The lesson from Atlanta's Shame

       A Chicago Tribune Editorial

If ever there was a teachable moment about the steep consequences of cheating, it came last week in Atlanta.

Not students cheating. Teachers.

Former Atlanta schools Superintendent Beverly Hall and many of the 34 other educators from the Atlanta public school district surrendered to authorities after being indicted in one of the most brazen and widespread cheating scandals ever uncovered.

Hall allegedly set performance targets and threatened principals and teachers with firing — and actually fired some of them — if kids' test scores didn't reach those goals.

The New York Times reported that some Atlanta teachers, dubbed "the chosen," allegedly toiled in a locked windowless room every afternoon during the week of state testing, erasing students' wrong answers and correcting them. Other teachers allegedly held "changing parties" on weekends to fix answers. In some cases, plastic transparency answer sheets were created to make the changes go faster. The cheating continued for so many years that one teacher told an investigator "We considered it part of our jobs."

Now Hall and the others face racketeering, theft and other charges.

How can a parent explain to a child why an educator, a figure of immense trust, would break the rules?

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten's explanation focused on ... no, not Hall or the teachers and principals ... but the tests.

"Tragically, the Atlanta cheating scandal harmed our children, and it crystallizes the unintended consequences of our test-crazed policies," she said in a statement. The Wall Street Journal reported that Robert Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing said, "When test scores are all that matter, some educators feel pressured to get the scores they need by hook or by crook. The higher the stakes, the greater the incentive to manipulate, to cheat."

So ... the tests made them do it?

Please.

We've heard teachers' complaints for years about standardized tests. That they're forced to teach to the test and that kids are forced to take too many of them. Those complaints have gained fresh urgency since many districts, including Chicago, now factor student growth, including test scores, into teacher evaluations. In January, some Seattle teachers refused to give students district-mandated standardized exams after the district made the tests part of teachers' evaluations. The same debate is taking place in Chicago Public Schools, which uncovered a cheating scandal involving test scores a decade ago.

Testing is a necessary component of measuring student growth, and many teachers and parents strongly support using student growth as a significant factor in evaluations of teachers.

A recent Joyce Foundation-Chicago Tribune poll found that more than 6 in 10 respondents said improvement in student achievement should carry more than 30 percent weight in a teacher's evaluation. (CPS currently counts student growth for 25 percent of a teacher's evaluation, and that will rise to 40 percent in five years.) We strongly agree.

There are examples of cheating in just about every profession, from sports to law to journalism. When it happens, the impact often goes far beyond the cheater. The impact is particularly acute when it happens in education.

Let's make sure students take the right lesson from Atlanta's shame: Pressure to perform is no excuse for cheating. If you cheat, you rob yourself.

When teachers cheat, students suffer.

In announcing the indictments, Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard talked about a third-grader who failed a benchmark exam, was held back, but not long afterward passed another assessment test. The girl's mother "knew something was wrong, but was told by school officials that the child simply was a good test-taker," the Associated Press reported. And so she advanced.

The sad result: The girl is now in ninth grade, reading at a fifth-grade level.