In the 1942 film "Casablanca", Captain Renault closes up Rick's Cafe. "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" he exclaims as the croupier hands him his winnings. Today, after years of excessive testing and numerical targets that actually widen the "achievement gap" they are supposed to close, we have no more right to be shocked by the perverse incentives of so-called "data-driven decision-making" in schools than Renault had to hypocritically hyperventilate at finding gambling in Rick's.
Beverly Hall was already a star when she was made superintendent of Atlanta schools in 1999. She had been head of NY high schools under Chancellor Ray Cortines, and then Newark Superintendent after the State of New Jersey took over those schools. She was named Superintendent of the Year in 2009 before the whole thing came crashing down in a massive cheating scandal. People were "shocked, shocked" to discover that teachers and principals faced with enormous pressures to produce score increases might find alternate means of producing those results. Superintendent Hall was fired and indicted.
Reform superstar Michelle Rhee has a similar scandal in her past. She still pretends to be "shocked, shocked" by the revelation that her intense insistence on test score improvement might have led to cheating by teachers and principals. But investigators with subpoena powers discovered a memo to her from an outside consultant she hired to look into cheating. That consultant was clear that this wasn't about kids copying: "191 teachers representing 70 schools." And the report points to principals, too: "Could the erasures in some cases have been done by someone other than the students and the teachers?" But Michelle Rhee is a golden child with the corporate reformers. She had already been removed -- by a new mayor, which enhanced her "non-political" credentials -- and there has, to date, been no indictment. I will not dwell on the most obvious difference between Michelle Rhee and Beverly Hall.
These perverse incentives act at all levels. When I was a high school principal in the Bronx, two of my colleagues in Brooklyn informed me that they had mandated a 90% passing rate for all classes. I said I thought that was a reasonable target. They each gave me a look, and then one stressed that this was no target, it was a mandate. I asked what would happen if there were more than 10% with excessive absences, or inadequate work. I wondered how the cooperative kids would react when they discovered that their classmates who were blowing off classwork and homework received passing grades. I asked what would be the eventual effect on Regents' scores. They told me not to worry. They were going to improve their data by increasing the proportion of kids receiving enough credits to be promoted to the next grade. That is data-driven decision-making, too.
We see it in fields other than education. The entire Enron scandal came from accountants who were driven to make the balance sheets look more attractive to investors. The "friendly-fire" shooting of NFL linebacker Pat Tilman by his fellow Army Rangers in Afghanistan was finally due to officers who had to check off a certain number of villages entered by their men, regardless of whether that meant towing a broken Humvee through a rocky path after discussing their itinerary in front of Taliban sympathizers!
But there are still times when I am "shocked, shocked." Today's BBC world news revealed that the Chinese government is trying to get its citizens to stop burying their dead and to cremate them instead. This means setting quotas for cremations that local Party functionaries have to meet. So (I suppose I should insert an "of course" but this case beggars my imagination) some local officials have contracted with grave robbers! The thieves dig up corpses from cemeteries in other districts and these corpses can be cremated in order to meet the quotas. I would call these extremely perverse incentives.
Except. Except that, as grisly as this case is, I don't think that abusing the dead is worse than abusing our children. I spoke to a friend today who has a young son getting ready to start kindergarten. They live two blocks from a well-regarded public school. He could have the autonomy to get to school and have friends in the neighborhood. But she is a public school teacher herself. She sees herself driven to test prep instead of teaching. She sees herself driving kids instead of allowing them to develop intellectually. And she is starting to think that in the current climate of data-driven decision-making, both public and charter schools are becoming torture chambers for kids. Desecrating graves to meet cremation quotas may be extremely perverse. But so is the constant testing and preparation for testing that we do to our children, who are -- after all -- still alive.
No comments:
Post a Comment