Open communications

The Wejr Board | Your School Needs a Facebook Page
Things have gone extremely well with our Facebook Page – parents love it. We have grandparents and other relatives, former students, and community members (businesses, reporters, etc) that “Like” the page and therefore get constant updates on their Facebook Page. It is THE best way to showcase the great things that are happening at our school.

I suppose that depends on the school community's comfort level with new media. Still, it's a step worth considering, if the school has someone who will post to it regularly and monitor it for comments that need replies.

Refresher course

Courthouse News Service | Report Eviscerates Atlanta Schools for Decade of Systematic Cheating
A stunning and exhaustive report for the governor concludes that "thousands of school children were harmed by widespread cheating in the Atlanta Public School System," in institutionalized corruption of standardized tests, directed from the central office, for a decade. Teachers and administrators gave children answers, erased incorrect answers, hid and altered documents, offered monetary incentives to encourage the cheating, and punished employees who refused to cheat, according to the report.

More than 178 administrators and teachers from 56 elementary and middle schools in the Atlanta Public School System participated in the cheating on the standardized Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, according to the 3-volume report of more than 800 pages. (Volume 2, Volume 3, interview with retired superintendent.)

"Eviscerated" is not too strong a word. This is not a new story, of course (CNS posted it on Wednesday, July 27), and it is rather long -- but comprehensive. CNS is a news service targeted specifically at lawyers.

It's also worth remembering that 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. Subsequent years were outside the scope of the investigation.
• Some of the people named were replaced for other reasons before the investigation had even begun -- and some of their replacements may be guilty of the same actions of which their predecessors stand accused.
• The initial "investigation" was conducted -- tainted -- by the infamous Blue Ribbon Commission, a body with no concern for the chain of evidence. Statistical studies are evidence, of a sort, but evidence that proves only that a crime DID occur, and doesn't necessarily definitively identify a perpetrator.

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" throughout APS.

I do have sympathy for the teachers who took part in "cleanup" parties only because they felt their jobs were threatened -- 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.

Other APS problems

Anyway, if you're not sick to death of APS news, take a look at:

• AJC | APS faces $10 million in cuts: "Davis said Friday that it will cost APS almost $1 million a month to keep nearly 130 implicated employees home on paid leave while also hiring their replacements. The figure does not include legal expenses for the district, which will soon begin efforts to fire them."
• AJC | APS board sanctioned by attorney general: Embarrassingly, when Governor Deal called the Mayor and School Board to the Capitol to read them the riot act, they violated the Open Records act.
• AJC | Feds say APS cheating unlikely on NAEP, but Perdue seems to think otherwise
• AJC | Qualifying ends for APS board seat
• AJC | APS faces final accreditation push
• And there's still that search for a permanent superintendent: Interim Superintendent Davis has a one-year contract, but doesn't want the job long-term.

Also: Take Part | Top 5 Most Shocking Public School Cheating Scandals: You mean, there are others? Oh, you bet there are.

But it couldn't happen here, could it?

Chicago Tribune | Cheaters: A disturbing pattern in education. Is it happening here?
We know some educators here have cheated.
In 2002, then-Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan asked University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt (later of "Freakonomics" fame) to study possible cheating on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, then given to CPS elementary students.
Levitt and coauthor Brian Jacob targeted 117 Chicago elementary classrooms, some of which were suspected of cheating because they had reported huge and unexpected student gains. Those classrooms were retested under tighter controls. Result: The huge scoring gains disappeared in 29 classrooms. CPS investigated. Several teachers and principals were fired or reprimanded.

That's how they get away with it. It's so damned brazen that a sensible observer can't believe they would try.

If there's anything schools are good at, it's pep rallies

This just in...

Interim Superintendent Errol Davis, with Brenda Muhammad
and others I should know. Tweeted by @apsupdate

AJC | 300 rally to support Atlanta Public Schools
District-wide teacher of the year Belita Hamilton called on parents and others to help the district rebuild trust. "The relationship of trust has been damaged,” she said. “We need your help in rebuilding trust with all our parents, students and community members."

And each other. Don't forget each other. Remember it was a test coordinator who said "If any bitch mentions my name...[I'll] get them at their car." It was a principal who said "you do not need to be [here] if your students do not perform better." It was an SRT Director who told teachers if the GBI questioned them, to tell the GBI to "go to hell."

WGCL-TV 46 | Dozens rally to support Atlanta Public Schools
The school year starts Monday and leaders want to put the CRCT cheating scandal and the nearly 180 educators accused behind them. The troubled school system wants to start the school year off right.

Good luck with that. You can't just lose 180 employees and have nobody notice.

Countdown to Chaos

Students return to class on Monday, August 8.

WSB-TV | APS Library Workers Forced Into The Classroom
Dozens of employees who head up media centers and libraries in Atlanta Public Schools are being transferred into teacher positions to replace educators removed following the test cheating scandal.
Some of the media specialists being placed in teacher positions contacted Channel 2's Tom Regan to complain that they are not prepared to lead a classroom even though they are certified to teach.
...Some of the media specialists also complained they were being uprooted from schools where they have worked for years and transferred to teach in another school.

No, this didn't happen to, er, a certain person I know. It might have happened, but (fortunately, I guess) she doesn't have the right certification. Many librarians are semi-retired and sorta-retired teachers, which makes them vulnerable to reassignment.

AJC | Parents defend Atlanta school caught up in scandal
Parents of students at [West Manor Elementary School] on Tuesday night defended their school and teachers at a town hall meeting. ...The town hall meeting, held at Jean Childs Young Middle School in southwest Atlanta, was called by the school board representative for the area, LaChandra Butler Burks.
Also Tuesday, about 15 clergy, parents and community members attended the early portion of a planned six-hour vigil outside Atlanta Public Schools. ...The event was organized by Rev. Timothy McDonald of First Iconium Baptist Church in East Atlanta as a way to highlight the work of the thousands of teachers and employees not associated with the cheating scandal.

Rev. McDonald never saw a camera he didn't want to jump in front of. He's our local Jesse Jackson, a man in danger of becoming a parody of himself.

AJC "Get Schooled" Blog | A rally downtown this evening to affirm the good in APS
The Atlanta Council of PTAs plans a rally this evening [at Centennial Olympic Park] on behalf of the Atlanta Public Schools to highlight all the good things about the battered system.

At this time, the "GOOD" statistics the event celebrates are questionable. The rally isn't a bad idea, but it may be premature or insufficiently researched.

WABE | Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens Addresses Atlanta Press Club
According to Olens, APS officials blatantly delayed or denied numerous open records request from Atlanta Journal Constitution reporters. This was prior to the investigation that eventually revealed systemic cheating: "It was abundantly clear that their responses to the request were not compliant to Georgia law."

There is more, but then the man is a lawyer, he phrases his remarks very carefully.

Lawrenceville Patch | Parents Talk: APS Cheating Scandal
With Atlanta only about 40 minutes away from Lawrenceville, a parent must ask, where will the teachers who participated in the APS Cheating Scandal end up? More than likely their teaching certificates will not be taken from them. They probably will not be able to teach in Atlanta again... so where will they go?

Retirement, mostly, but even that doesn't mean they won't show up in some unlucky district's schools.

Alternative journalism

I haven't been comprehensive: I've been concentrating on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) coverage. Let's see what Creative Loafing (CL) has had to say.

The 9 most depressing details in the APS cheating report [CL]

These are awfully long details, but they constitute the core of APS' problem. If you don't want to read the whole 800 pages, read this.

APS cheating report only the first step to recovery [CL]

There's hundreds of millions of dollars unaccounted for. And everyone knows (always watch out for that phrase) how cash-strapped public schools are. When I hear about APS administration getting bonuses for Adequate Yearly Progress numbers, I remember that every teacher I know has to pay for her own photocopy paper, yes, out of her own pocket, in order to give her students a test.*

Anyone want to dive head-first into the APS crapstorm? Anyone? [CL]

Or, as a normal news outlet would headline it: "Qualifying dates set for special election to fill vacancy on APS board." You can tell Creative Loafing is an edgy alternative paper because its reporters write like bloggers. No, wait, that doesn't work, a lot of reporters write like bloggers. Were I the editor, I might have had the writer point out that the position is open only to residents of the West Side. Which he sorta did, by referring to the post being to represent APS district 2, which is equivalent to City of Atlanta districts 3 and 4, and leaving it up to the reader to figure out how to find a city council district map.

While we're all laughing at what one CL commenter called the "Sopranos wanna-be" attitude of the secretive educators, let me say (as has been observed elsewhere) that the pressure teachers felt to elevate these test numbers by any means necessary did not come from each other.

I'll also say that despite the temptation to think of this incident as Keystone Kops Korruption, those who created this atmosphere were clever enough not to put anything in writing where it might become evidence.
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*   The vast, vast, vast majority of APS employees are women. So sue me.