ideally, former APS Superintendent Beverly Hall would have stood trial alongside her former subordinates. The malady of major illness intervened. Whether Hall is ever tried, at this point, seems within only God’s knowledge and humankind’s guess.
Yet, justice should continue onward. Atlanta and its children deserve that.
For not seeing, or refusing to see what were significant problems at best, and stunning failures at worst, came with a terrible price. Struggling kids did not get needed help – at least not in a timely fashion.
No Child Left Behind somehow became No Excuses At Any Time within yesterday’s APS. And that view stubbornly held, no matter the disruptive woes that troubled students dragged into classrooms each day.
Admittedly, viewing a bright and flashy skyrocket of success is much more exciting than watching a slow slog upward toward that same place. Our impatient society likes easy, 1, 2, 3, “Fix It Now” solutions. Such can fuel smoke and mirrors which obscure seemingly intractable societal problems that have tenaciously endured through the Great Society and Reagan Revolution alike. Poverty. Hunger. Ignorance. Substance abuse. Parents who are absent in body, mind or some percentage of both. All impede classroom performance each day at too many schools.
Yet, it will prove easier and cheaper in the long run to adequately educate a child than to fix, incarcerate or otherwise subsidize dysfunctional adults. APS spends nearly $14,000 a year on each student. It costs $18,000 annually to keep one inmate in Georgia’s prisons.
Yes, personal responsibility from a young age and an appreciation for education’s transformative power are necessities. But who will teach those when parents don’t?
Instilling such values must somehow be a part of education at schools that expect to overcome poverty and turn out motivated students who’re well-prepared for productive life and citizenship.
That should be a big-picture metric embraced by both Atlanta and our broader community.
And we must find a better way of testing, too. A more honest and rigorous way to assess our children’s academic progress. Only then can teachers productively teach and children truly learn.
To do otherwise is to cheat our neediest kids. And shortchange Atlanta’s future and present in the process.
Methodically seeing through to an appropriate end the long examination of what went wrong at APS and acting smartly on the answers will let Atlanta begin to climb upward from its low place.
A city with ambitions as great as ours can do with no less. If we accept that, and begin our long climb, greater Atlanta can reach new, unparalleled heights — as we’ve done many times before.
