Education: High stakes, low acts

DETECTIVE series usually do pretty well on TV. I have an idea for one that would be truly different.

This one would star Georgia state investigator Rich Hyde, a man who for many years had pursued drug dealers, racketeers and other felons. Last week, Hyde made news because of the Atlanta public elementary school teacher he had "flipped" and had wear a wire to her school, resulting in an indictment of former Atlanta Pubic Schools Superintendent Beverly L. Hall and dozens of teachers.

Hyde's work led to a host of charges centering around allegations that Dr. Hall, the teachers and various administrators conspired for years to systemically erase student answers on standardized tests and correct them.

Hall and the Atlanta schools had been nationally recognized for soaring test scores that often beat the wealthy suburban school districts around Atlanta. Hall had received more than $500,000 in bonuses around these test scores and was even honored at the White House by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

The reaction of many posters to the New York Times was summarized by one who wrote, "What a surprise, high stakes testing encourages cheating." I've seen this reaction before, which seems to say that education is the one area where we shouldn't have measurable results and, heaven forbid, competition. Did so-called high-stakes testing really force a group at one elementary school in Atlanta to sign up to be part of a group that the indictment calls "the chosen" that sat together in a windowless room in their school and erased wrong answers together on the days of standardized tests?

This derisive phrase, "high-stakes testing," was brought home to me when Gov. Chris Christie moved in and took over the Camden Public Schools. This move underlines that the stakes are high when educating our kids. We can't continue to see the students in places like Camden drop out or graduate from high school without being able to read, write and compute effectively.

I taught in Camden and I know that it is very challenging, but Christie's move is correct in order to get a superintendent and other leadership that will get better results. At least in Camden, we have a pretty clear picture of how bad things are. In Atlanta, there was widespread denial that things were not good in the Atlanta public schools. Former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue told the New York Times that even though he was a conservative Republican businessman, the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce offered him strong resistance.

Locally, I have to praise the Inquirer for its investigations of test scores at Cayuga Elementary School and Roosevelt Middle School. The paper acted on tips from teachers at these schools, and I believe that this resulted in a great tightening in test security in Pennsylvania because of the efforts of the Corbett administration.

Despite scores of stories nationwide of public-school districts engaging in cheating around standardized tests, I still believe that we need to use them to ensure that kids are progressing educationally. I also still support merit pay for teachers. I don't think the merit-pay system should be based solely on the tests, but it can include classroom observations, parental input and any number of other creative measures.

Please remember, it's not how high students score that should be looked at when evaluating a teacher, but how much the teacher improves their performance from the previous year's. A teacher with a previously low-achieving class would not be at a disadvantage.

As I said, the Atlanta cheating scandal does have all the elements of a classic detective show. I was struck by Detective Hyde's description of the testing coordinator at one elementary school carrying the tests in a tote bag to a principal, who put on gloves before touching them. Did high-stakes testing really turn this person into a criminal, or was it her own lack of character? Either way, there is no way to condone or explain this away; these people should not be in the teaching profession.

In addition to cheating students, parents and taxpayers, and earning bonuses for the fraudulent test scores, the cheating resulted in lost money for students at some schools. The investigators cited Parks Middle School, one of the major cheating schools, because it lost $750,000 in state and federal aid when the test scores rose so much that it was no longer cited as a school in need of improvement.

We do have to be smart about not going overboard with making standardized tests the sole measurement of effective schools. However, testing, competition and merit pay don't explain what happened in Atlanta. Children were robbed of a basic education. In any society, robbery is a crime.