Students in Atlanta attending Summer Math and Science Enrichment Camp. Source APS website.

I’ve read the complete report on the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) CRCT testing scandal. It’s hard to believe that there was such widespread activity in which student answers on the state’s CRCT bubble sheets were changed.

Why?

That is the central question of this post. I’ll say upfront, that I don’t know, and the report really does not answer the question. There is lots of evidence—the actual bubble sheets which were analyzed using a high speed optical computer program, interviews with more than a hundred teachers and administrators of the APS, Admissions by educators (probably under duress)  that they participated in changing answer sheets, and other documents that were too numerous to include in the report presented Governor Deal last week.

Culture of Fear

Could a culture of fear have caused teachers and administrators to change answers on the CRCT bubble sheets?  Did the focus on the reaching “targets” at any expense become the driving force in the way in which educators practiced in the APS.  On page 2 of the report, the authors concluded that:

A culture of fear and conspiracy of silence infected this school system, and kept many teachers from speaking freely about misconduct. From the onset of this investigation, we were confronted by a pattern of interference by top APS leadership in our attempt to gather evidence.

Reading interviews of teachers and some administrators (some administrators refused to answer interview question) conducted by investigators, there is evidence there to support the authors conclusion that there was a culture of fear in the district. Some teachers feared retribution if they did not go along with what appears to be an administration led effort to deceive the public.

However, it is important to note that 178 educators were identified as being involved in the erasure scandal. This represents about 3% of the educators in the APS. Surely not acceptable, but now the other 97% of educators that did not participate will be required to attend “ethics” classes.

If there was a culture of fear, what conditions created this culture? Was it unique to Atlanta and was it brought on by conditions from which other school exempt.

Corporate vs Communal Ideologies of Education

Christopher Emdin, professor at Teacher College, Columbia suggests in his research that a corporate model of education is the dominant force in the organization of schooling today in which teachers and students work with subject matter and function in ways that follow a factory or production mode of social interaction. In the corporate mode, the primary goal is maintaing order and achieving specific results as reported on achievement tests such as Georgia’s CRCT.  This mode is a “one size fits all” scheme, which is the anthesis of what we know from the research in the learning sciences.

He contrasts the corporate model with a model in which students and teachers work together with subject matter through interactions that focus on interpersonal relationships, community, and the collective betterment of the group.  He labels this model, “communal.”  In my own view, the communal form of education asserts the professionalism of teachers in that they know what is best for their students, and that they also realize that knowing and understanding subject matter is not always measurable on bubble tests, and instead rely on formative means to help students understand the subject matter.  This means that the professional teacher in a much better position to assess what students know and have learned.  It could include an end of course test, but professional teachers also know that students’ teaching each other, building portfolios, keeping journals, writing reports, presenting papers, talking with peers, developing digital reports and projects, designing website, keeping blogs, analyzing data, are as powerful, and taken together provide a more meaningful picture of student learning, than a score of 825 on the CRCT test in science.

Although the corporate model of teaching is not new, has taken on a different and more centralized system of control by the passage of the NCLB Act a decade ago, the development of Standards in all subject areas over the past 20 years, the implementation of high-stakes tests in all states as the single measure of student academic achievement, the recent mandate within the Race to the Top Program to tie student achievement to teacher effectiveness and school accountability.  These various policies have put in place an authoritative system of education in which a centralized command and control system regulates schooling as if it were a factory producing nails.

We have created a system of education that is a top-down dominion in which administrators in Washington and each of the state’s capitals monitor “progress” in front of their computers based on “Spring” assessments that take a few hours to administer, and then a few more shine lazer and computer lights on the bubble sheets that millions of students filled out.

I believe that the citizens of Georgia, and in particular Atlanta, need to stand up and question the form of education that is now in place, and raise “tough questions” about the scandal, and how high up in the educational system in Georgia we should investigate to get at the bottom of this mess.

Emdin, C. (2007). Exploring the contexts of urban science classrooms. Part 1: Investigating corporate and communal practices Cultural Studies of Science Education, 2 (2), 319-350 DOI: 10.1007/s11422-007-9055-z