Atlanta Schools – Cheating Only One Of The Problems

Today’s Courier Herald Column

Last week, a test cheating scandal within the Atlanta Public School System moved from a topic mostly discussed among city leaders and political insiders to one of national media attention. A “devastating” report issued after a year-long formal investigation, which followed several years of investigative reporting by the Atlanta Journal & Constitution, confirmed the worst of the rumors: Cheating was discovered to have taken place at 44 schools, involving 178 educators. 38 Principals were implicated in the report.

The findings document even larger problems for an Atlanta School System, already on probation from their accrediting agency and facing a fall deadline on possible loss of accreditation. The report calls all progress claimed by APS on improvements on student achievement for the last decade into question. It has embarrassed political leaders, business interests, and outside charitable foundations, all who have held up the city as an example of how inner city children can be taught to excel despite their circumstances.

Critics have long attacked the system as spending the most per pupil with having little to show for it. Defenders of the system argue that the rates of poverty, high incidents of single parent households, and deficient average education of parents sending students are high hurdles to overcome.

The pressure to meet test scores within a public school system is great. The incentive to cheat is real, as much public money is at stake for the system, and the career advancement for educators often relies on the standardized test performance of students, considered to be the only objective measure a school system or administrator has to gage performance.

The federal No Child Left Behind act added to this pressure, as significant penalties to schools and school systems were added with respect to federal funds for failure to meet an annual goal of progress for student achievement.

With the challenges high and much money at stake, the Atlanta school system caved to pressure and took the easy way out, institutionalizing fraud to ensure the funds and promotions kept coming despite the needs of the students. In the process, many were robbed. The taxpayers have not received a return on their investment, but most importantly, the children who have spent years in Atlanta classrooms have not received the education that our system of government promises them.

While this problem is glaring in its magnitude and scope, it should perhaps not be as surprising given the amount of money and power that was at stake, with accountability insulated within the system from those who stood to profit from it. This space often deals with issues of ethics in government, and unfortunately, the City of Atlanta School System is but the latest example of why large amounts of sunlight, public accountability, and an independent series of checks and balances are necessary when public resources are at stake. Once money is appropriated on a perpetual basis to an insulated and unaccountable system, those within the system have everything to gain and often little to lose by ensuring that the system’s continuation is the primary goal, with all other objectives secondary.

The Atlanta Mayor, New School Board President, Governor, and now former University System Chancellor turned School Superintendent have all signed on to fix the problems within APS. Those of governance are the most obvious, and relatively easy to fix. Once a framework to ensure accountability is in place, the socio-economic problems of the students will remain. Those are much harder to deal with.

At the end of the day, the testing must be objective, and a true baseline set. The real depths of problems in Atlanta’s education will then be known. Let’s hope those who have invested political capital to handle the scandal part of this problem remain involved to fix the true, and much bigger, underlying problems.