When the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement began working on a standardized testing audit process in the summer of 2008, we had one overriding concern: to ensure that the state’s test results were giving students and their parents an honest picture of how well Georgia’s students were learning in school. Given the huge proportion of the state’s budget spent on k-12 schools every year, following the mantra of “trust, but verify” is only common sense.
Reactions to the AJC’s coverage of GOSA’s work often fell into two extremes: those who “knew” there was widespread cheating in the state’s public schools, and those who condescendingly dismissed the investigation and offered such naive defenses as test-taking strategies that called for students to mark multiple answers.
Neither reaction was remotely correct. Across the state, only a small percentage of schools’ data looked abnormal. And clearly, given the number of admissions of guilt, the idea that GOSA was conducting a witch hunt of teachers was also ridiculous. Since the investigators’ report has been released, we can make three conclusions:
● Students were harmed;
● A lot of the pain the city and school system experienced could have been avoided with better leadership;
● We should keep sight of the purpose of auditing schools.
First, the most important players in this scandal are the students. They have been talked about the least, but over time have been hurt the most. GOSA only audited the 2008 summer school and 2009 spring CRCT examinations, but it is now documented that concerns were raised on APS data for several years before that.
Second, much of the pain the school system and the city have experienced in terms of reputation and investment dollars could have been avoided had the school system handled things appropriately from the beginning (as, for example, DeKalb County did). The report shows how egregious some of the data were. It’s worth recalling that APS had all of the erasure and test score data from the start. APS did not have the details that the governor’s special investigators gleaned from interviews. But APS could have learned much the same thing, had they taken the investigation seriously from the start.
Third, tests did not hurt these children — adults did. Gwinnett County, with a number of high-poverty schools, saw very few abnormal results. Fulton County had very few as well. Georgia may not often be on the cutting edge in education, but we are now the cutting edge of honesty in testing, and we now have a routine audit process that other states should emulate.
It is telling that so many people rushed to the school system’s defense ahead of knowing any facts. Many pundits and business leaders believed APS long after there was reasonable suspicion that academic gains were, partly, a mirage. In the end, Mayor Kasim Reed, State Superintendent John Barge and GOSA Executive Director Kathleen Mathers appear to agree: What matters most is what we as a city and a state do to help the children who were hurt and what we do to prevent such a thing from happening again. It will mean many difficult decisions, but I believe that interim Superintendent Erroll Davis and a chastened APS school board are capable of leading such a transition.
Eric Wearne is an assistant professor of education at Georgia Gwinnett College and former deputy director of the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement.
