Cheating Schools

Eugene Robinson has the sad news from Georgia:

Beverly Hall, the former superintendent of the Atlanta public schools, was indicted on racketeering charges Friday for an alleged cheating scheme that won her more than $500,000 in performance bonuses. Hall, who retired two years ago, is also accused of theft, conspiracy and making false statements. She has denied any wrongdoing.

Also facing criminal charges are 34 teachers and principals who allegedly participated in the cheating, which involved simply erasing students’ wrong answers on test papers and filling in the correct answers.

In 2009, the American Association of School Administrators named Hall “National Superintendent of the Year” for improvement in student achievement that seemed, in retrospect, much too good to be true. On Georgia’s standardized competency test, students in some of Atlanta’s troubled neighborhoods appeared to vault past their counterparts in the wealthy suburbs.

For educators who worked for Hall, bonuses and promotions were based on test scores. “Principals and teachers were frequently told by Beverly Hall and her subordinates that excuses for not meeting targets would not be tolerated,” according to the indictment.

I don't know what to do about this. It seems to me that any serious effort to improve our schools has to rely heavily on these tests -- we just don't have any other way of measuring what children are learning. But the more you stress the tests, the more that either distorts what happens in the classroom ("teaching the test") or leads to outright cheating. Obviously we must be more suspicious of any major change in a school's scores, especially if there has been no major change in personnel or teaching methods. More of our attention should be focused on methods, and on evaluation of classroom teaching either by in-class observation or video. But corruption is always with us, and the spectacle of superintendents and school reformers vaulting to fame off the backs of students seems destined to repeat itself again and again.