House of Cards

Last week, the team appointed by the state released the report summarizing the investigation of cheating in the Atlanta Public Schools.  I didn't read the whole thing (it's three volumes, and hundreds of pages), but I stayed up late the other night and read enough of it.  The evidence is overwhelming.  In some schools, there were organized, systematic efforts to change test scores.  Hundreds of people were involved, many confessed, some invoked their 5th amendment rights.  In the implicated schools, the too-good-to-be-true test results disappeared with the 2010 Criterion-Referenced Compentency Test (CRCT), which was administered with outside monitoring.

Beverly Hall, the then-superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools, said she didn't know.  And she was shocked - shocked - to learn that there was cheating going on in the schools.  She accumulated awards and bonuses and national-level recognition for her work in Atlanta, but when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution began to report on test score increases that simply were Too Good To Be True, the result was denial and a failure of leadership.  Finally, belatedly, she says she's responsible, now that it's too late to say anything else, but she says she didn't know, she really didn't.

But she should have.  She should have been curious enough to have a couple of her central office staff (I think she has more than a few people who worked for her in headquarters) go to the implicated schools, where impossible gains were made in scores, and see what exactly had been done in the classrooms that had produced these miracles.  See what kind of work the students were doing, listen to them in class, review their writing and classroom work.  It wouldn't have been hard, but apparently no one did it.  They didn't do it because they didn't want to know.

I told Tom the other evening that it reminded me of the crumbling of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.  Knowledgeable outsiders who looked carefully at Madoff's investment strategy and reported returns knew it didn't add up, and some of them reported their suspicions to the Securities and Exhange Commission.  Some of the investors themselves probably had suspicions, but at long as the money kept coming, they didn't really want to know.

And what happened at the Atlanta Public Schools was like a Ponzi scheme.  Once you start cheating, you can't stop, because the goals for the next year just get racheted up.  So every year more kids have to do better on the exams, more teachers and staff have to get pulled in.  More children denied extra help that they needed and families misled about how their children were doing in school.  And now that it's all come tumbling down, more careers ruined.

The report documents a massive failure of leadership of the Atlanta Public Schools.  Beverly Hall says she didn't know.  But she should have, and she could have, if she had bothered to investigate the initial allegations that the AJC reported.