It’s time to admit it. In fact, it’s way past time. It was a really bad idea to criminally prosecute educators accused of falsifying Criterion Referenced Competency Test results in the Atlanta Public Schools.
This all began with a loud, pontificating and politically inspired investigation, launched in 2010 via then-Gov. Sonny Perdue’s appointment of special investigators outside normal investigative and prosecutorial channels. More than three years later, a single trial has been held, ending in an acquittal. More than 30 criminal cases remain in prosecution and are not scheduled for trial until next spring; how many continuances and separate trials will eventuate is anybody’s guess.
But this passage of time has lessened the initial “scandal” hysteria, permitting a more objective analysis. What has emerged is a clearer view of the bandwagon represented by the rush to prosecute, a stampede which has made such high sport of demonizing a broad swath of an entire profession. Seemingly almost everyone within earshot — the public, parents, press, politicians — joined this mania early on, deciding to “take out” on educators our cumulative frustrations with our local and national inability, or unwillingness, to achieve high educational standards.
How much easier this pedagogical pogrom has been than recognizing and honestly confronting our land’s collective failures in child-rearing, government neglect of education, and societal indifference to learning. But foregoing prosecution would discomfit the comfortable evasion afforded by simply laying all blame upon educators, thereby acquitting all others of any complicity in this sad saga.
Even worse, criminal prosecution has impeded the prompt resolution of this entire affair. It is a tediously endless process that has not only inhibited corrective measures, as well as disposition of employment termination and license revocation proceedings against accused educators, but student recovery from the effects of these wrongs upon them. This impasse has also gradually strangled the careers, families and lives of many educators convicted without trial and condemned without hearings to a terribly punitive limbo.
Yet few have even questioned the basic premise of prosecution. Why criminalize the investigation? Forensic investigators have long known that criminal prosecutions can be the worst way to investigate and correct institutional failures and breakdowns.
A quarter-century ago, law professor Gary Goodpaster wrote in a Northwestern University law review article that using the criminal courts, where many of those knowing the most understandably invoke their Fifth Amendment right to not be questioned, “forecloses an important source of evidence.” Goodpaster recalled as one example the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion investigation, where an adversarial criminal investigation was rejected in favor of “amassing evidence from any source relevant to” investigators.
But such lessons have been lost in the rush to demonize and imprison our educators.
Equally bad is what widespread prosecution is already looking like, as foreshadowed by court proceedings to date. Educators and students will be testifying, at times against each other, youngsters seeing their teachers (and even their schools) branded as “criminals”; and schools roiled even further — not to mention the costs to teacher recruitment (who would want to teach?) and the financial costs of prosecution in these strapped times.
The zeal behind this bent for vilification is matched only by its hypocrisy. How feigned were the surprise and outrage over test score changes. How quick all were to celebrate, or at least accept, a sudden dramatic spike in test score results.
And finally, a word about the legislative and executive branch leaders at the state and national levels who in large measure started all of this by decreeing from on high the all-determinative importance of the exalted CRCT. What a field day for those politicians: risk-free pontificating, without any accompanying political accountability or liability for their role in all of this, accomplices though they are.
Few would dispute that changing test results is wrong. But that wrong is a collective wrong, perpetrated or at least facilitated by a broad array of the public, press, politicians and, yes, some educators themselves. (For those demanding retribution, isn’t possible loss of teaching certificates and careers, after due process of law and a chance to defend oneself, enough?)
One of life’s simplest lessons in education is to “look before you leap.” Prosecution was a bad idea whose time had not come – and shouldn’t have. Too bad no one will intercede and reverse that ill-considered decision. But in today’s political environment, government officials would rather that bad decisions persist regardless of the costs, than admit the error necessary for a reversal of course.
