The announcement of racketeering and conspiracy charges against the former Superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools and thirty-five of her principals and teachers demonstrates the power of the demon “success -through-testing” and the willingness of the business community to accept superficial and suspect evidence to defend their educational agenda.
While no one has yet been convicted of these charges, and they should not be used to indict urban educators in general, the preponderance of the evidence and the complicity of the Atlanta business community in this scandal should be an admonition to those who have allowed standardized testing to possess the wills of school administrators and teachers.
“Live by the test, die by the test” was the spirit in Atlanta and both school administrators and the business community staked their reputations on a lie: the falsification of answers on the lowest-scoring tests by surreptitious erasing and re-writing of multiple choice responses. Not only did the conspirators defraud the state assessment program by institutionalizing cheating, they directly harmed the weakest students by depriving them of state assistance for remediation. As reported in the New York Times (March 30, 2013)
The falsified test scores were so high that Parks Middle School was no longer classified as a school in need of improvement and, as a result, lost $750,000 in state and federal aid, according to investigators. The money could have been used to give struggling children academic support. Stacey Johnson, a Parks teacher, told investigators that she had students in her class who had scored proficient on state tests in previous years but were actually reading on the first grade level. Cheating masked the deficiencies and skewed the diagnosis.
Very likely educators who comply with testing fraud or teaching-to-the test never expect to harm students, because that is their bottom line: do no harm to students. Here is specific evidence of harm, and this isolated example reflects the malignancy of the testing demon. When raising test scores becomes the ultimate end of education, the lowest performers in the classroom are most harmed. They learn only what is believed to be on the test and any positive results on their test scores masks the deficiencies they have brought to the classroom, because no one cares about anything except the raising of scores. Instead of learning to read, they are learning to eliminate the likely wrong answers in a multiple choice question.
The bureaucratic mentality that asserts that quality can be evaluated by a single number is anathema to schools. The members of the business community that advocate the comprehensive evaluation of students, schools and teachers by standardized tests should consider this a wake-up call. The role of Atlanta businesses in propping up and protecting the school superintendent, Dr. Beverly Hall, makes them complicit in the scandal. Former Governor Sonny Perdue, who pushed back against the business community to follow-through on the investigation, is quoted in today’s Times article:
“I was dumbfounded that the business community would not want the truth,” he said. “These would be the next generation of employees, and companies would be looking at them and wondering why they had graduated and could not do simple skills. Business was insisting on accountability, but they didn’t want real accountability.”
The unshakeable belief that test scores were irrefutable evidence of quality in education distorted what were likely good intentions for improving urban education. The extent to which prominent business owners were willing to defend these scores against the Governor himself indicates how reckless was their faith in bureaucratic reform. Observing the adjudication of the evidence in the months to come should awaken them to the mindless demon they energized by allowing the superintendent her reign of terror on Atlanta’s teachers.
Dr. Hall was known to rule by fear. She gave principals three years to meet their testing goals. Few did; in her decade as superintendent, she replaced 90 per cent of the principals.
When an entire city is possessed by the testing demon, you have to consider the power of a culture, rather than the moral depravity of its employees. Earnest educators lost their jobs and many nights’ sleep in the grip of the demon. The demon had powerful allies, but mostly it had bullied victims. It stalked the city in plain sight because its victims were silenced by those mindful of their own careers more than the welfare of Atlanta’s students.
As the case of Dr. Beverly Hall and her associates unfolds, we should recognize the power behind the scandal as well as the defendants themselves. The mindless faith in the authority of standardized test scores possessed a city to support a demagogue and her agenda. No regime could survive so many years without the implicit belief that rising scores were conclusive evidence of success in the public schools. Lies can masquerade as truth only when we have given the demon power to deceive us.