Testing Lessons For CMS
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools interim chief Hugh Hattabaugh used his inaugural presser this week to make clear his intention of staying the course when it comes to fully implementing a barrage of new, pricey, and unproven tests that come part and parcel with the district’s drive for teacher performance pay.
The initiative, championed by former super Peter Gorman, has come under fire from parents and teachers, who contend that preparing and administrating the tests takes away from valuable classroom time and often provides unreliable benchmarks for gauging teacher effectiveness.
As part of his plan to keep the testing regime moving forward, Hattabaugh said he wants to include more teacher feedback as part of process. That might prove easier said than done: frontline educators are already rightfully leery of CMS admin machinations, after Gorman covertly pushed for new legislation that would nix previous assurances that teachers would have a vote on whether a performance pay plan would be implemented.
In any case, a new wrinkle has been thrown into the whole testing debate on a national level. Seems that some administrators and teachers are going to great and evidently illegal lengths to assure test results yield high results, which put a golden shine on a superintendent’s reputation while priming the pump for connected business leaders and boosters to tout their schools’ purported successes. This from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Across Atlanta Public Schools, staff worked feverishly in secret to transform testing failures into successes.
Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students’ answer sheets.
Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible.
Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.
For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests. The scores soared so dramatically they brought national acclaim to Hall and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.
In the report, the governor’s special investigators describe an enterprise where unethical — and potentially illegal — behavior pierced every level of the bureaucracy, allowing district staff to reap praise and sometimes bonuses by misleading the children, parents and community they served.
Not that anything like that could ever happen here. With scores of new and untested tests flowing into the mix, tied directly to teacher pay and bonuses and the national accolades any success stories from such an initiative are certain to bring for the superintendent in charge. Right?
The school board has already passed on one chance to put the brakes on steamrolling through teacher performance pay and its accompanying slew of tests, and using the pause to more thoroughly vet and research the plan.
Now would be a good time for that same board to revisit the issue, gather the teacher input and feedback Hattabaugh says he wants, and move forward with a greater degree of trust and confidence in getting it done right.
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