What do all these people have in common? They’re either serving or facing twenty years in prison. What was the heinous offense of the woman in the upper left corner? Inflating test scores in a public school district in Atlanta. She and ten other educators have been found guilty of violating RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations), a law typically used to fight organized crime and such acts as bribery, embezzlement, and fraud.
When I read about this, two questions occurred to me: why did these educators do what they did, and how could anyone justify putting them away for twenty years?
In a system gone mad with testing and quantifying learning, these people were concerned about their jobs, income, status, ego, etc.—so they chose to change wrong answers on standardized tests in order to boost student scores. Obviously, this kind of dishonesty should be punished: the Atlanta 11 should have been fired, and maybe even banned from being involved in schooling for the rest of their lives. But finding them guilty of RICO offenses and sentencing them to 20 years behind bars is incomprehensible.
It wasn’t always this way. Ask any teacher over the age of 40—those of us raised in a more sane time, schooled differently than kids today—and they will tell you privately that the system has gone crazy. Sadly, though, the underlying assumptions behind conventional schooling—that learning can be quantified and that adults must be in control—haven’t changed all that much. We’re just seeing the logical extreme of believing kids must be forced to learn and learning must be measured in order to be valid.
What the Atlanta 11 did was an attack on the whole concept of high-stakes testing, so of course the system came down on them like a ton of bricks. Already the rhetoric has reached outrageous levels. Consider, for example, the words of professor Ron Carlson: “This is a huge story and absolutely the biggest development in American education law since forever. It has to send a message to educators here and broadly across the nation. Playing with student test scores is very, very dangerous business.” (“Playing with student test scores”! How about we stop looking at children as creatures to be manipulated, their every attempt at doing things measured?)
Testing madness is everywhere. Neil deGrasse Tyson, well known for hosting the rebooted “Cosmos” series, once said that “when students cheat on exams, it’s because our school system values grades more than students value learning.” Or consider a school in India where parents were photographed climbing the exterior wall in order to give their students answers to the exam they were taking. Cram schools in Japan—same thing. This may sound extreme, but just like the Atlanta 11, this is what testing madness drives people to do. One cure for testing madness is encouraging parents to seek out alternatives like Alpine Valley School; another is taking time off from school during testing events.
I don’t know any of the Atlanta 11 personally. I have, however, known a lot of teachers and why they got into this profession, so I have a lot of sympathy for these people. What the Atlanta 11 did may not be legally defensible, but it is understandable. Demands for better test scores have perverted teaching into a system that has very little to do with learning: today, teachers are little more than “curriculum delivery tools.” Gone is the discretion a teacher once had to teach what he thought best. Gone is the opportunity to make meaningful connections at the cost of skipping over pieces of the prescribed curriculum. In its place is testing madness.
Thank goodness for places like Alpine Valley School, havens of sanity in a test-crazy world!
Larry Welshon is a founder and staff member at Alpine Valley School. He is also the proud parent of two AVS graduates.