The Seattle Times in an editorial Sunday morning defends the high-stakes test after the Atlanta scandal. It's interesting, though, that right next to the editorial in the hard copy edition of Sunday's paper is an op-ed by David Sirota (can't find the ST link) about the sanity of the education system in Finland. Why does sanity seem such an impossibility in this country? Is sanity so far out of reach even in a manageable, smart city like Seattle and its school district? I've given up any hope for sanity in Washington, D.C. But I haven't lost hope for Seattle.
Here's my quick response to the Seattle Times: Students and teachers are individually responsible to make the choice to cheat or not to cheat–and of course it's wrong to cheat and nobody should do it–but the Times doesn't understand the power of Campbell's Law in action. When so much is at stake for teachers and students, there is enormous incentive to game the system. The quest to find loopholes inevitably evolves into an outright culture of cheating. You have a situation, similar to the doping culture in sports, in which you're considered a fool if you don't cheat because cheating becomes the norm. A culture of cheating clearly clearly developed in Atlanta, and when that kind of culture develops, it takes heroic effort not to succumb. It's folly to support a system that requires heroic resistance to do the right thing.
Whatever marginal benefits come from administering tests like the MAP three times a year–even to kindergartners–they are dwarfed by the expense, the waste of time, the stress on the teachers and the kids, and the likelihood of creating enormous pressures to cheat. What's the Times solution? Save the test, but make it harder to cheat on it. Once again predictable, conventional wisdom that typifies the so-called Best-and-Brightest Syndrome that got us into Vietnman and Iraq: Once you have committed to technocratic, dehumanizing folly, never question your assumptions, just keep pouring more money into it.
UPDATE: See this article: "The Atlanta Scandal: When Teachers Are Disempowered and Abused" in Education Views. Excerpt:
The intimidation of teachers is more important than the cheating, because, as the Investigation Report makes clear, cheating on the scale of Atlanta could only occur by crushing the first line of defense against cheating: the voice and sense of integrity of the teachers. I urge people to read the reports, because Atlanta is not very different than DCPS and other troubled, mostly urban, school systems. Make no mistake: We Are All Atlanta Teachers.
“Almost without exception, teachers and principals said that the single most important factor to this administration is ‘data.’ They said that ‘data is (sic) the driver,’ ‘data drives instruction,’ and ‘the data controls everything.’” “But data can also be used as an abusive and cruel weapon to embarrass and punish classroom teachers and principals or as a pretext to termination. After hundreds of interviews, it has become clear that Dr. Hall and her staff used data as a way to exert oppressive pressure to meet targets.”
“As a result of the APS failure to temper its drive for success with ethical guidelines, the message was: ‘Get the scores up by any means necessary;’ in Dr. Hall’s words, ‘No exceptions and no excuses.’”
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