But to commence doing something means to begin it. So it's actually quite appropriate, if unusual, to refer to the commencement of a school year.
But this is not just another school year. This is a new day. This is a golden opportunity for you to make history. You have it within your power, right now, to take control of Atlanta Public Schools and change it, dramatically and permanently. You only have to do one thing. It's easy. It's simple. And it's what you went into education to do in the first place: Change the world.
Tell the truth.
Oh, I know it's unexpected. I've had children in APS for a couple of decades, I've dealt with teachers and administrators, educators and "educationists" of all kinds. I know that this is not what has been asked of you in previous years.
Now, with the inescapable publicity that the recent CRCT scandal has received, it's tempting to believe that the removal of 178 educators will solve the problem. Dust our hands with a hearty "mission accomplished" and move on.
Except that you know that isn't all. You know there are more cheaters to find.
- Some schools weren't investigated as heavily as others.
- Many weren't investigated at all.
- The investigations specifically targeted the 2009 CRCT cycle, two years ago.
- Previous years' testing was considered only to get a baseline against which to compare 2009. How do we know we can trust the baseline?
- Subsequent years were outside the scope of the investigation. Can we trust 2010? (2011 results aren't being released for now, but we don't know what's being done with them in the meantime.)
- Some of the employees named were replaced for other reasons before the investigation had even begun -- and some of their replacements are guilty of the same actions of which their predecessors stand accused.
- If the SRT Directors are being suspended pending termination, then perhaps we'd also better look very hard at their personal staffs, and at the principals they hired, fired, promoted and transferred from 2009 onward.
- The initial "investigation" was conducted -- tainted -- by the infamous Blue Ribbon Commission.
I confess I want to see heads roll. A little metaphorical blood in the streets would be nice too. As big a story as the CRCT scandal is, it is still merely a symptom of the larger problem, the "culture of lies and intimidation".
I do have sympathy for the teachers who felt coerced to take part in "cleanup" parties -- but I'm not prepared to let them completely off the hook. And I certainly want to see the willing co-conspirators run out of town.
The real perpetrators are taking advantage of their contracts, still collecting APS money for relaxing at home or polishing their resumes, planning to "run out the clock" until the prosecutors lose interest, confident that the hard evidence that would support a criminal trial will never be found. Even now, they don't think they've done anything wrong. It wasn't the smoking gun we had hoped to find.
I say "we". I'm neither an APS employee nor a GBI agent, but I still have a vital stake in the outcome of this scandal. I'm a parent, and I'm a taxpayer in the city of Atlanta. I pay property taxes to support my schools, and I volunteer. I feel like my money was stolen, or at the very least collected under false pretenses. The property taxes I pay that are earmarked for education, I intended to stay in the classrooms and make a demonstrable difference in the lives of children.
I did not intend for it to pay millions of dollars in unearned bonuses to administrators who terrorized teachers into doing their dirty work while those same teachers bought pencils and photocopy paper with their own money in order to be able to administer tests. That is disgraceful.
Speaking for outside observers like myself, I'll say this: You have no idea how pissed we are.
That was a violation of trust so sweeping that it compromised not just the named teachers, not just the city of Atlanta Public Schools, but the entire profession of education.
Those of you who remain at APS must realize this: When we look at you, we don't see the good and loyal teachers who worked for thirty years trying to engage the minds of generations of young people. We no longer see idealistic, responsible, overworked teachers. We see the "educationists" who gamed the system and collected their prize. We see vandals. We see parasites. We can't help it. We can't know for sure which of you are guilty. The Governor's report has shaken our faith in your profession, named names of people we knew and respected, loved and trusted.
I've had experience in the private sector, so I know how employee honesty works. I know that in any business, there are some employees who simply will not steal even if you lock them in a room full of unmarked bills, and assure them that they've never been counted and no one knows how much money is in that room. These people won't so much as make change for a five.
And there are employees who look for opportunities to steal. They consider anything they can pocket to be a fringe benefit, no more than they deserve. From pencils and paperclips to the day's deposits or more, if it's unguarded, it's theirs.
And then there is most of us, who want to be honest, but who can be convinced to steal under the right circumstances, given the right temptation. There are far more of this group than either of the first two. We call them "human", and there's no shame in being one.
The fact that some educators falsified CRCT results has to be the worst-kept secret of all time. Everyone knew it was going on. Throughout the findings the phrase recurs: "If I don't see it, I don't have to report it." They knew it was happening, but they convinced themselves it wasn't their problem. The miracle is not how the Atlanta Journal-Cconstitution learned of it, but how they could possibly have avoided knowing about it for so long.
You have no idea how pissed we are.
But it is within your power to fix it. Let the sun shine in. Hide nothing. Tell the truth.
We know the system is broken. But we also know that you've been covering for it. You've been creating documents that say whatever upper management tells you they must say. These documents don't actually reflect the conditions brought about by a broken system. They don't reflect reality at all. They pretend that everything is fine.
This means that bad policies aren't allowed to fail under their own weight. They continue in place, creating two kinds of employees: The ones that actually try to follow the letter of the law, fail, and worry about being caught; And the ones who ignore the law, do what they damn well feel like doing, and learn to describe what they do in the language of that law -- and worry about being caught.
In a culture like this, rules cease to mean anything. And the good rules get treated just like the bad rules, ineptly enacted, ignored, or deliberately undermined. Thus both good and bad rules have the same result. Nothing changes.
And when you convince yourself that the broken system is not your fault... You enable it. You sustain it. You accept responsibility for it. It becomes your fault.
Here's another consideration: One of your most precious resources is time. You have rubrics to create. Lesson plans to write. Bulletin boards to fill. Professional development training to undergo. Documentation to produce and documentation to produce and more documentation to produce. And, oh, yes, when you can make time for it, students to teach.
You don't have the time to waste falsifying tests and reports. It's among the least efficient things you can do with your time. All the more so when you remember that you are working against your students' best interests. You are not only not helping them, not working with them, not teaching them; you are destroying the evidence that they even need help. You are ensuring that no one else will ever know that they need more help than you have time to give them. That is nothing less than tragic.
Bad policies can be overturned by the least senior employee affected by them. All it takes is the truth.
Let's talk about money. No, not the estimated hundreds of millions of dollars unaccounted for over the last decade, although I'm plenty upset about that. I'm talking about the money that is actually on the public record, the money APS has documented how they receive it and to whom they pay it.
In any line of work, it seems only fair and just to financially reward workers who do a good job. Most of the capitalist world works that way, and works very well generally.
There is no idea so good that an educationist bureaucrat can't ruin it.
But then, what happens to the students that really need those extra resources? You have given the resources to the schools that need them least, as a reward, because their test scores were pleasing. The presence of just one troubled student ensures that the teacher unlucky enough to have him in her class will not get a bonus, regardless of how good she is at actual teaching.
It becomes very tempting, for example, to delete the worst students from the roll the day before CRCT testing starts, so that they don't count as absent and their test scores aren't counted, and then re-enroll them the day after.
The "good" schools keep getting better, and the "bad" schools keep getting worse, and the incentives, the bonuses, the resources, go somewhere else. Because you've just created documents that prove you don't need it.
So students in some schools get expansive art programs and stroll the halls whistling Bach. And students in other schools have never visited the zoo.
This creates a paradox, in which teachers feel they must mis-represent the academic progress of their students in order to be rewarded (for "achievement" that didn't happen) with the promise of such resources as might actually have improved the child's performance if he'd had them in the first place.
What criteria actually determines whether a student in need of help gets it? Is it the opinion of his teacher, the one person in the system in a position to know what the student needs? Does that have anything to do with it? No. It's the damned standardized all-important CRCT. This potentially useful tool to which we've assigned far more importance that it deserves. This anonymous test conceals individual need for the sake of aggregate Adequate Yearly Progress.
Testing, even the much-maligned "standardized testing" (is there any other kind?), is a useful tool: It's the only way to find out what the children actually know. But it's not reliable enough to have so much depending on the results of one test. No test is that good, even when the results aren't being deliberately altered.
This is a flawed system. All of you seem to know this. But you work all the harder to perpetuate the flaws. You work to create falsified documents that say that everything is just fine. You work to put bonuses in someone else's pocket, willing conspirators in having your own pockets picked.
The purpose of a labor union is to stand with its loyal, honest members if they feel their jobs are being threatened. Their job is to step in to prevent any teacher from feeling obligated to lie, to falsify any report, any test, any document. If any teacher feels any such pressure, she has to know that if she can't go to her principal she can go to her union. And her union will have her back. But if she yields to pressure and temptation, the union is not on her side. The union's job is to assure the school system that the "union label" means something, that a union teacher is a solid, honest, qualified teacher -- by helping remove any who are not. NEA, GAE, AFT, your obligation is crystal clear. Yet you are strangely silent on the CRCT investigation. Do you not feel that dishonest teachers hurt your reputation? Are these the people whose right to work you feel comfortable defending?
As I read over this document I had to ask myself: Do I seriously think it might be possible that everyone in APS will simply tell the truth? Am I deranged? What in the history of the Atlanta Public School system has given me any reason to believe that's ever going to happen?
But if you did... Ah, if you did... you could do what you went into education to do in the first place: Change the world.
For God's sake, for the students' sake, for your own sake, now is your chance. Let the sun shine in. Hide nothing. Change the world. Make us proud. Tell the truth.
Thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment