Won’t Get Schooled Again

In what’s being described as the most extensive case of test-tampering in US public-school history, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal dropped an 828-page bomb on the state last Tuesday detailing fraud in Atlanta public schools that was so ineptly concealed, it suggests that many of the city’s teachers are too stupid to be school janitors.

The report concluded that 178 Atlanta schoolteachers and principals–82 of whom have already confessed–either assisted students to cheat on the state’s standardized competency tests or deliberately corrected wrong answers themselves. Of 56 Atlanta public schools examined, 44 were found to have engaged in statistically significant cheating.

For a decade, Atlanta’s public schools had been depicted as a shining national star that dared leave no child behind as dedicated educators and their eager-to-learn pupils joined hands, chanted slogans, marched together, chest-bumped and fist-pumped one-another’s self-esteem, established a clear vision, looked to the future, kept their eyes on the prize, and made countless other ultimately hollow gestures. For a decade, it seemed as if Atlanta was a real-life example of every cloying Hollywood movie where loving-yet-stern teachers grabbed gaggles of shiftlessly misbehaving urban youngsters by the scruffs of their necks and taught them that teaching was something worth being taught and that learning was a valuable thing to learn.

Then it occurred to people with a basic grasp of ‘rithmetic that the reputed gains were too good to be true. In one implausibly stellar year at one school, eighth-graders whose scores exceeded basic math standards leapt from 1% to 46%. At another, English scores suddenly catapulted 51% higher. At another, math scores rocketed up 62% from the previous annum. At another school, special-ed students were suddenly scoring higher than gifted students in math.

One student passed the exam while reportedly being unable to read the word “cat.” Another left an entire section blank and passed. Another slept through the entire test and passed. Another sat under his desk, refused to take the test, yet still passed.

It was an educational miracle.

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Multiple interviews revealed that some teachers seated lower-scoring students behind gifted students so they could copy their answers. In oral exams, teachers would drastically change their vocal inflections to suggest which multiple-choice answer was correct. Others would simply point to the correct answers. Others would read them aloud. At several schools, teachers would change incorrect answers by hand after students had completed their tests. In one instance, teachers gathered together for a weekend “changing party” at one instructor’s home and corrected faulty answers en masse.

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Those with a financial and/or ideological stake in America’s public-schools system have blamed mandatory testing for creating “unrealistic” standards based on the daffy-assed concept that children should graduate from school with basic competency in reading and math–standards that didn’t seem unreasonable a generation ago and aren’t deemed preposterously rigorous anywhere else in the industrialized world today. To these condescendingly anti-intellectual idealists, school is a place where children come to live and explore and create and be inspired and touch and smell and dance and feel and have their self-worth validated–it is most definitely NOT a place where they should learn to read and write and add and subtract. And what dizzy bastard came up the demented notion that school is a place where children are administered tests?

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Is it possible that some of these classrooms are filled with kids who are as fundamentally stupid as a dented box of rusty lug nuts? No, it’s the system, the parents, the corporations, the Republicans–anyone but those unblemished little blank slates who crave knowledge but are cruelly denied it. {snip}

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Since they–and not I–were the ones who brought up this culturally touchy subject, I will note that every picture I’ve seen of every educator named in this report is of African ancestry. And many of the teachers’ names–lively handles such as SuJuana, Raqketa, Chynel, Tremelia, Denethia, Lucious, Lashaine, Sheretha, Cernitha, Kwabena, Tiffonia, Lesma, Ketchia, Letrecia, Tabeeka, Cawanna, Lucrelia, and Jamesia–likewise suggest that sub-Saharan genetics are involved.

It was overwhelmingly Atlanta and other majority-black counties that showed testing irregularities.

Still, anyone who’s sat in front of a TV for the past forty years knows that America’s dumbest and most primitive humans, our brave nation’s primary impediments to truly meaningful progress, are the drooling, banjo-plucking rural hillbillies.

Wait–wasn’t Deliverance filmed in Georgia?

Yes, it was–way up in Rabun County.

For comparison’s sake, I selected an elementary school at random from Rabun County and one from Atlanta that had been featured in the governor’s report. The hilljack school is as overwhelmingly white as the Atlanta school is black. Their respective zip codes’ median household income is roughly the same, although the blacks earned a trifle more skrilla in 2009–the year before the governor sent in monitors to oversee the testing.

Fifth-graders in both schools scored almost identically in 2009’s standardized tests. The only two major statistical differences were that the inner-city black kids received nearly $3,000 more yearly in educational funding than the rural Deliverance kids, and 51.4% of the black classrooms were flagged for high wrong-to-right testing irregularities, while the trailer-trash kiddies’ tests showed zero cheating. So in order to achieve testing parity with those toothless inbred hillbabies, Atlanta’s black kids needed an extra $3,000 in funding and had to cheat their goddamned asses off.

Happy now?

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