There are no good guys here

Apr 4th 2013, 13:24 by J.F. | ATLANTA

ON MARCH 29th, a grand jury in Fulton County, in which most of Atlanta lies, returned a 65-count indictment against 35 teachers and administrators in the Atlanta public-school system. Among those charged was Beverly Hall, Atlanta's former superintendent of schools. During her tenure she racked up an impressive array of awards and accolades for the stunning gains in test scores achieved by Atlanta's students. But prosecutors, as well as an investigative team assembled by former-Governor Sonny Perdue allege that those gains rested on neither pedagogy nor diligent study, but on something far simpler and more invidious: cheating.

An 800-page report details how the cheating occurred. Sometimes teachers gave students the right answers during tests; sometimes they gave them out before testing began; most often, though, they simply collected the students' test papers and changed the wrong answers to right ones. The indicted teachers were charged with racketeering, making false statements, tampering with witnesses and, because many of them received bonus checks based on apparently falsified results, theft (not all teachers and administrators face all charges).

Two debates have sprung up around this indictment, one largely Atlanta-centred and one national. Let's do the first one first. Shirley Franklin, who was mayor of Atlanta during most of Ms Hall's tenure atop the school system, wrote on her blog yesterday that "cheating is awful. And so is conviction before a fair trial...[S]ay a prayer for a fair trial for all those charged, say a prayer for every family and child who has been touched by the scandal and say a prayer to calm the public lynching mob mentality that has begun." Ahem. The Atlanta Journal Constitution first uncovered questionable test-score jumps in 2008. Mr Perdue assembled his investigative team in 2010. It released its report in 2011. It is now 2013. "Public lynchings" usually do not take five years.

Undoubtedly, people are angry. If the material contained in the report is true, they have every reason to be angry: their children were cheated. Teachers allegedly manipulated results to make themselves look good and to win accolades and financial rewards that they did not deserve. They did so at the expense of the people they should have been helping. Ms Franklin is absolutely correct that everyone deserves a fair trial. But that does not preclude the public from voicing—civilly and non-violently, of course—outrage that appears to be entirely justified. (There is, by the way, a valid point she could have made about prosecutorial overreach: if convicted on all counts Ms Hall could face 45 years in prison, and prosecutors initially recommended a $7.5m bond, both of which seem unduly harsh. And there is always a valid argument to be made against wanton use of RICO laws. But if there is any reason to doubt that the accused will face as fair a trial as Georgia's courts can afford, Ms Franklin ought to present it.)

The second debate concerns over-reliance on testing as a metric for evaluating teacher quality. Eugene Robinson writes that "the fashionable theory of school reform—requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students’ standardized test scores—is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket." Also at the Washington Post, Valerie Strauss writes that of the "dozens" of cheating scandals across the country, only Atlanta's was thoroughly investigated, because only Georgia's governor empowered an investigative team. But the other scandals, like Atlanta's, "have been a result of test-obsessed school reform". When the report came out in 2011 Dana Goldstein wrote a nice piece for Slate making a similar point.

Jonathan Chait, proving that the New Republic is less a magazine than a state of mind, makes the counterintuitive argument that teacher incentives ought to remain tied to test scores, even though doing so seems to encourage cheating. "Incentivizing any field," he writes, "encourages people to cheat." Students have long cheated because they have a reason to do it. Given the choice between a system in which teachers' pay is tied to performance, and one in which pay is tied solely to tenure, choose the former, but improve it.

The devil, as always, is in the details. Nobody likes "teaching to the test": not teachers, not students and not parents. As a retiring teacher writes in his valediction, current educational philosophy "strangles creativity, it smothers the development of critical thinking in our students and assumes a one-size-fits-all mentality more appropriate to the assembly line than the classroom." At those lines I can hear anyone who ever had an inspiring teacher cheer. Teaching to the test restrains those teachers: in trying to bring the bottom up, it also (and that is a generous "also") brings the top down. We must find a way to allow good teachers to flourish. But we need not tolerate those who game whatever system is in place.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 845