We Are Atlanta

Recently and rather unexpectedly, a radio producer in Georgia asked me to record my thoughts on the Atlanta cheating scandal and what, if anything, we could learn from it.  I was humbled to be asked, and as a result of editing the commentary and the conversations I have had since it was broadcast I’ve given the scandal a lot more thought.  And the more I think about it, the more I think this scandal – and the indictment and incarceration of educators – may be an inflection point in our public dialogue about education and education reform.  It presents a unique opportunity for us all to interrogate and rethink our core assumptions about what works and what is morally just.

The justice system sought to hold individual educators accountable for their actions, but I have been thinking about our collective responsibility.  It is all too easy in the post-hoc analysis of this scandal to speak in the passive voice, in the detached voice of omniscient narrators:  we would never do what they did, we say to ourselves.  But I think that we should not be so sure.

Quoted in a U.S News column about the scandal, Peter Cunningham, a former Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education official and founder of the non-partisan education reform organization Education Post, remarked that the convicted teachers “got a signal from somebody, whether it’s their principal or superintendent, that we need to see rising test scores at all costs.”  When I read this, I thought Cunningham was rightly pointing out that the teachers were not alone in their responsibility for what happened.  However, I think he stopped short of saying what we all need to hear, which is this:  it was not only the principals and the superintendent who sent the signal that rising test scores mattered most.  We all sent that signal.  Cunningham did, I did, we all did.

We are all complicit in the system in which these Atlanta teachers worked.  We are the lawmakers sitting in a room in 2001 and 2002, deciding that we cannot object to the NCLB standard that 100 percent of all students be proficient by 2014, that to demand any less would be to be seen as making excuses and as weak and besides which 2014 is such a long way away.  We are Beverly Hall, wanting so much to think of ourselves as miracle workers, to be visionary and celebrated for our success where so many others had failed.  We are the principals and testing coordinators, afraid to be the only ones failing in a district succeeding beyond anyone’s wildest expectations and what that might say about us and our teachers and our students.  And we are the teachers themselves, maybe resisting at first but ultimately succumbing to the pressure all around us.  We cheated on those tests, not because we were hiding our failures but because we reluctantly thought it was the right thing to do.  And then we are the judge and jury who sent those teachers to jail, pitying their bad choices but determined to make an example of them.

The teachers to be sentenced in Atlanta are not the only ones who need to take responsibility for their actions.   Helping teachers and students be individually successful is our collective responsibility, and so I think a lot of people failed in Atlanta.  Most of us who share responsibility will not be going to jail, but we can make amends. 

This scandal is an opportunity for us all to do some real soul-searching, a real look-in-the-mirror kind of a moment.  Many commentators, including the author of the above column, rightly empathize with the students and families, who were terribly aggrieved in this whole affair. But I think we should all make more of an effort to empathize with the full complement of players in the universe of education under reform.  When we do that, I think we might be able strike a more reasonable balance between accountability and responsibility.  Such a balance would be a redeeming side-effect of these otherwise dark days.