In the days since 11 public school teachers were found guilty of racketeering, led out of an Atlanta courtroom in handcuffs, and sent to jail, I have been doing a lot of thinking. I have been thinking about the prosecutorial discretion that applied a law aimed at organized crime to low-level public employees and why this was deemed reasonable or acceptable when not one banker was indicted on similar charges after the global financial crisis of 2008. I have been thinking about the convicted teachers who have not only lost their livelihoods and freedom but who as felons will now be saddled with numerous civil rights restrictions. (I have been especially thinking about former first grade teacher Shani Robinson, who will be sentenced in August just months after giving birth.) And, of course, I have been thinking about the many students and families in the Atlanta Public Schools who were cheated – literally – out of the kinds of sustained supports they needed to succeed in a system stacked against them.
But mostly I have been thinking about whether the cheating scandal that swallowed up these 11 teachers – as well as their colleagues who pled guilty and avoided trial (and jail time) – was more anomaly or a fable. And since there are now testing irregularities alleged in 40 states, I am inclined to think it is more fable. And so, what if anything can we learn?
The Atlanta cheating scandal was a story of brazen deception on a massive scale. In addition to being a grave breach of public trust, the deliberate and systematic manipulation of students’ test scores had many far-reaching negative consequences, not least of which included promoting students who were ill-prepared for advanced work and rendering students and schools ineligible for much-needed academic support programs.
From one perspective, the convicted teachers’ conduct earned them whatever consequences they get, no matter how severe. This was certainly the perspective of the presiding judge, Jerry Baxter, who ordered the teachers immediately arrested after the verdicts were read, saying, “They have made their bed and they’re going to have to lie in it, and it starts today.”
From another perspective, though, these teachers’ conduct is a predictable consequence in a system rife with ethical dilemmas that are not easily resolved. As Richard Rothstein writes:
Holding educators accountable for student test results makes sense if the tests are reasonable reflections of teacher performance. But if they are not, and if educators are being held accountable for meeting standards that are impossible to achieve, then the only way to meet fanciful goals imposed from above… is to cheat, using illegal or barely legal devices. …Certainly, educators can refuse to cheat, and take the fall for unavoidable failure in other ways: they can see their schools closed, their colleagues fired, their students’ confidence and love of learning destroyed. That would have been the legal thing to do, but not necessarily the ethical thing to do.
Frankly, I find it too easy to fling venom in the direction of these teachers. Calling them “edu-racketeers,” Forbes contributing writer James Marshall Crotty – in a column positively dripping with condescension – suggested that they lacked moral fiber and accused them of “cutting corners to cover up their own pedagogical failures.” An editorial in U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s hometown Chicago Tribune similarly absolved the pervasive high-stakes accountability culture and placed blame squarely at the feet of the teachers themselves, saying that they alone “demolished [the] trust” at the heart of public education. Even Dr. Beverly Hall, the disgraced former superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools who was facing 45 years in prison when she died in March, steadfastly pushed responsibility away from herself and onto school personnel. In a video message to her staff before she retired in 2011, Hall said, “It's become increasingly clear that a segment of our staff chose to violate the trust that was placed in them. There is simply no excuse for unethical behavior and no room in this district for unethical conduct.”
I agree with Dr. Hall and critics like those at the Tribune and Mr. Cotty that we all must take responsibility for our action, but I also think it is intellectually lazy to dismiss outright or minimize the role of what a state investigation called the “culture of fear, intimidation, and retaliation” in which these teachers worked. To castigate the teachers for a lack of integrity while we continue to uncritically lionize the tests they manipulated is an act of willful ignorance.
Because the teachers are inseparable from the accountability context that surrounded them, I think the lessons from Atlanta must center on both the practitioners and the conditions under which they worked. Specifically, unless and until we are willing to seriously consider the possibility that high-stakes have unacceptably negative consequences – and I don’t know anyone who thinks the Atlanta cheating scandal was acceptable – I believe we can expect more of the same.
If we want to strengthen the ethical compass of individual teachers – and I think most people would agree that we should – then we cannot rely solely on stricter policing of their behavior. We must also commit to fortifying the teaching profession itself. At the risk of stating the obvious, the teachers indicted in this scandal engaged in conduct unbecoming of a professional. Strong and durable professional ethics – that is, professional ethics that are effective at helping professionals navigate ethical dilemmas and sanctioning those who stray from acceptable norms of behavior – depend on the strength of the professions they serve. And in fairness to the teachers in Atlanta, and as many observers (including me) have pointed out, teaching in the United States is not a profession. Rather, teachers in this country are still laborers, subject to standards and requirements and sanctions imposed upon them, and they are laboring under increasingly strict and draconian working conditions. (Sufficed to say, it does not have to be this way.) Strengthen the teaching profession, and you strengthen the professional standards that govern teachers.
The education sector is a dynamic ecosystem, and both teachers and the incentives designed to boost teacher and student performance – chief among them high-stakes tests with their carrots and sticks – are integral parts of that ecosystem. However, travesties like the one that occurred in an Atlanta courtroom this week make me think that maybe we cannot have both. Maybe, as we continue to invest in our school system, we need to consider which of the two are truly indispensible: teachers or the tests. If we choose the tests, we are liable to lose the teachers. If we choose the teachers, we need to lose the tests (or at least the high-stakes tethered to them).