Scandalous Schools
April 19, 2013
One of the bad features of the school reform movement that was cited in our posting of March 29 (“Hit Again”) is the obsession over standardized testing and the linkage between children’s scores and adults’ salaries. The length to which some so-called educators have gone reached new highs (or perhaps lows) in Atlanta recently; but that’s far from the only school testing travesty we’ve seen, as Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post Writers Group reported on LSJ.com on April 4, 2013:
“It is time to acknowledge that the fashionable theory of school reform – requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students’ standardized test scores – is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket.
“I mean that literally. Beverly Hall, the former superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools, was indicted on racketeering charges Friday for an alleged cheating scheme that won her more than $500,000 in performance bonuses. Hall, who retired two years ago, has denied any wrongdoing.
“Also facing criminal charges are 34 teachers and principals who allegedly participated in the cheating, which involved simply erasing students’ wrong answers on test papers and filling in the correct answers.
“In 2009, the American Association of School Administrators named Hall ‘National Superintendent of the Year’ for improvement in student achievement. For educators who worked for Hall, bonuses and promotions were based on test scores. After a day of testing, teachers would allegedly be told to gather the students’ test sheets and change the answers. Suddenly a failing school would become a model of education reform. The principal and teachers would get bonuses. Hall would get a much bigger bonus.
“State education officials became suspicious. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote probing stories. There seemed to be no way to legitimately explain the dramatic improvement in such a short time, or the statistically improbable number of erasures on answer sheets.
“Sonny Perdue was governor at the time, and in August 2010 he ordered a blue-ribbon investigation. Hall resigned shortly before the release of the investigators’ report, which alleged that 178 teachers and principals cheated over nearly a decade. Those findings laid the foundation for Friday’s Grand Jury indictment.
“My Washington Post colleague Valerie Strauss, a veteran education reporter and columnist, wrote Friday that there have been ‘dozens’ of alleged cheating episodes around the country, but only Atlanta’s has been aggressively and thoroughly investigated.
“Standardized achievement tests are a vital tool, but treating test scores the way a corporation might treat sales targets is wrong. Students are not widgets. Even absent cheating, the blind obsession with test scores implies that teachers are interchangeable implements of information transfer, rather than caring professionals who know their students as individuals.
“School reform has to be something that is done with a community of teachers, students and parents – with honesty and, yes, a bit of old fashioned humility.”
On the Hook
March 12, 2013
The over-arching theme of interscholastic athletic administration today is the health and safety of our student participants. It’s always our most important concern but now, by both self-serving and serious advocates, it’s being made a political football – actually more like a soccer ball being kicked back and forth and back again, resulting in about as much chance of scoring any positive goals as a World Cup soccer game will have in scoring any goals at all.
We are daily being distracted, and taken off our tasks, by symbolic more than substantive proposals to require this, that or the other thing to protect children from the risk of injury – regardless of grassroots input and without regard to grassroots resources. Zealous advocates for child safety wish to protect children from any risk of physical exertion, while in the next breath they complain of youth inactivity and obesity. And those who are trying to increase participation AND the quality of that experience – that’s us – become the targets of criticism. Often, those who have never done anything, blame those who have done a lot, for not doing enough.
Our frustration is flowing from the health and safety “idea du jour” to which we must respond, knowing that every time we fail to gush over some legislator’s or advocate’s notion, we invite the characterization that we are uncaring, lazy or arrogant, or all of the above. What we are doing is protecting schools from ubiquitous, onerous mandates which no one else in the school community is taking notice of because, appropriately, they are focused on the impossible task of providing an ever-expanding list of required services to an ever-increasing percentage of school-aged children with an ever-increasing list of problems, with the expectation that all of them will perform at ever-improving levels of achievement.
But even with all these disclaimers, I can’t let us off the hook. There are some things we can do and must do to better meet our highest calling in educational athletics which, if we’ve lost sight of it in the confusing clutter of challenges, is not only to do no harm physically to students but also to help instill in them healthy habits for the rest of their lives. Consistent with this high calling, we have obligations to do some critically important things – sometimes in spite of outside interference and sometimes beyond that interference – and do so without delay. It is about those things that I have been commenting most these past few months, and will continue to address.