Atlanta Test Score Scandal

Mr. Prezbo Instructs.  "The Wire"

If ever there was an example of unintended consequences in the passage of a law, No Child Left Behind and the disaster it unleashed,  has got to be it.

It may be argued that it wasn't the law,  but the mindless application of its principles and the utterly inane application of "statistics" and meeting the numbers which were the problems.

Metrics have been used by lazy executives and administrators to ruin police departments, businesses, medical care delivery systems and military efforts . But the metrics which NCLB spawned  were used to injure millions.

Michael Lewis glorified Billie Bean, who used metrics intelligently to revolutionize the assessment of talent for baseball players. But what Bean did was to recognize that certain numbers, like batting averages and runs batted in and runs scored,  can be very misleading and beyond the control of the player.  He came up with more meaningful metrics.

In her article in The New Yorker , "Wrong Answer," Rachel Aviv quotes John Ewing, the executive director of the American Mathematical Society who said he was perplexed by the infatuation with data by educational authorities, who placed faith in data rather than probing what that data actually meant.  Here is a numbers guy, who knows how numbers are derived, saying you have to understand "garbage in garbage out."

Mad Dog wonders how anyone reading "Wrong Answer" can really appreciate why those teachers doctored up the answer sheets of their students' exams,  without having seen the fourth season of "The Wire."  

One of the most telling remarks in Aviv's piece was from the mother of Damany Lewis, the first teacher to be fired for changing students' wrong answers to correct answers--the mother said when she read what the teachers had done,  she knew immediately her son must have been involved because it was, to her, plainly an act of "civil disobedience."

Damany Lewis :  A latter day Schindler?

Mad Dog thinks of teachers in public schools who were entirely incompetent, who sat behind their desks, happy and secure in their jobs and determined to do nothing, to learn nothing, to teach nothing--not because they were bad people but because they had been produced by the same environment their students now were drowning in and the teachers could not imagine anything better.  You had the blind leading the blind in Washington, D.C. schools--teachers who might have meant well, but who simply were not themselves well educated enough to help their students.

Not meeting the goals of percentages of students scoring high enough gave license to fire these inadequate teachers, but it was not used to get rid of just the hopeless cases--it was applied so blindly it threw the babies out with the bathwater. Smart, well educated, emotionally involved, highly ethical teachers were fired because their students did not, could never (as long as they lived in the ghetto) pass the tests.

The moral dilemma here was this:  In a hell hole of a neighborhood, the school became the only refuge for children who had no fathers, whose mothers were high on drugs, children who worked on the corners slinging drugs. These children floated in a sea sea of despair and deprivation; in that living hell, the school provided meals, some modicum of safety, sometimes clean clothes.  

This school was not a school, in the sense of being able to teach kids algebra, so much as an institution of a safe harbor for the refugees of a failed economy and a shattered social structure.  The "school" would be closed down if the test scores were not high enough. The lifeboat would be scuttled. The teachers saw all this and they knew that all they had to do was to violate that measurement tool, for the school to remain viable.

Suppose you had a concentration camp staff which falsified records of the number of inmates received and killed?  Supposed those camp guards conspired to make this a camp where inmates would be protected and spared?  Would you condemn those guards as unethical for falsifying reports?  Suppose each month, the guards sent back to Berlin reports of increasing production of war implements and increasing numbers of killings of received "unproductive" Jews, the elderly, the weak, children who could not produce water materiel and by doing this, the camp was praised, the safe-house preserved?  Would you condemn this collusion for a benign purpose?

Of course, the teachers at Parks Middle School were ultimately found out. And the school was closed and the children "transferred" to other middle schools, where their presence would lower tests scores, but their low scores might be diluted in the new schools. 

In a sense, the system worked: The school was not a school, but a social service facility and it was closed down for being a fraud. 

The empty building was not reopened as a refuge, of course. That refuge is gone. The children are now adrift at other buildings, where, perhaps, other students are actually going to school and learning,  and the kids from Parks are sinking beneath the waves, likely leaving "school" altogether, which is fine with the new schools,  who don't want these under-performers dirtying up their statistics. 

Schools have to be schools, not refugee centers. Ruthless? Yes, but at least consistent. No child was left behind in the Parks Middle School, once it was closed--children were simply expelled from the one institution which provided a safety net. 

Not the school system's  fault.  the school system is focused only on what schools are supposed to do: teach the subject matter, demonstrate this has happened with testing.

Safety net is somebody else's problem. We are here to teach and test. Or to test and teach. 

The problem,  of course,  was the superintendent of the system was like that orthopedic resident in "There is a fracture, I must fix it,"  who is so focused on one narrow problem--the fracture--he completely misses the fact the  patient is already dead. 

There were other, nastier people along the way: The superintendent could not possibly have been unaware of the fraud in testing throughout the school system, at least on some level. If she did not know about it, it was because she did not want to know about it. Those rising test scores were just too beautiful.  Don't destroy the  fantasy--it feels too good.

If ever there was an example of what can go wrong with public policy, with national goals visited like a plague upon local people,  this law with its accompanying distortion of data was it. Of course, it came, so predictably, out of Texas, and was visited upon the rest of the nation, from Baltimore to Atlanta. 

Stupidity institutionalized.  "Government" living up to Ronald Reagan's quip about, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."

It is a cautionary tale, which progressives ought not forget--every time you push for a "reform," remember what damage has been done in the name of reform--when it gets into the wrong hands.

It's things like this which give government-- the whole idea of government as an instrument for social good--a bad name. Small wonder people who have seen No Child Left Behind would be cynical about the possibility any other government project--like health care--could do more good than harm.

And, much as Mad Dog celebrates the joy of an Obama presidency, it has been a great disappointment to see Mr. Obama embrace the idea that poor performance of ghetto children ought to be laid upon the heads of schoolteachers in these combat zones, who are just trying to provide a safe house,  while the neighborhood around them burns.

Mr. Obama is said to be a fan of "The Wire." Watch the 4th season, Mr. President, then tell us what you think about judging the teachers by the test scores.