Check-Offs

It's not hard to fill in the boxes of the "Atlanta Cheating Scandal" story.

Demonizing public shools: check
Locating accountability at the bottom: check
Meting out disproportionately harsh punishment to those deemed accountable: check
Those punished happen to be black: check, check, anddouble-check

Charles Pierce observes—

... the ahistorical explosion of bullshit that is Judge Jerry Baxter, who called the convictions of eight former Atlanta school administrators in connection to a fairly massive scandal involving cheating on standardized tests "the sickest thing that ever happened in this town." (Somewhere in the bowels of a SuperMax in Colorado, Eric Rudolph finds himself off the hook.)...

After listing the individual prison sentences, Diane Ravitch adds—

...all of the convicted educators lost their license, their pensions, and five years of compensation.

If only all those bankers who nearly destroyed the economy in 2008 had been dealt with as harshly. But they were "too big to fail."

Richard Rothstein makes it all clear—

Eleven Atlanta educators, convicted and imprisoned, have taken the fall for systematic cheating on standardized tests in American education. Such cheating is widespread, as is similar corruption in any institution—whether health care, criminal justice, the Veterans Administration, or others—where top policymakers try to manage their institutions with simple quantitative measures that distort the institution’s goals. This corruption is especially inevitable when out-of-touch policymakers set impossible-to-achieve goals and expect that success will nonetheless follow if only underlings are held accountable for measurable results.
...

Certainly, educators can refuse to cheat, and take the fall for unavoidable failure in other ways: they can see their schools closed, their colleagues fired, their students’ confidence and love of learning destroyed. That would have been the legal thing to do, but not necessarily the ethical thing to do. As one indicted teacher told the judge before the trial, "I truly believed that I was helping these children stay in school just one more year," something from which they would have benefited far more than being drilled incessantly on test-taking strategies so they could pass tests legally.

As Pierce says—

The sentences are preposterous, but the sentences are not about the crimes involved. The sentences are a message that the power in this country is behind the "reform" grifting movement no matter what the cost to children or to public education in general. They will have their testing. (Ravitch finds one New Jersey superintendent who "hopes" kids will feel bullied by the testing regime. Bravo, sir.) It doesn't matter even if the people sharing in the grift -- like, say, the people involved in designing and running the computers on which the testing system depends -- are any good at their jobs or not. They will have their testing, and I include the current administration in this, come hell, high water, or hangin' judges, and you best not offend against it, or you are the worst thing that ever happened to Atlanta. Leo Frank wept.