Why not take the deal?
That was the question heard ‘round town on Tuesday as eight former educators convicted in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating trial received prison sentences, rather than taking lighter punishments in exchange for acknowledging their guilt. Instead of getting weekends in jail for six months or a year under home confinement, like two defendants who took the deal, a trio of administrators were sentenced to seven years in prison. The others got one or two years up the river.
To the rational outside observer, this seemed like insanity. They’d already been convicted. The evidence against them, as Judge Jerry Baxter repeated, had been overwhelming. Their lives were already ruined; their choices were to live through this ruin in prison, or outside it.
Why not take the deal?
But the rational outside observer was missing one thing. Accepting a deal would require these defendants to accept something to which they’re apparently allergic: accountability.
They cheated in the first place because they refused to be held accountable for their students’ lack of learning.
They went to trial, unlike 21 other indicted educators, because they refused to be held accountable for that cheating.
They refused the gift of mercifully light sentencing deals because, after all this, they still don’t think they did anything really wrong.
It is of course their constitutional right to maintain their innocence and appeal their convictions. But the theme that permeates what Baxter called “the sickest thing that’s ever happened to this town,” Jim Crow and William Tecumseh Sherman notwithstanding, is an insistence on blaming others.
Kids who couldn’t read, as Baxter noted, were falsely receiving passing scores. That meant celebrations, commendations, even bonuses for educators instead of extra help for students who in reality were struggling. Baxter said he’d handled the cases of some of those students who wound up in jail themselves.
And yet the parade of excuses that took to the street when this newspaper first reported the possibility of widespread cheating, driven not just by the teachers and their lawyers but by community leaders and teachers associations and civil-rights icons, continued around the block even this week.
An overemphasis on testing, an atmosphere of fear, the scourge of intergenerational poverty — it was one or all of these things, you see, that drove educators to take erasers to paper and change wrong answers to right ones.
But if we should expect an overemphasis on testing to drive people to cheat, why does Atlanta’s sorry example stand apart from anything else reported anywhere else?
If (as seems certain) Hall and others created an atmosphere of fear in Atlanta’s schools, why didn’t more teachers and principals take their concerns to authorities beyond the central office?
If intergenerational poverty is destined to breed incapable students, why even bother holding classes in poor areas? (An even more awkward question: How many of these hopelessly impoverished kids are second- or third-generation APS students?)
Enough of the blame-shifting. Enough of the excuse-making. Enough of the adults whose only lesson for the children in their charge is to dodge responsibility for one’s obligations and actions.
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