Indictments in the Atlanta Schools Cheating Scandal
The details of the indictment are stunning - teachers and
school administrators allegedly engaged in a vast conspiracy, all
for the sake of making Atlanta’s students appear to thriving
instead of flailing.
Nearly three dozen Atlanta Public Schools employees – ranging all
the way up from classroom teachers to central office
administrators to former Superintendent Beverly Hall – face stiff
fines and jail time over allegations that they changed students’
answer sheets on high-stakes statewide exams. The indictment has
65 counts, including racketeering, false statements and writings,
and influencing witnesses.
Some of the most damning charges are laid at the feet of
66-year-old Hall, a former national Superintendent of the Year,
who is alleged to have fostered a work environment where
dishonesty was rewarded. While the legal system does its
work, some observers question whether the high-stakes,
high-pressure emphasis on testing in the nation’s public schools
helped create an environment where cheating was not only rampant
but inevitable.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting the heck out of
this new development, which is not surprising given that it was
the newspaper’s dogged “Cheating Our
Children” investigative series that eventually led to this
week’s indictments of Hall and 34 other district
employees. (You can read my posts on the AJC investigation,
including the controversy it sparked in districts
nationwide, here, here,
and here.)
From the AJC this week:
According to the criminal indictment, Hall “publicly misrepresented the academic performance of schools throughout APS.” Pressuring subordinates to produce targeted scores, the indictment said, “created an environment where achieving the desired end result was more important than the students’ education.”
“Not only were the children deprived, a lot of teachers were
forced into cheating, forced into criminal acts,” forrmer Georgia
Attorney General Michael Bowers, who investigated the cheating
allegations, told
CNN. “Now, granted, they did wrong, but a lot of them did
this to protect jobs.”
There’s been some criticism of the scope of the charges filed, as
the AJC’s education blogger Maureen Downey
pointed out, sharing a piece written by
attorney-turned-Oglethorpe University President Lawrence Schall.
He suggests the pressure of the high-stakes tests were a factor,
and questions whether Hall’s actions rose to the level of
racketeering.
“I sure hope that if Dr. Hall is convicted, it is for something
other than being a demanding, even an overly demanding, boss,”
Schall wrote.
On Tuesday I spoke with
Andy Porter, dean of the Graduate School of Education at
the University of Pennsylvania, who has a unique perspective on
the cheating scandal. Three years ago, Porter was hired by the
Atlanta Education Fund, a nonprofit group focused on boosting
student achievement in that city, to review the district’s test
scores. He submitted his findings, which largely validated the
AJC’s reporting, but the organization took no action.
When I asked Porter what the odds were that the sizable test
score gains at the suspect Atlanta schools occurred legitimately
without adult intervention, he didn’t mince words:“Slightly
greater than a snowball’s chance in hell.”
While the Atlanta investigation focused heavily on erasure
analysis (tracking how often the wrong answers were erased and
replaced with the correct ones), there are plenty of other ways
districts can cheat, according to FairTest, a national advocacy
group. Educators can “skim” the student population by
discouraging students who are likely to be poor test-takers from
enrolling, report low-scoring students as absent so that their
answer sheets don’t have to be turned in, and even encourage
teachers to look at the test questions ahead of time so they can
tailor their instruction accordingly.
There’s little question that the stakes have increased enormously
for students, teachers, schools and districts. And there’s
growing frustration among educators, students and parents at
what’s seen as an over-reliance on testing in public schools,
particularly the time and money spent on preparing for and
administering the exams. At the same time, it’s important to note
that while cheating scandals are grabbing headlines, they
likely represent only a small fraction of the nation’s public
schools.
However, it’s clear that the pressure is taking a toll. For
teachers, student test scores are often now a factor in their
performance evaluations. And schools that fail to demonstrate
adequate achievement face a host of sanctions triggered by state
and federal accountability measures.
So how much weight is too much to assign to one measure of
accountability? Is it reasonable to blame the assessment process,
rather than how individuals choose to respond to those pressures?
Does cheating really have to be an unavoidable byproduct of
raised expectations? To be sure, as the details of the
indictments in Atlanta unfold, we should expect questions like
those to at least be asked – if not answered.
Comments
Post new comment