Road Apples by Tim Sanders
July 25, 2011

Good old Golden Rule days

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When I was a youngster and complained about all of the homework I’d been assigned, my dad tried to make me feel better about my situation by passing along helpful little anecdotes about his own childhood. These anecdotes featured fascinating facts about one-room schoolhouses with wood stoves, two-seater outhouses, and teachers who were instructed by concerned parents to shout at their children and beat them with hickory switches so they wouldn’t get homesick. He said he’d have loved to have done his homework lying on a carpet in front of a new Sylvania television set with the patented Halo Light, but with the farm chores in the evening and no electricity, he had to do most of his studying by candle light. And there were no school buses back then, only ox carts. Once, during the Indiana monsoon season, my dad could only get to school by swimming a swollen creek with his notebook and three No. 2 lead pencils clamped tightly in his teeth. But he did it, and was glad to have the opportunity to do it, because even as a child he understood the value of an education. His stories always made me anxious to get back to my homework before something else occurred to him, so I guess they served their purpose.

Dad’s anecdotes were so effective that I used my own educational experiences to encourage my son, David, when he was in school. Since I spent my childhood in Michigan, my little motivational talks relied heavily on things like tunneling through fourteen-foot snowdrifts, fighting off half-starved wolverines attracted to the peanut butter sandwiches in my lunch bag, and strapping my sixty pounds of homework to my sled every afternoon, hoping against hope that I could make it home before dark, when the dreaded Michigan timber wolves came out, sniffing the air for small boys with peanut butter on their breath. And by the way, I had no fancy computers or PlayStations, just the flickering Halo Light of a primitive Sylvania TV, which on a clear day only got three crummy channels because we had to make do with those stupid rabbit ears. Life wasn’t easy back then.

What my anecdotes and those of my father had in common was the sense that scholarship was serious business, and that with each successive generation education had become increasingly trivialized and ... well, silly.

Which brings us to the Atlanta public schools scandal. In early July a report by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation revealed that a whole lot of cheating had been going on in the Atlanta public school system. As Julianne Hing noted in her July 21 article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:


“[The GBI] found widespread cheating in nearly 80 percent of the elementary and middle schools that were subject[s] of the year long investigation. Investigators found that changing answers on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, the Georgia state standards test, was a common practice for years.”


But it wasn’t the kids who were changing answers, it was the teachers. As Hing put it:


“Educators, the investigators found, faced a district mandate to raise test scores at any cost, and whistleblowers were intimidated and threatened with termination when they attempted to speak up. Nearly 200 educators were implicated in the scandal, and 82 confessed to taking part in test tampering and cheating.”


The rest of the article was equally depressing. There was, for example, the reporter’s constant use of the term “educators” to describe those boneheads who erased incorrect answers and replaced them with correct ones at after school “cheating parties.”


EDUCATOR #1: Here’s one on page 13. It asks “What follows the letter ‘a?’ The Snyder kid chose option B, which was “c.”

EDUCATOR #2: Answer B was “c,” or answer C was “b?”

EDUCATOR #1: C wasn’t “b,” D was “b.”

COACH RIDLEY: I got a headache. Somebody get me another beer and a fresh eraser.


And there were likewise the feeble attempts by Atlanta Federation of Teachers president Verdailia Turner to explain away the cheating. Aside from the cheaters in 80 percent of Atlanta’s elementary and middle schools, and aside from the “nearly 200" educators implicated thus far, and of course not counting the four “high-ranking district officials” who’d already resigned, or former Atlanta School Superintendent Beverly Hall, who was given the America’s School Superintendent of the Year Award in 2009 due to the really awesome improvement in Atlanta’s standardized test scores, Turner was proud to point out that “we are people of integrity.” The teachers, she said, were “being unfairly blamed” for the cheating scandal, which the article indicated was obviously due to the unreasonable use of standardized tests to measure teacher competency, the fact that Georgia was a right to work state, the low income level of certain districts involved, global warming, the plight of the Asian panda, and a “do or die” culture. Ms. Hing added that “Schools in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Newark and Washington D.C. are all currently investigating similar reports of testing irregularities,” which the more unreasonable among us might call the “Gee whiz, all the other kids are doing it” defense.

So is the phrase “excellence in public education” only an oxymoron? Well, there was certainly cheating going on when I was a kid. The difference was, our teachers let us know, right up front, that when it came to cheating, we’d get no help from them. We were on our own. And when someone was caught, just like those “educators” in Atlanta, he was expected to come up with his very own “these tests are biased, there’s too much emphasis on test scores anyway, we students need to organize, and gee whiz, all the other kids are doing it” excuses. Nobody had ever thought of the “low income” excuse, although some of my friends and I could certainly have used it. And although our teachers often admired creativity, when the culprit had exhausted his litany of excuses (including the popular “the wind blew that cheat sheet under my foot” alibi), he dutifully handed his test to the teacher and he or she tore it up and gave the student a failing grade.

Not that I ever personally cheated, myself, but I had some very good friends who did.