When Teachers Go to Jail
Drug trafficking. Burglary. Grand theft auto. Assault. Arson.
What do all of these crimes have in common? They all carry average prison sentences shorter than those handed down this April by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry W. Baxter in the cases of Atlanta school administrators found guilty of systematic cheating on state-mandated standardized tests (the crime they were convicted of was actually racketeering). True, those sentences were later reduced to 3 years in state prison, but I think the point had already been made rather clearly: DO NOT MESS WITH TEST DATA.
Stop for a moment and just ponder the fact that these educators are going to prison. They are losing their jobs, and their licenses, and they are going to prison. They will spend time there with drug traffickers, and car thieves, and violent offenders, and many of those criminals will be released before the Atlanta administrators. We have come to the point where artificially inflating school test scores is a worse crime than drug trafficking. How did it possibly come to this? How did we get to the point where cheating on state tests could be equated with racketeering, a charge normally reserved for drug cartels and mafiosos?
I think I know why. There are three main reasons that people are sent to prison:
1. To protect others from the risk that the offender poses.
2. To punish the offenders for harming others.
3. To act as a deterrent to others who might commit a similar act.
Let’s look at each of these in turn:
1. They were certainly not sent away to protect society. Even the chance that they might “endanger” students by continuing to cheat is unlikely, considering they’ve been stripped of their credentials and their reputations are ruined.
2. This seems like a logical choice, but I beg to differ. Who was harmed as a result of test scores being inflated? That depends on how the test scores are used. The tests in question are the Georgia Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT), which were given in grades 1–8 (they have since been retired). According to the Georgia DOE website, “This information is used to diagnose individual student strengths and weaknesses as related to the instruction of the state standards, and to gauge the quality of education throughout Georgia.” Since the cheating resulted in higher test scores, this would have resulted in overestimated strengths, and overly high expectations for those students. But wait a second. The last 50 years of research have shown us that unwarranted high expectations actually benefit students rather than harming them, so I think it’s hard to make the case that students were harmed by having their strengths exaggerated. You could make the case that students who needed additional supports such as Special Education services were denied them due to inflated test scores. The CRCT can be used — as one measure of several — to evaluate students for SpEd services. However, there is evidence to suggest that at the time of the cheating, students in Atlanta Public Schools were being over-identified as learning-disabled, especially along racial lines. So inflating the scores may have raised expectations for students and undone some institutional bias. Hardly harm to students. By the same token, you might say that teachers wouldn’t have accurate CRCT data to identify particular student needs. While this may be the case, teachers have vastly superior ways to identify student needs compared to standardized tests: their own formative assessments, classroom assignments, and daily observations, all of which return data instantly as opposed to months later. No, I think that direct harm to students as a reason for the sentences doesn’t have much merit.
Barring harm to students (at least harm of any consequence) we are left us with the second half of CRCT’s purpose…“to gauge the quality of education throughout Georgia.” CRCT data is used to gauge the success and failure of whole schools and districts, so you might make the argument that inflating a school or district’s scores would make it harder to identify a school that should be targeted for improvement. That would be a logical argument if it weren’t the case that top administrators in Atlanta’s school system were involved in the scandal. I have to believe that these administrators knew full well which schools were struggling; isn’t that why they started cheating in the first place? I suppose that the administrators used the altered test scores to protect themselves and their own poor performance, and that this theoretically trickled down to harm students. It just seems like a bit of a stretch. Especially considering that I think the third reason we send people to prison makes much more sense…
3. To act as a deterrent to others. I believe this is the genuine reason that these educators are going to prison. They are being made examples of. This is how cheating on a test can be considered racketeering. Whether Judge Baxter realizes it or not, I believe he has internalized the national obsession with using data to judge our schools, our students, and our teachers. We are so obsessed with it, that to even taint that data’s purity is to commit a heinous act. In our zealotry to improve standardized test scores (note I didn’t say improve student learning), we have elevated educational data to a level of sanctity that it is reasonable to send someone to prison for the better part of a decade to preserve its accuracy.
So what’s the big problem, you ask? After all, data has become a cornerstone of science and progress in our modern world. Why shouldn’t we protect its accuracy by throwing the book at some cheaters? There are two problems. First of all, standardized test data has issues. Test scores are not always accurate measures of student learning, especially if students stop taking them seriously. Point-in-time assessments are notoriously bad gauges of student progress. The more we trust the data, the more we put our faith in something that is built on shaky ground. With this said, I think our dependency on standardized testing data has a much more dangerous downside; it has diminished our faith in teachers’ ability to judge what students know and can do. We have stopped trusting that teachers, many of whom spend more time with their students than parents do with their children, can make good judgments about student progress. Don’t get me wrong, teachers still need to collect data through quality assessments of their own. But teachers know far more about individual children than a for-profit, faceless assessment company. If standardized testing leads us to trust Pearson, or PARCC, or Smarter Balanced, or any other testing company more than teachers, then I think our education system is deeply in trouble.
Perhaps I am making too much of one particular court case. Yes, these sentences were handed down by one judge in one courtroom. And yes, the sentences were reduced, likely in part due to outrage at their lengths. Still, as a career educator, I can say that to me they fit frighteningly well within the prevailing sentiments in many schools: data is king. Not teachers, not students…data. As a teacher, there are lots of things that will cost you your job, a few other that will cost you your license. But there are only a small handful that will cost you your freedom. And apparently messing with test data is one of them.
