Dr. Meria Castarphen, superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, thinks everyone is completely misunderstanding the situation.
APS has just announced the slashing of eighteen band and orchestra teachers from the elementary school system, and possibly the funding for those programs as well (the reportage on the latter is a little fuzzy).
That news spread pretty quickly, and Dr. Castarphen took to her personal blog to offer an explanation. Kind of.
Yes, eighteen positions were cut. That was just part of a district "right-sizing" (lordy, but I just live for the day that some boss announces "right-sizing" as an explanation for hiring more people). This right-sizing included cutting 368 positions, including a chunk from the central office. But cutting music?! No!! Well, maybe. Sort of. Yes.
In our cluster planning and our move to a new operating system, APS
has given clusters and schools more freedom and flexibility to choose
how they staff their schools in order to meet the specific needs of
their students. This includes the decision about which arts and music
instruction to offer students.
For example, if principal A observed high interest in band over
orchestra in their elementary school, that principal could choose to
enhance the band program and remove the orchestra program. If principal B
saw a growing interest in visual arts, principal B could decide to
invest more in visual arts, eliminating band and orchestra. If principal
C was interested in enhancing band and orchestra programs, principal C
could choose to increase school class sizes in order to offer a more
robust fine arts program.
See, even if the school doesn't have a band program. It could be taught by, I don't know, pixies, or regular classroom teachers on their lunch hours, or traveling street musicians who were coaxed into the building. Because students can be taught to play instruments, particularly as beginners, by pretty much anybody.
Maybe students will get really interested in a band, which I suppose could happen despite the fact that they have no band or band teacher in the building to pique that interest-- maybe they'll read about bands in books or see some compelling band music on tv or those same instrument-teaching pixies will visit them in their sleep.
Also, please note that middle school and high school band and orchestra are not being cut. Nosirree. They will still be there, thriving despite the fact that students will arrive from the elementary school without any knowledge of playing in a music ensemble or playing an instrument. Because middle and high school programs don't depend on feeder programs in the elementary at all.
She tried to clarify her position in other interviews
"That doesn't mean you eliminate programming because you eliminated a
positon. You can still do the programming with one person instead of two
people," said Carstarphen. "We allow those teachers and those
principals to still offer band and orchestra as part of their design if
they are able to do it with what they have as a student population,
available resources and the interest of the school."
See? They can have a music program. Just not with enough qualified teachers or resources. We aren't taking the puppy to the pound-- we just aren't going to feed it ever, and you can still keep it once it's a dog.
Oh, yeah. And she's in charge of converting Atlanta to an all-charter system. You can read their whole presentation and application for charter status here.
Reading her plaintive pleas for understanding, I could only think of one question--
Is this woman really that clueless?
It doesn't seem possible; in her blog post, she identifies herself as an oboe player. An oboe. The kind of advanced (and expensive) instrument that students generally move onto only in high school after they have mastered a more standard instrument in elementary and middle school.
I mean, there are only two possibilities here. Either she doesn't understand the implications of these cuts, or she understands and she's trying to lie and bluff her way past this.
There are limited clues. Castarphen was hired just a year ago, to replace the superintendent who replaced the superintendent who presided over the Atlanta cheating scandal. When Castarphen was hired, "embattled" turned up often as a descriptor of APS. Previously Castarphen led the Austin school system for five years, a system twice as big as Atlanta's. According to some sources, Atlanta pursued her; but her Austin contract had not been renewed and would be running out now. In 2012, district leaders "admonished" her to build better relationships with staff, parents and community. In fact, she was the only candidate the board brought forward after a process some called "opaque."
In Austin, Castarphen came under fire for a "closed leadership style" and "there are those who believe Carstarphen's hard-charging methods are aimed at bullying people to get her way." That stood in contrast to her defense of No Child Left Behind as a program providing necessary transparency. "And that's at the heart of what the spirit of the law is about: Transparency. Are we doing the job or not?
Before Austin, Castarphen was head of St. Paul Public Schools, where critics accused her of a combative style (the word "bullying" turns up again) and over half the administrators there in 2006 when she arrived left before her departure three years later.
