Eleven years ago, an ambitious Atlanta school superintendent confronted an equally ambitious No Child Left Behind Act, which imposed an unprecedented goal: 100 percent of children in America performing at grade level on math and reading by 2014.
The goal is unmet and discarded. And the superintendent is under indictment for fostering a culture that encouraged any means necessary to raise test scores to meet that goal.
Thirty-five people, including Beverly Hall, now face criminal charges related to the doctoring of test scores to make it appear Atlanta students were advancing. Many Atlantans cheered this week when the indicted educators arrived at the Fulton County jail to be booked. “A compendium of the booking photos would make a lovely addition to any coffee table,” crowed one commenter on AJC.com.
First uncovered in a 2008 investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and confirmed by a state analysis, the APS cheating undid illustrious careers, shook public confidence and, worst of all, fueled the belief that inner city students can’t meet high standards. Three years later, the AJC team examined 1.6 million records from 69,000 U.S. schools and found the likelihood of cheating in other places, most commonly urban and rural school districts serving poor children.
The adults in APS who betrayed children for quick gains on tests that netted them generous bonuses, big grants and national applause must answer for their actions. But the more important legacy of this scandal ought to be a renewed commitment to figuring out how to reach and teach poor kids.
“Parents who have had enough should not be satisfied with seeing Beverly Hall carted off to jail,” says education advocate Alfie Kohn, author of “The Case Against Standardized Testing” and other books. He says parents ought to be challenging a testing mania that sacrifices the exploration of ideas, critical thinking and meaning and understanding to rote practice, bubble tests and prefabricated lessons.
Kohn sees two key lessons in the Atlanta scandal: “The problem here wasn’t just the illegal and immoral behavior of a few individuals, but an absurd system of top-down, heavy-handed, test-based accountability, which is why cheating scandals have been popping up all over the country for as long as we’ve had high-stakes testing. And even if the Hall administration had raised the scores without cheating, Atlanta schoolchildren were still cheated out of a real education because the schools were turned into glorified test-prep centers.”
Hall blamed a tyranny of low expectations for holding back inner city students. But tyrannies come in other guises: tethering students and teachers to unrealistic targets, demanding students meet those targets in lockstep in a week of testing in mid-April and then judging the students, teachers and schools by the results.
In its efforts to bolster student achievement, APS invested in more effective staff training. It created SWAT teams of master teachers to rush to the aid of struggling colleagues in the classroom. The district won millions in grants to overhaul math education. Many Atlanta grads — even from high poverty schools — are attending and graduating college, so clearly some of those efforts paid off.
Why didn’t more of them?
Research suggests that while standards should be even higher than they are now, it’s a mistake to expect that every student will reach the same level of proficiency at the same time. What’s more important than measuring absolute performance across schools is measuring steady growth in individual students
Slow and steady was allegedly not enough for Hall, who, according to the indictment, “placed unreasonable emphasis on achieving targets, protected and rewarded those who achieved targets through cheating… and ignored suspicious CRCT gains.”
Hall’s fate rests with the courts. The fate of the children of APS rests with the community — parents, educators and policymakers — and its willingness to demand learning-centered classrooms for its most vulnerable children rather than mind-numbing worksheets.
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