The New Yorker Nails the Real Lesson of the Atlanta Testing Scandal
Rachel Aviv's excellent The New Yorker article, "Wrong Answer," hits the proper balance. Aviv rightfully focuses on the conspiracies and the outright cheating in the Atlanta Public Schools. She makes it clear, however, that the real lesson of the scandal is that test-driven accountability is the "Wrong Answer" to the question of how do we improve schools.
Aviv starts, and ends, with a teacher and a principal, who are both good people. They lost their moral bearings in an effort to help poor children of color during the time of No Child Left Behind. They committed what was, then, a mostly "victimless crime." They cheated on a relatively meaningless NCLB test at a time when the stakes for improving test scores were not nearly as high as they are today. Since the Obama administration put high-stakes testing on steroids, however, all educators are subject to test and punish and, nowadays, there are very few victimless tests.
As Aviv implies, outright cheating is just the tip of the iceberg. So, I will focus on the other abuses she recalls and disgusting behavior that dwarfs outright cheating in terms of polluting our educational environment.
Atlanta Superintendent Beverly Hall is the complex villain. Hall, like other "brass knuckle" reformers, apparently was sincere in wanting to help children. She drove the scandal with the typical mantra, "No exceptions and no excuses." She laughed when warning the new, idealistic, caring principal that "you will need your own team."
This and similar phrases, in Atlanta and elsewhere, is a de facto mandate to violate the rights of educators. Across the nation, such aphorisms are invitations to commit age discrimination, to stop the honest exchange of ideas and information, and to punish veteran teachers for refusing to compromise their morality and resisting teach-to-the-test malpractice.
The new principal was urged to "forge stronger relationships" with fellow principals; in other words, appropriate their techniques for jacking up test scores. In order to protect children from having their school closed, the principal conformed to the <i>The New Yorker </i>Nails the Real Lesson of the Atlanta Testing Scandal | John Thompson: