Of all the responses to the devastating report on cheating in Atlanta schools, APS board member Courtney English offered the most important: “Fixing the cheating problem is merely the tip of the iceberg. Beneath that lies a far greater question — what our teachers, staff and employees actually believe about our kids.”
Speaking at Thursday’s board meeting, English said, “We have to ask ourselves what did not happen in the classroom that allowed an adult to make a decision on behalf of a child that ‘I don’t think you can actually hit this bar.’ I think that is a very scary question, but I do think it is one we have to ask ourselves. Are our teachers getting enough support in the classroom to do the job? Are they, in fact, the right people in the classroom to do the job we have asked them to do?”
The state probe shows the principal and teachers at Parks Middle School practically ran a covert CIA operation in their cheating efforts. They plotted clandestine missions to steal tests, staged elaborate ruses to lure the coordinator out of the building so his office could be rifled and then photographed the man’s desk so disturbed items were replaced exactly.
Couldn’t the Parks staff have put that effort into just teaching the students so their students could pass the CRCT without test tampering?
The implications of what happened in Atlanta reach beyond the central office and the district. The report ought to raise questions over whether it’s possible to raise student achievement in poor schools under the current structure, design and funding of American education.
The report depicts APS teachers as under unrelenting and unreasonable pressures to improve student performance. We read about beleaguered educators who believed that wholesale failure by APS students on the CRCT was blamed solely on their inadequacies rather than on poverty, indifferent parents or challenging home environments.
I am sure that part of the motivation of those who doctored tests was preserving their jobs and appeasing a school leadership team that held them to higher and higher standards.
But I think some of their motivation was less self-serving; they wanted to fulfill Superintendent Beverly Hall’s vision that low-income children from single-parent homes and tough neighborhoods could and would succeed at levels comparable to suburban Atlanta peers and that such performance could be achieved systemwide by adopting best practices and by working harder and smarter.
Some APS teachers, principals and administrators wanted to prove that the faith of the Broad and Gates foundations and the Metro Atlanta Chamber in the district was not misplaced and that APS could rewrite the script of urban education in America and provide a happy, or at least a happier, ending for its students.
And that’s what ought to alarm us, that these professionals ultimately felt their students could not even pass basic competency tests, despite targeted school-improvement plans, proven reforms and extensive teacher training.
Does it mean that it’s harder than we think, or that the APS schools that cheated did not work hard enough at it?
Can an urban school system elbow its students past poverty, uneducated parents and lack of education-rich home lives by extraordinary effort, will and commitment?
I don’t know. But I think it is important to all of us that Atlanta use this debacle to find the answers to those questions.
Because right now we have no real models for turning around a failing urban district.
We have isolated instances of success, sometimes fleeting once the charismatic leader who powered the transformation leaves. And sometimes those successes fall apart on closer inspection, as has occurred in Atlanta.
But even within Atlanta, there are schools that saw improvements in their student performance without any evidence of cheating: schools such as Centennial Place Elementary, a Distinguished Title I School four years in a row.
Since it can be done and is being done in Atlanta, we need to better understand what conditions and staffing need to be in place. I still argue that it comes down to principals and teachers who believe in their students and who have the talent, patience and ability to work with children who have many strikes against them, from single-parent families to poverty to homelessness.
The crime here is that the educators who cheated increased the strikes against these kids, robbing them of the extra funding the federal government provides schools to help close the achievement gap for poor kids.
And worse, their actions communicated to these students the defeating message that “you just can’t do it.”
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Email her at mdowney@ajc.com
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