Back in the 1970s, comedian Flip Wilson turned an expression, “The devil made me do it,” into a national catch phrase.
The sassy black woman Wilson would portray in some of his funniest skits, Geraldine Jones, would utter that excuse whenever she said or did something that was a bit risque.
The apologists for former Atlanta School Superintendent Beverly Hall and the almost three dozen other educators recently indicted on racketeering charges in a test-cheating scandal sound like Geraldine.
It’s not the educators’ own moral shortcomings, they say, that caused them to allegedly collaborate in a widespread effort to rig students’ results on standardized tests.
No, it was the “devil” — the devil being an accountability system that has been using these exams as the primary means to judge the schools, the teachers, the principals and those in the central office.
Nonsense.
During those years when Hall was being lauded nationally for the supposed turnaround of the Atlanta public schools and receiving a reported half-million dollars in performance-based bonuses, all of the accolades and cash were based on test-score results. She was more than happy to accept the rewards that came with the greater number of questions that students in her school system answered correctly.
Those gains, we have since learned, were fraudulent — the product of a scheme in which educators either told students the correct answers or changed their answers from wrong to right.
There is nothing improper about using standardized tests to rate the schools and the educators employed by them. It is the only objective way to evaluate whether students are actually learning anything worth knowing.
The real problem is that too little emphasis has been put on making sure that the test results aren’t compromised by cheating.
Some people have a strict moral compass. They wouldn’t cheat, no matter their circumstances or whether they think anyone’s watching.
But others are “situationalists.” Their decision of whether to do right varies with the circumstances. If they think there is a good chance they will get caught, then they won’t stoop to dishonesty. But if they think they can get away with it, they will — particularly if they believe the benefit to them is much higher than the risk of being detected.
Too many state departments of education have operated as if they think educators are somehow less susceptible to human failings than are bank tellers or bookkeepers. They talk a good game about test integrity, but they scrimp on what it takes to ensure it, leaving mostly the local school districts to police themselves.
Atlanta demonstrated amply why that’s a terrible idea. Even if Beverly Hall, the former school superintendent, wasn’t personally involved in the test-cheating, as she claims, she had to suspect something was fishy when the rise in test scores exceeded probability. Even if she didn’t direct the scam, she had a vested interest in not digging too deeply to uncover it.
There is a temptation to rationalize cheating, to blame the fraud on the pressure under which educators operate, to say they can’t be expected to overcome impoverished home environments, to claim the standardized tests are culturally biased against blacks and other minorities.
Can you hear echoes of Geraldine? “The devil made me do it.” In this context, though, no one should be laughing.
