America is criminalizing Black teachers: Atlanta’s cheating scandal and the racist underbelly of education reform - Salon.com

America is criminalizing Black teachers: Atlanta’s cheating scandal and the racist underbelly of education reform - Salon.com:

America is criminalizing Black teachers: Atlanta’s cheating scandal and the racist underbelly of education reform

Our educational system stacks the deck against Black children -- now we're throwing their teachers in jail

Former Atlanta Public Schools school research team director Tamara Cotman, center, is led to a holding cell after a jury found her guilty in the Atlanta Public Schools test-cheating trial, Wednesday, April 1, 2015, in Atlanta. (Credit: AP/Kent D. Johnson)

 Last week, an Atlanta jury convicted 11 teachers and school administrators of racketeering in a system-wide cheating scandal. Yes, you read that correctly. Teachers and administrators inflating student scores on standardized tests is now considered “organized crime” in this country, and is punishable by more 20 years in prison, in these cases.

I am an educator. I am a Black woman who may someday mother a Black child. I have taught other Black mothers’ children. Much of my educational success in elementary school is directly attributable to high performance on standardized tests that caused my white teachers to notice me and intervene on my behalf to get me “tracked” into higher-achieving classrooms. I believe all children deserve access to a good, high-quality,public education.

Therefore, I don’t have to condone cheating in any form (and I don’t) to assert that what has happened in Atlanta to these teachers is a travesty. The pictures that emerged last week of handcuffed Black schoolteachers being led out of Southern courtrooms in one of the country’s largest urban Black school systems were absolutely heartbreaking.

Scapegoating Black teachers for failing in a system that is designed for Black children, in particular, not to succeed is the real corruption here. Since the early 1990s, we have watched the deprofessionalization of teaching, achieved through the proliferation of “teacher fellow” programs and the massive conservative-led effort to defund public education in major urban areas throughout the country. There is no longer a consensus that a good public education — a hallmark of American democracy — should be considered a public good.

Black children have for generations been the primary victims of this continuing social mendacity about the national value of education. More than 51 percent of children who attend public schools live in poverty. In Georgia, the percentage of Black children living in poverty hovers right around 39 percent. For Latino children, the number is consistently over 40 percent. Nationally, the number for Black children is 39 percent, according to most recent data, and 33 percent for Latino youth.

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Eighty percent of children in Atlanta Public Schools are Black. Eleven percent are white and 3 percent are Latino. However, only 50 percent of children in Atlanta’s Gifted and Talented programs are Black, whereas 40 percent are white. More disturbingly, 98 percent of all students expelled from Atlanta public schools during the 2009-2010 academic school year were Black.

These numbers taken together paint an abysmal picture of students who are disproportionately poor, over-disciplined, and systematically “tracked” out of high-performing classrooms. And yet we expect teachers to work magic in conditions that are set up for failure.

Lest you think this is merely an Atlanta problem, over at the Crunk Feminist Collective, Susana Morris tells a similar story of attending a predominantly Black high school in Florida with advanced classes that were overwhelmingly white.

Her story mirrors my own. In Louisiana in the 1980s and 1990s, students took two standardized tests. One (the LEAP test) measured basic proficiency and the other (the California Achievement Test) measured more advanced proficiencies. In the third grade, I scored 100 percent on the LEAP test, the only student in my overwhelmingly white class to do so. The teacher Mrs. Callender called me up to the front of the room and bragged about me to all the other students. That same year, on the CAT Test, I scored in the 89 percent percentile.

Meanwhile, I noticed one day during class that several of my white classmates, among them my best friend Amanda, were all mysteriously led out of class and then returned later, with no explanation. When I asked Amanda where she’d been, she said school officials had made her take a test, but she wasn’t clear what for. She never mentioned it again.

The next year, fourth grade, I walked into a classroom and met Beatrice Gaulden, one of only three Black academic teachers I would ever have. With her neon green and yellow Hammer-pants, her penchant for drinking eight tall glasses of water a day, and her strict instructions each morning  – we were not to approach her desk, but rather to wait until she moved to a stool in the front of the room for open discussion time — she was a wonder. Mrs. Gaulden is a character in most of my childhood stories of transformation because she was so pivotal to my own sense of self-worth as an outspoken, bossy, loquacious, bespectacled, ponytailed Black girl in a predominantly white classroom.

Because of Mrs. Gaulden’s instruction, my test scores leaped from the 89th percentile to America is criminalizing Black teachers: Atlanta’s cheating scandal and the racist underbelly of education reform - Salon.com: