Late this past summer, there was a story leaked concerning Atlanta teachers and principals cheating and doctoring their students' test results in order to increase the schools' overall performance. Almost half of Atlanta's public schools participated in this cheating, including over 178 principals and teachers from the area.
National Public Radio (NPR) covered this story in the form of a podcast.
From the NPR interview, I am dumbfounded and disgusted at the behavior of these teachers and principals. In my opinion, teachers and principals should strive to be the kind of people that we as students admire and look up to. They should be positive influences: not only teaching us the curriculum, but also to be good, honest, hardworking educators. In this case, the teachers were focusing all their attention on all the wrong values.
Neal Conan, the host of this specific podcast, shares some reasoning as to what drove Atlanta teachers to act the way they did. He says that at the annual school get-together at Georgia Dome, if your school had good results, you sat up close by the dais. However, if your school received "low" scores, then you sat up in the nosebleed seats. To many Atlanta principals, sitting in the nosebleed seats was an "embarrassment,"and therefore in their opinion, their school scores needed to improve to avoid this "mortifying" situation in the future.
The pressure put on the teachers to drastically improve their class' grades stemmed directly from the school's principals. Michael Winerip, national education columnist for the New York Times, says during the NPR interview,
"At another school, there was a principal- if the teachers at the classes didn't make their numbers, he would have them climb under, walk under a table, kneel under a table, just to make the point that their scores were too low and they were too low."
It is clear that what these principals and teachers were doing was wrong, but in my opinion, they not only cheated the system, but cheated the students as well. By covering up and fixing the lower scores of students, students who may have needed help in certain areas were completely overlooked.
And so, I will bring back this theme in American culture: the importance of winning. What these teachers wrongfully and perhaps unintentionally taught their students was that getting a "good score" was more important than understanding and learning. "Success" was completely redefined; teachers depicted a skewed vision of what succeeding should entail.
Also, as the cheating continued for an extended period of time, and then only stopped because the offenders were caught, one can surely question the morality of these teachers. It's impossible to think that the teachers were clueless about their actions being wrong, so why didn't somebody stop and rethink? There are many positive things Americans value, but unfortunately in this situation, winning was stressed too much in a negative way.
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