Prosecutors Get an 'A' On Convictions of Atlanta Ed-Reform-Gone-Bad Test Cheats

theodp writes Just weeks after an L.A. Times op-ed called on public schools to emulate high-tech companies by paying high salaries to driven, talented employees whose productivity more than compensates for their high pay, the New York Times reported on the dramatic conclusion to perhaps the largest cheating scandal in the nation's history, which saw a Judge order handcuffed Atlanta educators led off to jail immediately for their roles in a standardized test cheating scandal that raised broader questions about the role of high-stakes testing in American schools. Jurors convicted 11 of the 12 defendants — a mix of Atlanta public school teachers, testing coordinators and administrators — of racketeering, a felony that carries up to 20 years in prison. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution sowed suspicion about the veracity of the test scores in 2009, and while investigators found that cheating was particularly ingrained in individual schools, they also said that the district's top officials, including Superintendent Beverly L. Hall, bore some responsibility for creating "a culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation" that had permitted "cheating — at all levels — to go unchecked for years." (More below.) Officials said the cheating allowed employees to collect bonuses and helped improve the reputations of both Dr. Hall and the perpetually troubled school district. Dr. Hall, who died on March 2, insisted that she had done nothing wrong and that her approach to education, which emphasized data, was not to blame. But a Fulton County grand jury later accused her and 34 other district employees of being complicit in the cheating. Twenty-one reached plea agreements, and two defendants died before they could stand trial. Interestingly, in early 2010, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported on how Hall and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation were bringing a "fair and transparent evaluation and support mechanism" to the Atlanta Public Schools. "We are excited to continue our [$23.6 million] partnership with APS and Dr. Hall," said Gates Foundation director of education Vicki L. Phillips. Five years earlier, in a 2005 Gates Foundation press release, Hall said, "We look forward to partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to take our reform efforts to the next level."

Comments

If all you care about are numbers

[gweihir]

... all you get is numbers. This testing-mania is hurting education badly. In cases where the numbers are not outright made up, they are subject to over-fitting (pupils learn jut for test-scores, not for knowledge and skills anymore), where they become just as meaningless. The underlying problem is that politicians are so abysmally dumb these days that they cannot comprehend anything about any real question but whether a number is higher or lower.

Re:Wrong profession

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they obviously chose the wrong profession. Had they been Wall Street hedge fund bankers, they would have got an invite to the next country estate deer hunt.

I saw (read?) a documentary on the scandal over a year ago. It focused on one guy and to boil it down he wasn't cheating for himself, what he got out of it was minimal - he was still putting in (in the form of school supplies that he purchased, etc) way more than he got out. He ended up cheating because it was so prevalent that his own students would be unfairly penalized if he didn't inflate their scores. They were at a bottom of the barrel school and yet they were learning, they were rising above their circumstances. But their legitimate scores would have still put them on the bottom compared to all the other fake scores. He saw cheating on the tests (changing their answers sheets to have more correct answers after the fact) as the only way to do right by his students.

It kind of reminded me of reading about corruption in China. In some government departmets corruption is so prevalent that the honest people are not trusted. That if you didn't take bribes everyone else in the office treated you with suspicion, that because you weren't as vulnerable as them to possible criminal charges they thought you might rat them out. You basically couldn't get your job done because no one wanted to have anything to do with you.

Its kind of like there is a "tipping point" for corruption in a system where once it reaches that point you simply have no hope of survival unless you join in, which ultimately makes anti-corruption drives extremely difficult because even the "good guys" are corrupt. You pretty much have to clean house and start over from scratch.