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Cleveland
Plain Dealer
The
dangers of test-score worship
By Sharon Broussard
April 12, 2013
A
major academic cheating scandal
involving the Atlanta Public Schools just might jolt states out of
their
lackadaisical oversight of school officials trying to game standardized
tests
as the results become more and more important in determining educators'
prestige and pay.
That
is the takeaway from last
week's stories about one of the nation's former rock-star school
superintendents being forced to show up like a common criminal to get
her bail
reduced to $200,000 from $7.5 million.
If
Beverly Hall did what the grand
jury says she did -- she and 34 other indicted Atlanta public school
educators
have pleaded not guilty -- she murdered a good number of students'
dreams of a
better life by giving them an indifferent education, at best, while
getting
handsomely paid to do it. That's something that state officials and
lawmakers
should care about.
According
to the grand jury, from
at least 2005 to 2010, Hall, a one-time school superintendent of the
year,
heaped rewards on principals who turned in soaring test scores and
ignored or
punished those who spoke of cheating.
It
took a newspaper, the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, to crack the story in 2008 after an analysis
revealed
that many of the district's tests had an unusual number of erasures.
These
aren't victimless crimes. One
of the injured parties was the daughter of Justina Collins, who cried
at a
press conference held after the Atlanta indictments.
Years
before, Collins had asked
Hall how her struggling third-grader had managed to ace the
standardized test
while floundering in reading. Easy, she recalls the superintendent
telling her
in the best Grinch fashion, she must test well…
Read
the rest of the article at the Plain
Dealer
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