Castarphen's teaching routes go back to teaching middle school Spanish. Studied at Tulane, Harvard. Affiliated with ETS, Council of Great City Schools.
I don't see it. Maybe it's just not her style to say, "We are strapped for cash, and as much as I hate to cut any program off at the knees, I've decided that instrumental music is going to take a gut shot so we can try to save the district." That might have been more honest, but I suppose it would have invited debate, and Castarphen doesn't seem to be a fan. Of course, she now finds herself embroiled in a debate about whether or not musical yetis riding on unicorns will keep Atlanta's music program alive and well. She probably should just stick to a debate about reality.
Upon arriving in Atlanta, she told staff, "You're going to work harder than you ever have before. But we'll try to make it fun, we'll try to make it exciting
and we'll try to make it rewarding."
Showing posts with label Atlanta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Atlanta. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
If I Had Been in Atlanta
Much has been written about the conviction of the Atlanta teachers from the standpoint of society-- how should we react, should they have been convicted, how should they be punished, what this tells us about the system, etc. Here's a great article comparing their fates to the fates of our economy-crushing housing crisis creators. Here's what one of my favorite political writers, Jason Linkins, had to say. And here, tied more closely to testing policy, is what blogger Stephen Singer had to say. And if you'd like the background of how this happened, last year's New Yorker article is thorough.
But as I've watched this unfold and read through many reactions to the prosecution and conviction, I find myself coming back to the more personal question--
What would I have done if I had been in Atlanta?
Most teachers have a visceral reaction to cheating-- bad, wrong, don't, don't ever, ever, ever, ever do it. I'm no different. Cheating is wrong. Dishonesty is wrong. And, frankly, I've made enough mistakes in my own life to know that sick-at-gut feeling of living dishonestly, to know it personally and to live with a pretty strong commitment to never feeling it again.
But I'm not in Atlanta.
I teach in a small town high school in a rural area that is mostly free of the high-pressure troubles of poor urban schools. We're pretty unwealthy ourselves, but here in the hinterlands, there aren't a lot of charters and privateers trying to crack open the market. We're also the only high school in the district, so we don't have people breathing down our necks with score sheets in one hand and demolition plans in the other.
I also teach for bosses who are not score-obsessed or threatening to end my career if I don't make my numbers. The state may slowly be losing its mind with teacher evaluations, but my bosses still judge me on how well I teach.
So I'm not in Atlanta. I'm not working under the constant threat of punishment for crazy factors beyond my control. So if I stand up and nobly proclaim that I am 100% certain I would never do what those teachers in Atlanta were convicted of doing (and what so many other teachers across the country have not been convicted of doing), I would be talking out of some orifice other than my mouth.
I know some of the factors I would consider.
I think one of the worst results of the cheating in Atlanta (and in DC and Philly and Houston) is that cheating on tests has bolstered the illusion that reform is working.
Teachers are often terrible institutional enablers. Somebody up the line makes a bad policy choice, and rather than let our students suffer for that choice, we "fix" it on the classroom level. This solves the problem for the current students, but it also gives the administration the impression that the policy works just great.
Sometimes it's necessary to step back and allow a single small mess in the present to avoid huge systemic ongoing disasters in the future. It is one of the things I wonder-- how much longer did No Child Left Behind keep chewing up education because all of us in the classroom were doing our best to make it look as if NCLB were actually working?
But thinking about that would also remind me that we lie and cheat on the small scale all the time. We put our name on all manner of paperwork, from fictitious lesson plans to dust-collecting standards alignment documents, with no intention of pledging ourselves to pay attention. In teaching, nodding your head and signing your name to baloney is part of the normal price of admission. Raise your hand if you've never fudged a student's grade for your own class. Yeah, that's what I thought.
We accept it because we think of it as paperwork that doesn't matter, that has no bearing on the real work we do. I don't consider the Pennsylvania's Big Standardized Test anything more than a time-wasting big pile of useless baloney; linking it to threats against my professional future won't make me respect it any more, but my lack of respect for it would probably make it easier to cross that line.
Bob Schaeffer of Fairtest says, given the overuse and abuse of standardized testing, "It is hardly surprising that more school professionals cross the ethical line."
But here's the thing-- all teachers were pushed across an ethical line years ago. No Child Left Behind codified a whole raft of educational malpractice. It required, among other things, that teachers treat the big Standardized Test as the gold standard of what education is about. It required that we tell our students, "Nothing is more important to your future than getting a good score on the BS Test." And as most of us recognize, that is a lie. It is especially a lie for poor students who lack both the skills to excel at test taking and who also lack much of what they need beyond test-taking ability. It's like taking poor kids to the store, handing them ten dollars, and saying, "Now, the only thing you need to plan a great menu for the week is this fifteen-dollar case of Twinkies."
The Atlanta teachers were over the ethical line from the moment NCLB was made law. They could either follow the letter of the law, stop doing the things that were turning their school around and focus on a bogus test for a system that would inevitably chew them up, or they could try to trick the system into sparing them in hopes that some students could eventually be saved. Both choices are unethical, but one choice was far more likely to serve the interests of the students-- at least in the short term.
NCLB and much education reform nonsense makes me angry precisely because it gives me a lose-lose choice. I can break the rules and commit educational malpractice, or I can do what I know professionally is correct and break some rules while doing it. Or I can, as most teachers do, try to create some sort of clever parquet out of the two and tap dance my way through the teaching day.
Teaching has, in one short generation, turned from a profession with extraordinary ethical clarity into one of shadows and greyness and compromises that we make with the system, our students, and ourselves.
If I had been in Atlanta, what would I have done?
The honest answer is that I don't know. I might have refused to cheat at all and instead tried to wave my hands and draw attention to the crash and burn that followed, but the modern ed reform approach has been crashing and burning, with virtually no successes to speak of, for over a decade-- and nobody in power seems to care.
So I might have decided to try to save my kids and my school, and I might have stepped into it by increments, until I was confronted by the horror of people trying to laud my "success" publicly.
I might have looked for other work, if I could, but I am a nester and when I put down roots in a community, I'm unlikely to pick up. I might have left the profession, but it would have been bitter to abandon my students to someone else willing to live on the wrong side of the ethically line. I might have become obnoxious and angry, that guy who makes everyone's eyes roll in staff meetings, and blogged angrily as well, until I managed to get myself reprimanded and fired for insubordination. Except in all those cases, a decade ago I would have had to face the prosepct of being a divorced dad with kids to look out for.
One of my fundamental beliefs about life is that, no matter how dark the place you find yourself, no matter how many wrong choices you have made, there is always a right choice open to you. So it is a hard thing for me to imagine that there were no good choices available for the Atlanta teachers (or all the other cheating teachers who haven't been arrested or ruined). But I wasn't there, and I have no way of knowing exactly what choices they faced.
And yet there is something baldfaced and ugly about taking out an eraser and changing the answers on a test. It seems like a bigger jump. But is it?
Making ethical choices in unethical circumstances is damned hard. It would be great if the Powers That Be recognized the conviction of the Atlanta teachers as what it is-- a sign that the system is horribly out of whack. It would be great if the Powers That Be recognized that a teacher who changes answers on a test is not the equivalent of a dangerous organized crime figure who needs to be locked up for the safety of society. I'm not holding my breath.
Instead, I'm just remembering to hoping that my big Atlanta moment never comes, but if it does, that I recognize it and that I find a choice that I can live with.
Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats
But as I've watched this unfold and read through many reactions to the prosecution and conviction, I find myself coming back to the more personal question--
What would I have done if I had been in Atlanta?
Most teachers have a visceral reaction to cheating-- bad, wrong, don't, don't ever, ever, ever, ever do it. I'm no different. Cheating is wrong. Dishonesty is wrong. And, frankly, I've made enough mistakes in my own life to know that sick-at-gut feeling of living dishonestly, to know it personally and to live with a pretty strong commitment to never feeling it again.
But I'm not in Atlanta.
I teach in a small town high school in a rural area that is mostly free of the high-pressure troubles of poor urban schools. We're pretty unwealthy ourselves, but here in the hinterlands, there aren't a lot of charters and privateers trying to crack open the market. We're also the only high school in the district, so we don't have people breathing down our necks with score sheets in one hand and demolition plans in the other.
I also teach for bosses who are not score-obsessed or threatening to end my career if I don't make my numbers. The state may slowly be losing its mind with teacher evaluations, but my bosses still judge me on how well I teach.
So I'm not in Atlanta. I'm not working under the constant threat of punishment for crazy factors beyond my control. So if I stand up and nobly proclaim that I am 100% certain I would never do what those teachers in Atlanta were convicted of doing (and what so many other teachers across the country have not been convicted of doing), I would be talking out of some orifice other than my mouth.
I know some of the factors I would consider.
I think one of the worst results of the cheating in Atlanta (and in DC and Philly and Houston) is that cheating on tests has bolstered the illusion that reform is working.
Teachers are often terrible institutional enablers. Somebody up the line makes a bad policy choice, and rather than let our students suffer for that choice, we "fix" it on the classroom level. This solves the problem for the current students, but it also gives the administration the impression that the policy works just great.
Sometimes it's necessary to step back and allow a single small mess in the present to avoid huge systemic ongoing disasters in the future. It is one of the things I wonder-- how much longer did No Child Left Behind keep chewing up education because all of us in the classroom were doing our best to make it look as if NCLB were actually working?
But thinking about that would also remind me that we lie and cheat on the small scale all the time. We put our name on all manner of paperwork, from fictitious lesson plans to dust-collecting standards alignment documents, with no intention of pledging ourselves to pay attention. In teaching, nodding your head and signing your name to baloney is part of the normal price of admission. Raise your hand if you've never fudged a student's grade for your own class. Yeah, that's what I thought.
We accept it because we think of it as paperwork that doesn't matter, that has no bearing on the real work we do. I don't consider the Pennsylvania's Big Standardized Test anything more than a time-wasting big pile of useless baloney; linking it to threats against my professional future won't make me respect it any more, but my lack of respect for it would probably make it easier to cross that line.
Bob Schaeffer of Fairtest says, given the overuse and abuse of standardized testing, "It is hardly surprising that more school professionals cross the ethical line."
But here's the thing-- all teachers were pushed across an ethical line years ago. No Child Left Behind codified a whole raft of educational malpractice. It required, among other things, that teachers treat the big Standardized Test as the gold standard of what education is about. It required that we tell our students, "Nothing is more important to your future than getting a good score on the BS Test." And as most of us recognize, that is a lie. It is especially a lie for poor students who lack both the skills to excel at test taking and who also lack much of what they need beyond test-taking ability. It's like taking poor kids to the store, handing them ten dollars, and saying, "Now, the only thing you need to plan a great menu for the week is this fifteen-dollar case of Twinkies."
The Atlanta teachers were over the ethical line from the moment NCLB was made law. They could either follow the letter of the law, stop doing the things that were turning their school around and focus on a bogus test for a system that would inevitably chew them up, or they could try to trick the system into sparing them in hopes that some students could eventually be saved. Both choices are unethical, but one choice was far more likely to serve the interests of the students-- at least in the short term.
NCLB and much education reform nonsense makes me angry precisely because it gives me a lose-lose choice. I can break the rules and commit educational malpractice, or I can do what I know professionally is correct and break some rules while doing it. Or I can, as most teachers do, try to create some sort of clever parquet out of the two and tap dance my way through the teaching day.
Teaching has, in one short generation, turned from a profession with extraordinary ethical clarity into one of shadows and greyness and compromises that we make with the system, our students, and ourselves.
If I had been in Atlanta, what would I have done?
The honest answer is that I don't know. I might have refused to cheat at all and instead tried to wave my hands and draw attention to the crash and burn that followed, but the modern ed reform approach has been crashing and burning, with virtually no successes to speak of, for over a decade-- and nobody in power seems to care.
So I might have decided to try to save my kids and my school, and I might have stepped into it by increments, until I was confronted by the horror of people trying to laud my "success" publicly.
I might have looked for other work, if I could, but I am a nester and when I put down roots in a community, I'm unlikely to pick up. I might have left the profession, but it would have been bitter to abandon my students to someone else willing to live on the wrong side of the ethically line. I might have become obnoxious and angry, that guy who makes everyone's eyes roll in staff meetings, and blogged angrily as well, until I managed to get myself reprimanded and fired for insubordination. Except in all those cases, a decade ago I would have had to face the prosepct of being a divorced dad with kids to look out for.
One of my fundamental beliefs about life is that, no matter how dark the place you find yourself, no matter how many wrong choices you have made, there is always a right choice open to you. So it is a hard thing for me to imagine that there were no good choices available for the Atlanta teachers (or all the other cheating teachers who haven't been arrested or ruined). But I wasn't there, and I have no way of knowing exactly what choices they faced.
And yet there is something baldfaced and ugly about taking out an eraser and changing the answers on a test. It seems like a bigger jump. But is it?
Making ethical choices in unethical circumstances is damned hard. It would be great if the Powers That Be recognized the conviction of the Atlanta teachers as what it is-- a sign that the system is horribly out of whack. It would be great if the Powers That Be recognized that a teacher who changes answers on a test is not the equivalent of a dangerous organized crime figure who needs to be locked up for the safety of society. I'm not holding my breath.
Instead, I'm just remembering to hoping that my big Atlanta moment never comes, but if it does, that I recognize it and that I find a choice that I can live with.
Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats
Friday, April 3, 2015
The Atlanta Cheaters
As most know by now, the verdict was handed down in the Atlanta cheating trial and eleven former educators (it seems safe to say that they'll never work in education again) were hauled off instantly and none-too-gently to a bizarrely extreme sentence of jail.
You can get a pretty full picture of the story from these two articles-- the New Yorker in depth piece from 2014 and the Atlantic article that accompanied the verdict.
Much of the ground has been covered. The teachers did a Very Bad Thing and their punishment is earned. The teachers' crime is also an indictment of the system we're currently operating under. There are just a few more thoughts that occur to me.
First, I'm stuck by how hard the teachers at Parks Middle School were trying. This was not teachers trying to game the test scores so that they could back to napping in the lounge and showing videos all day. This was a school where, by all accounts, they were trying everything they could think of in the face of serious challenges, and they were moving forward and creating success-- just not enough of the right kind of success.
In a world without No Child Left Behind, Parks Middle School would have been called a success, a school that was slowly turning around not just its students, but its neighborhood. The cheaters were not trying to save their cushy paychecks or no-stress sinecures-- they were trying to defend the little success that they had managed to create.
Nothing I've read really addresses this, but I would bet that nobody at Parks thought they would have to manage the charade for years. Remember-- from 2007 on we all lived in hope that Congress would rewrite ESEA any day now and the ridiculous imperatives for unattainable test scores would go away. When a new administration was chosen in 2008, that hope became even stronger. In my school, as in many schools, the mantra became, "Let's just figure out how to get through this year, and maybe by next year things will be different." I get a sinking hollow in my gut just imagining the growing horror at Parks as each passing year dug them deeper into the growing pit of lies they were digging for themselves.
I can't condone a thing they did. But it would be cheap of me to condemn them for failing a test I've never had to take. That's why I particularly value the insights of someone like Adell Cothorne, a whistleblower who used to work in DC in the heart of the big Cheating Scandal That Never Happened and who wrote a full response to the convictions for Mercedes Schneider in which she said this:
Do I condone what they did in reference to manipulating students’ tests? No I do not – in any way, shape, or form.
Do I understand why they participated in these egregious acts? I do!
By 2010, it was clear to anybody who was paying attention that there were increasingly only two types of schools in America-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating.
The fate of the Atlanta cheaters stands in stark contrast to the fate of teachers and administrators cheating across the US. Can I pull up a list and name them? No, nor would I. But I don't doubt for a fraction of a second that hundreds upon hundreds of schools in this country survived the insanely unattainable politically-set requirements of federal reform by cheating in ways big and small. This can't be a surprise-- school reform's first big exemplar was the Texas Miracle, which turned out to be nothing more than creative accounting and magic tracking. The federal government literally paraded a big fat lie in front of schools as if it were a model and then said, "Okay, now YOU do that, too!"
We've heard whisperings of cheating from across the country since then, with reports of questionable test erasures to results that just raise your eyebrows right off your face. The biggest marquee Cheating Scandal That Never Was didn't occur in DC under the watchful eye of She Who Will Not Be Named, but as with the Texas miracle of Rod Paige, too many important people had bet too heavily on the success of She to allow any such scandal to gain traction.
But somehow, in a whole nation of cheats, the folks in Atlanta were the ones who were caught and slapped, an entire library thrown at them.
There's a whole conversation to be had about the ethics of following bad, damaging destructive laws. If you are in Nazi Germany, is it okay to lie about the Jewish family hiding in your attic? If a gunman asks if there are a bunch of five year olds in the classroom behind you, is it okay to lie? If somebody wants to destroy a school that you have built into a haven of peace and positive growth for the community, is it okay to lie to hold them off?
These can be hard questions, but here's one other thing I know-- when a system pressures people to lie in order to survive, bad things happen when they don't lie, and worse things happen when they do.
If you want a stunning example of a lie-fueled reporting system in action, take a look at the Great Chinese Famine of the fifties and sixties, a story all the more remarkable because it's still not widely known outside of China or widely acknowledged within it.
The simple outline is this. Mao decided that he would remake the Chinese economy in the Great Leap Forward (1958) by simply dragging farmers off the farm, taking every scrap of metal that could be rounded up, and building an industrial economy in the cities. He would do this without hurting the food supply by setting quotas for the districts, requiring farmers to make their numbers, or else. The district's farms, stripped of resources and manpower, could not make their numbers, but in Mao's China, nobody wanted to face the "or else." Some tried to broach the subject, but were told that was defeatist thinking-- did they not believe in the mighty power of China's farms? And so everyone made their numbers by lying.
On paper, China in the sixties was doing just fine. In reality, the country was in the grip of man-made famine. The Chinese government now admits to a death toll of 20 million; some writers estimate as many as 36 million. Officials commandeered more grain in some district than existed. Peoples' deaths went unreported so that survivors could keep collecting food rations.
So much weight was put on the measure of food production that to this day, there's no accurate measure of the reality in existence.
When you create a machine that is so badly engineered that it can only work when heavily lubricated by lies, that machine will never do any of the work it was supposedly built for. It will just chew things up and make a destructive mess. What is the moral response to an immoral system?
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if nobody anywhere had lied about test results, if the feds had been forced to confront a nationwide epidemic of "failing" schools, more than could have been milked for profits by charter profiteers and corporate raiders. Would someone have said, "Well, that can't be right" or would we be looking at millions of unemployed educators and a public ed system completely gutted.
The Atlanta cheaters were wrong. What they did was wrong. So were the people who created the system that put those educators in a no-win situation. The Atlanta teachers were in trouble from the moment they were given numbers to make that could not be made; they were doomed to be either failures or cheats. There are no heroes in the Atlanta story, but when counting up the wrong-doers, it would be a grievous error to stop with the eleven people who just went to jail.
You can get a pretty full picture of the story from these two articles-- the New Yorker in depth piece from 2014 and the Atlantic article that accompanied the verdict.
Much of the ground has been covered. The teachers did a Very Bad Thing and their punishment is earned. The teachers' crime is also an indictment of the system we're currently operating under. There are just a few more thoughts that occur to me.
First, I'm stuck by how hard the teachers at Parks Middle School were trying. This was not teachers trying to game the test scores so that they could back to napping in the lounge and showing videos all day. This was a school where, by all accounts, they were trying everything they could think of in the face of serious challenges, and they were moving forward and creating success-- just not enough of the right kind of success.
In a world without No Child Left Behind, Parks Middle School would have been called a success, a school that was slowly turning around not just its students, but its neighborhood. The cheaters were not trying to save their cushy paychecks or no-stress sinecures-- they were trying to defend the little success that they had managed to create.
Nothing I've read really addresses this, but I would bet that nobody at Parks thought they would have to manage the charade for years. Remember-- from 2007 on we all lived in hope that Congress would rewrite ESEA any day now and the ridiculous imperatives for unattainable test scores would go away. When a new administration was chosen in 2008, that hope became even stronger. In my school, as in many schools, the mantra became, "Let's just figure out how to get through this year, and maybe by next year things will be different." I get a sinking hollow in my gut just imagining the growing horror at Parks as each passing year dug them deeper into the growing pit of lies they were digging for themselves.
I can't condone a thing they did. But it would be cheap of me to condemn them for failing a test I've never had to take. That's why I particularly value the insights of someone like Adell Cothorne, a whistleblower who used to work in DC in the heart of the big Cheating Scandal That Never Happened and who wrote a full response to the convictions for Mercedes Schneider in which she said this:
Do I condone what they did in reference to manipulating students’ tests? No I do not – in any way, shape, or form.
Do I understand why they participated in these egregious acts? I do!
By 2010, it was clear to anybody who was paying attention that there were increasingly only two types of schools in America-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating.
The fate of the Atlanta cheaters stands in stark contrast to the fate of teachers and administrators cheating across the US. Can I pull up a list and name them? No, nor would I. But I don't doubt for a fraction of a second that hundreds upon hundreds of schools in this country survived the insanely unattainable politically-set requirements of federal reform by cheating in ways big and small. This can't be a surprise-- school reform's first big exemplar was the Texas Miracle, which turned out to be nothing more than creative accounting and magic tracking. The federal government literally paraded a big fat lie in front of schools as if it were a model and then said, "Okay, now YOU do that, too!"
We've heard whisperings of cheating from across the country since then, with reports of questionable test erasures to results that just raise your eyebrows right off your face. The biggest marquee Cheating Scandal That Never Was didn't occur in DC under the watchful eye of She Who Will Not Be Named, but as with the Texas miracle of Rod Paige, too many important people had bet too heavily on the success of She to allow any such scandal to gain traction.
But somehow, in a whole nation of cheats, the folks in Atlanta were the ones who were caught and slapped, an entire library thrown at them.
There's a whole conversation to be had about the ethics of following bad, damaging destructive laws. If you are in Nazi Germany, is it okay to lie about the Jewish family hiding in your attic? If a gunman asks if there are a bunch of five year olds in the classroom behind you, is it okay to lie? If somebody wants to destroy a school that you have built into a haven of peace and positive growth for the community, is it okay to lie to hold them off?
These can be hard questions, but here's one other thing I know-- when a system pressures people to lie in order to survive, bad things happen when they don't lie, and worse things happen when they do.
If you want a stunning example of a lie-fueled reporting system in action, take a look at the Great Chinese Famine of the fifties and sixties, a story all the more remarkable because it's still not widely known outside of China or widely acknowledged within it.
The simple outline is this. Mao decided that he would remake the Chinese economy in the Great Leap Forward (1958) by simply dragging farmers off the farm, taking every scrap of metal that could be rounded up, and building an industrial economy in the cities. He would do this without hurting the food supply by setting quotas for the districts, requiring farmers to make their numbers, or else. The district's farms, stripped of resources and manpower, could not make their numbers, but in Mao's China, nobody wanted to face the "or else." Some tried to broach the subject, but were told that was defeatist thinking-- did they not believe in the mighty power of China's farms? And so everyone made their numbers by lying.
On paper, China in the sixties was doing just fine. In reality, the country was in the grip of man-made famine. The Chinese government now admits to a death toll of 20 million; some writers estimate as many as 36 million. Officials commandeered more grain in some district than existed. Peoples' deaths went unreported so that survivors could keep collecting food rations.
So much weight was put on the measure of food production that to this day, there's no accurate measure of the reality in existence.
When you create a machine that is so badly engineered that it can only work when heavily lubricated by lies, that machine will never do any of the work it was supposedly built for. It will just chew things up and make a destructive mess. What is the moral response to an immoral system?
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if nobody anywhere had lied about test results, if the feds had been forced to confront a nationwide epidemic of "failing" schools, more than could have been milked for profits by charter profiteers and corporate raiders. Would someone have said, "Well, that can't be right" or would we be looking at millions of unemployed educators and a public ed system completely gutted.
The Atlanta cheaters were wrong. What they did was wrong. So were the people who created the system that put those educators in a no-win situation. The Atlanta teachers were in trouble from the moment they were given numbers to make that could not be made; they were doomed to be either failures or cheats. There are no heroes in the Atlanta story, but when counting up the wrong-doers, it would be a grievous error to stop with the eleven people who just went to jail.
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