A Fulton County jury convicted eleven educators of conspiracy to falsify students’ test scores. You could almost hear a collective sigh of relief from city leaders and school district officials who have wanted to put this episode behind.
The trial was a spectacle that focused on the “who” and “how” of cheating, and diverted attention from understanding and improving the heart of the matter: the educational trajectories of APS students. Rather than closing the book on the cheating scandal, now is the time to focus on those children. There is much still to learn and do.
The effects are not over. My research on the meaning of cheating among students, families, and their communities has identified that some youth believe that teachers think they are “not smart enough”; these youth have left school or remain, but are struggling to keep up. I have interviewed parents who feel their children have not been harmed, while many parents feel an enormous sense of betrayal. One mother asked me: “ Who cares about what happens to these children? Who has gone to go check up [on how they are doing]?”
While APS has instituted new ethics rules and test security measures as well as a summer tutoring program, many children have not received adequate compensatory services. Community trust in the schools is low. The school district must provide students with the education they missed and rebuild that trust.
In the Southwest Atlanta community that has been the focus of my research, cheating is just one of many complicated circumstances contributing to children’s life chances. Health concerns, crime, and poverty have loomed large. Educational research has demonstrated the ill effects of poverty on children’s well being and academic achievement. These circumstances make it difficult for youth to learn and hard for teachers to raise student test scores.
Amidst these challenges, some students have received important supports, sometimes from the same schools where cheating occurred. One young woman described her school not as a barrier to success but as her second family. She described teachers, some who later admitted to cheating, who provided students with extra tutoring, afterschool activities, meals, safe rides home, respect, and sometimes even a place to live. In addition to many educators, a few community development organizations, neighborhood activists, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, have been trying to provide support. It is painfully obvious that more comprehensive support from local government is needed.
Listening to youth also brings to light the inequality of educational experiences and resources made available to different groups of children in Atlanta’s schools. Youth who attended schools where cheating occurred describe an incredible emphasis on testing, test preparation, and rote learning intended to help students improve standardized test scores. In addition, the available resources at their schools for educational trips, band instruments, and the maintenance of recreational facilities was deplorable in comparison with the predominantly White and wealthy schools. A former student noted, “kids were being disserviced … far before the cheating scandal ever happened, and are still being disserviced. There has been no plan instituted to … give urban schools better infrastructure. It was just about making them look like they’re responsive … they really care, but they don’t.”
To be sure, test security is important and cheating should not be condoned. However, if we want to improve children’s educations and lives, then the lessons we take from the cheating scandal in Atlanta cannot be limited to test security and punishing a few bad apples.
