Cheating In Atlanta: A Teachable Moment
You've probably heard that a jury last week convicted 11 Atlanta public-school educators of racketeering for their roles in what prosecutors described as one of the largest test-cheating scandals in U.S. history. You may not have heard that George W. Bush is to blame. Confused? I'll explain.
The state decided to investigate cheating in the public schools after an analysis of test results by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found suspiciously high gains in math and reading proficiency. “A miracle occurred at Atherton Elementary this summer, if its standardized math test scores are to be believed,” the paper reported in 2008. “Half of the DeKalb County school's fifth-graders failed a yearly state test in the spring. When the 32 students took retests, not only did every one of them pass—26 scored at the highest level.”
The suspicion was warranted. A subsequent 400-page report issued by the state in 2011 found that 44 of 56 investigated schools had falsified results on state exams. The cheating was “widespread and organized” and conducted “with the tacit knowledge and even approval of high-level administrators.” According to investigators, Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall and her aides allowed “cheating—at all levels—to go unchecked for years.” Teachers would gather at so-called “erasure” parties to correct answers on exams and inflate scores. Some 178 public-school employees, including 34 principals, were implicated. Thirty-five of them were eventually indicted by a grand jury, and 21 reached plea agreements. Hall maintained her innocence but died before she could stand trial.
The reaction to these shenanigans from defenders of the public-education status quo has been sad but not at all surprising. Yes, the teachers were wrong to falsify scores and set up students to fail by promoting them to the next grade unprepared. But if you are Randi Weingarten, who heads the powerful American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the real victims are your union members. For Ms. Weingarten, a strong opponent of the testing requirements included in the No Child Left Behind education law signed by President Bush, the Atlanta scandal “crystallizes the unintended consequences of our test-crazed policies.”
Lily Eskelsen García, who is president of the AFT's sister union, the National Education Association (NEA), wrote in a Journal-Constitution op-ed at the start of the trial that “too often, and in too many places, we have turned the time-tested practice of teach, learn and test into a system of test, blame and punish.” She added: “We are using these tests to punish schools, teachers, students and school districts. This simply isn't right. It is toxic.”
If the environment that produced this horrific behavior in Atlanta is “toxic,” blame the people who control that environment, not the testing regime that attempts to hold those people accountable. The teachers unions that run our schools view public education, first and foremost, as a jobs program for adults. That is why the unions fight so hard to keep open failing schools and want seniority—rather than teaching ability—to determine layoffs.
These are job-protection policies posing as education policies. And opposition to testing is more of the same. The AFT and NEA, which along with their state and local affiliates represent the great majority of teachers in the U.S., know that standardized tests reveal not only who isn't learning but also who can't teach.
In 2011 an investigation by a local television station in Atlanta, WSB-TV, revealed that more than 700 teachers in Georgia had repeatedly failed at least one portion of a test they must pass before receiving a teaching certificate. Nearly 60 teachers failed the test at least 10 times, and “there were 297 teachers on the payrolls of metro Atlanta school systems in the past three years after having failed the state certification test five times or more.”
Would you want your child taught by someone who flunked the certification test five times, let alone 10? And would that instructor be more or less likely to resort to changing student test scores to hide his own incompetence?
The eagerness to blame No Child Left Behind's accountability provisions for these cheating scandals is off-base. The law has its flaws, including an overly stringent method of judging a school's performance, but those flaws aren't fatal. The much bigger problem is the one exposed by WSB-TV. Long before Mr. Bush signed NCLB, public-school teaching was attracting the least-qualified students from universities. For decades, the test scores of people who enter teaching have trailed those of people entering other professions, and research by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and others shows that the trend has worsened in recent years.
Moreover, brighter college students who do want to teach for a few years after graduation, via highly selective programs such as Teach for America, are scorned by the education establishment as insufficiently committed to the profession. Among other things, Atlanta's cheating scandal is a byproduct of who goes into teaching.
This piece originally appeared in Wall Street Journal
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal