Testing scandal
Posted on July 29, 2014 by debmeier
Dear readers,
I have been silent since June fourth because my car, without my consent, left the road and crashed into a field—totaling it, but fortunately not me. I’m very lucky to have escaped with minor damage, but enough to “lay me low” for the past month plus. But, when I read Rachel Aviv’s marvelous article about cheating to boost scores in Atlanta (July 2lst New Yorker) I felt propelled to respond. It is time to return.
What a perceptive and clear account of an old wound. And done with a rare sympathy for the “villains”—teachers and administrators. Especially those far down the hierarchy. It is a subject about which I too have been unwisely silent for too long.
Aviv tracks math teacher Damany Lewis and his principal Christopher Waller and the life inside their middle school—starting in 2006 during Beverly Hall’s superintendency. She does not condone the many teachers who followed Lewis and Waller’s lead. But she describes the relentless, not quite inevitable path they each took to protect their students, the school and, of course, their own jobs too. They lost on all counts. But they are, I believe, only the tip of an iceberg that has been around for a very long time—and which the media has deliberately refused to take into account—and has in fact aided and abetted
I know personally.
In the 1970s—when I was the teacher-director of the newly formed Central Park East elementary school in East Harlem‑I faced a similar dilemma. Because we were an “alternative” school located in larger neighborhood school, our scores were not Testing scandal | Deborah Meier on Education: