Atlanta Public School officials are on trial for conspiracy to cheat on standardized tests.

By Fawn Johnson

Cheating scandals undermine the public's faith in standardized testing. Photo by Paulo Bona.

A trial in Atlanta is under way for 12 public school educators accused of engineering a widespread conspiracy to rig standardized test scores. It's ugly. The star witness on day three was a whistleblower who was fired for reporting that she saw another elementary school teacher coach a student during a state test. She received hate mail: "You are a big liar!"

A principal at a low-performing high school was let go even though his school made the No Child Left Behind achievement benchmarks for the first time under his watch. He said he was told by the superintendent that there was no time for "incremental gains."

The defendants are all African Americans who worked in low-income neighborhoods. Community leaders have complained that entire neighborhoods are being publicly humiliated because of the exposure. A local pastor told the Los Angeles Times that the trial was "a witch hunt against black teachers."

This could go on for months. It will raise questions about the legitimacy of standardized tests and the pitfalls of tying performance indicators to student achievement. It will scare superintendents around the country who face similar problems of pulling underachieving students up to par.

The trial goes right to the heart of the education reform debate. How hard do we push to make sure each student meets expectations, understanding that people and institutions will get hurt by our measuring tools?

Accountability advocates will argue that measuring student achievement is an essential part of closing the gap between rich and poor students. The Fordham Institute's Mike Petrilli predicted last month that stopping testing would steer the affluent schools toward a heavy emphasis on Advanced Placement and SAT tests while lower-performing schools would steer their underachieving kids to "easier classes with less challenge and weaker teachers."

The scandal will put the country's teachers on edge as their profession receives a public relations black eye. That's not helpful when they already are overworked and underpaid and more than two-thirds of Americans think they need more certification and training. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten noted last April that the Georgia teachers' union was among the first of the whistleblowers on the scandal. In a joint statement, she and Georgia Federation of Teachers President Verdaillia Turner also said the scandal "crystallizes the unintended consequences of our test-crazed policies."

Longtime test skeptic Bob Schaeffer, who is the education director of FairTest, said the Atlanta scandal is "the tip of the iceberg." Strategies to boost scores are everywhere, he says. (That makes sense. It happens wherever there is measured outcome. Just read your local sports page.) His group has also compiled a handy list of more than 60 ways that schools "cheat" on testing, which includes somewhat innocuous rituals like giving kids practice tests to outright illegal acts like shouting out correct answers during a test.

The saddest outcome from all the hoopla is the loss of credibility for the public school system writ large. Right or wrong, the scrutiny makes it that much more difficult for those operating in it to do their jobs. Some will do them well. Others, not so much. But everyone suffers when the system is weakened.

For our insiders: What is unusual about the Atlanta case? Are teachers and principals motivated by a culture of fear? Does that happen elsewhere? What happens to educators who face seemingly impossible benchmarks? How do they cope? Can testing systems build in protections against abuses? How should professionals who are tasked with raising achievement for low-performing kids be measured, if at all?
 

by Kevin Welner

Rachel Aviv wrote a must-read article in the New Yorker about the Atlanta scandal. She does a fantastic job describing the cheating as well as the policy context for the cheating. http://www.newyorker.com/magaz....