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【中文标题】“有教无类”的错误答案
【原文标题】Wrong Answer
【登载媒体】纽约客
【原文作者】RACHEL AVIV
【原文链接】http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/21/wrong-answer
帕克斯中学校长克里斯托弗•沃勒在亚特兰大得到了一片赞颂的声音，他在学校改革运动中变得小有名气。
2006年春天的一个下午，亚特兰大帕克斯中学的数学老师达曼尼•路易斯，打开存放标准考试试卷的房间。下个星期，他的学生们就要参加“标准能力考试”，这个考试的目的是衡量乔治亚州的学校是否达到联邦政府所要求的成绩。试卷用玻璃纸包裹，存放在硬纸箱里。29岁、身材消瘦、留着长发绺的路易斯思考了一下是否要用剪刀打开试卷，他觉得这样做痕迹太明显了。于是他离开学校，走到街边的一家商店，买了一个剃须刀片。回到学校之后，他割开玻璃纸，从包装里轻轻抽出一沓试卷。然后，他用打火机烧热刀片，插入封口的黏合处，撕开封条。
他复印了数学、阅读和语言部分的考试内容，根据“有教无类法案”，这几部分的成绩将决定帕克斯中学是否会被连续6年归入“需要改进的学校”类别。除非58％的学生通过数学考试，67％的学生通过语言考试，否则州政府就可能关闭这所学校。路易斯戴上手套，以免手上的油渍在塑料纸上留下痕迹，用他的打火机把玻璃纸的边缘熔合在一起，就好像整包考卷从未被打开过。他把阅读和语言试卷交给另外两位他信得过的老师，自己把数学试卷带回家。
翻阅过试卷之后，他骄傲地发现一年来他把所有的知识点都教到了。他说：“不需要看那些问题，根据图形我就可以说：‘噢，我的孩子们都知道。’”确认过之后，他把试卷丢在壁炉里。但是他担心学生们读不懂用长篇文字表述的题目，有一些7年级的孩子们还是通过大声朗读字母来阅读，“隐藏在字里行间”的概念似乎不大公平。路易斯觉得他把学生们逼得太紧了，他们还没有承受过这样的压力。他对我说：“我绝不会让州政府打他们的脸，说他们是废物。我要想尽一切办法阻止打击学生自信心的行为。”
帕克斯中学的校长克里斯托弗•沃勒知道他在考试前看过这些题目。沃勒说，路易斯是一位“明星教师”、一个“非常勤奋的员工，总是超额完成任务”。数学考试结束之后，路易斯说沃勒问他学生们考得如何。路易斯既然已经看过考试的题目，再翻翻学生的答案也不是什么大不了的事。路易斯回到考场，打开一些班级里成绩中等的学生的答题纸。他先看一道比较难的题目的答案，看到学生们都做出来了，他觉得其他学生也应该差不多。他说自己在房间里无所事事，打发时间。当他觉得时间耽搁得足够长了，就回来告诉沃勒说他的学生做得不错。但是沃勒还让他去查看其它班级学生的答卷，这一次，路易斯发现帕克斯中学一些最聪明的学生把这道题答错了。
考试周结束之后，路易斯和一位语言老师克里斯托•德雷普回到考场。在大约一个小时的时间里，他们擦掉学生错误的答案，填上正确的答案。他们之间没有对话，路易斯都不敢和她对视。他说：“我简直不敢相信我们在做这样的事。”他让自己专心处理技术问题，他小心翼翼地修改答案，十道题目中最多改掉一到两个答案。他说：“我做了简单的统计，不难了解改过答案之后的通过率。”很多学生离及格线只差一点点，他就推他们一把，这样他们就可以超过及格线一两分。
一个月之后，分数出来了。沃勒让学生们聚集在学校餐厅外的走廊里，那里摆满了冰淇淋、比萨饼和炸鸡翅。一位教师宣布：“你们做到了！你们终于成功了！”在有教无类法案通过之后的第一次，帕克斯中学达成了它的年度目标：八年级学生阅读考试通过率上升了31％，数学考试通过率上升了62％。一名学生尼基西亚•杰克逊说：“所有人都高兴得跳起来，就好像是获得了奥运会冠军。我们听到大家在说：‘我们还能做得更好！我们终于可以昂起头走进学校啦！’”
帕克斯中学位于亚特兰大市中心以南三英里的匹兹堡，旁边是一个废弃的停车场和一段铁轨。匹兹堡在内战后出现，曾经是黑人工人阶层的聚居处，直到上世纪六七十年代，居民开始移居到乡下。那里有一半的房屋空置。路易斯的学生们管那片地区叫“小越南”和“杰克都市”，因为经常有武装抢匪出没。有一次，路易斯在一家便利店遇到几个学生，让他们回家去写作业，这时一个妓女走过来。他说：“我当时说：‘哇，我可是个老师呀！她说：‘我不在乎，老师也需要嘛。’”
路易斯生长在加利福尼亚州东奥克兰的一个暴力街区，那是一所由慈善机构仁人家园建起的房子。他的父亲是个瘾君子，他的母亲靠一份银行出纳的工作抚养4个孩子，她后来开办了一家收容从良妓女的机构。路易斯说：“她绝对是个对弱势群体具有无限爱心的人。”到了周末，她带着路易斯去参加黑豹党组织的野餐。她的工作很忙，有时候邻居会来帮忙照看路易斯，他们经常告诉他要洗手，把衬衫的褶子熨平，在干裂的嘴唇上涂凡士林。他的橄榄球教练就像父亲一样，鼓励路易斯去亚特兰大的大学念书，这样他就可以具备“历史上著名黑人的经验”。
路易斯得到了克拉克亚特兰大大学的奖学金，那里离帕克斯中学不到3英里。有那么几个月，他无家可归，还因私藏大麻而被捕，但他依然取得了优秀的成绩。用他自己的话来说，他算是一个“轻量级的书呆子”。在获得了数学和哲学的学位之后，他的母亲敦促他去寻找一份教师的工作，因为他总是能把复杂的问题简单地表述出来。2000年，他开始在帕克斯中学教书，很快就被学生们绝望的情绪所感动。他对我说：“我出生在70年代，经历过民权运动，参加过黑豹党在奥克兰组织的会议，所以我没有任何偏见。我生长的那个年代，就是黑人抛弃屈辱的年代。”
他的学生每天身上带着难闻的味道，衣服上沾着尿渍，他们似乎从未想过有一天要离开这个地区。帕克斯中学的校长是个老女人，没有太多改变现状的意愿。家庭作业就是个笑话，走廊里堆着垃圾，学生们对着垃圾桶小便。一位资深的教师告诉路易斯，他班里的学生只有20％能听懂讲课的内容，所以他不得不把每部分内容都讲5遍。他记得自己在当时想：“拜托，我一定是个更好的老师，他只是在给自己兜圈子找借口。”
亚特兰大的校监贝佛莉•豪尔在1999年开始任职，她很快发现了帕克斯中学存在的问题。附近的一位牧师多次打电话投诉学校门口出现的毒贩。豪尔出生于牙买加，她主要在城市中欠发达地区工作。70年代，她在布鲁克林格林堡教书，然后到纽瓦克去做校监。她在亚特兰大的第一次会议上说，一些人“早晨起来就高喊‘告诉我该做些什么，我们必须采取行动改善亚特兰大的教育’。”这个地区四分之三的学生都生活在贫困线以下，90％的黑人和拉丁美洲人，只有不到4％的人从高中毕业。
豪尔是典型的革新派，她相信市场手段可以提振公共教育质量。因此她就像是一个企业的高管，向慈善人士求助，划定责任范围，制定绩效目标，这些目标比2002年被写入法律的“有教无类”内容严格得多。如果一所学校达成目标，所有的员工，包括校车司机和食堂服务人员，都可以得到最高2000美元的奖金。她把对教师的评定与考试分数联系在一起，并且警告校长，如果学校连续三年没有达标，他们将被解职。最终，90％的校长被替换掉。她不断重复那句咒语“没有例外，没有借口”。
2001年，她为帕克斯中学找来一位新校长，前大学橄榄球运动员迈克尔•希姆斯，路易斯说他是“自己心目中一直期望的父亲”。希姆斯在加强教育的同时，还非常关注营造团结、积极的氛围。他重新装修校舍，聘请辅导员、还把学校入口处脱落的“P”字换掉。他告诉学生们，即使他们在校园之外也依然代表着学校。如果周末有谁参与打架，周一就要停课。学校给家长开办计算机培训班，那些家长对孩子们的学习从来不闻不问，甚至找他们签字都很困难。路易斯说：“我们不得不用各种办法说服家长们来到学校里，有些人明显是瘾君子，不是那种为好玩而吸毒，而是足以毁掉生活的毒瘾。”
帕克斯中学逐渐变成一个让老师和学生们——绝大部分都是黑人——可以充分袒露自己的地方。路易斯说：“我们从小到大都把自己和整个世界隔绝开来，学校变成了我们的一扇窗户。”他让学生们把脏衣服丢到自己的车上，他可以帮他们洗干净。当学生们的母亲不在家（绝大多数学生都没有父亲），或者是吸了毒，他就让学生住在自己家里。他还变成了橄榄球教练，如果练习结束得太晚，他会把学生们逐一送到家门口。有几个学生后来管他叫爸爸。他对他们说：“我不知道你们怎么看待我，但我认为自己是成功的。如果你们也想知道自己是否会成功，就看看我。”他和帕克斯中学的一位语言老师结婚，他的妻子也同样关心学生。路易斯说：“她是所有成年女性的榜样，无论是言谈还是举止。”
贝佛莉•豪尔获得了数百万美元的捐款，以此创办了一个叫做“GRAD项目”的大学预科教学计划。帕克斯中学因此聘请了校外辅导员，开办了课外班。2004年的一部纪录片《期待最佳》讲述了帕克斯中学的故事，一个曾经仅仅是“托儿所”性质的学校变成了“一所可以作为榜样的优秀学校”。片中有一个场景，路易斯在自己家里的门廊与一个和他住在一起的学生下棋。画外音说这名学生叫安东尼奥，他之所以和自己的数学教师住在一起，“是因为她的母亲已经无法继续抚养他。这样的安排，尽管不是长久之计，但能让安东尼奥有一段稳定的生活。”
学校的状况在慢慢变好，但是学生的考试成绩一直没有让帕克斯中学有“足够的进步”。带有乌托邦色彩的有教无类法案设置了这项标准，要求所有公立学校的学生在2014年前必须熟练掌握数学和阅读能力，而判断的标准就是考试分数。改革的模版来自德克萨斯州在90年代使用的一套体制，它忽略了难以量化的智力发展因素。没有达成既定目标的学校可以获得联邦政府的资助，还会有一系列的管束措施，包括州政府的监管、修改课程、替换教员、重组管理层，甚至关闭学校。匹兹堡社区改革委员会负责人拉塞尔•霍夫曼告诉我，帕克斯中学在1966年成立，它是社区居民的骄傲，是这里的“一颗珍珠”。现在，他担心社区里再多一幢废弃的建筑物会给自己带来多大的麻烦。
达曼尼•路易斯
2004年新学期开始的第一天，路易斯发现帕克斯中学的校长没有出现。路易斯知道希姆斯绝不会错过新学期的第一天，所以他想一定是出问题了。地方行政官员召集了一个会议，说希姆斯不会回来了，他已经辞职，因为在上一份工作中他被控性骚扰。
几个月之后，一名卫理公会的牧师、有9年公立学校工作经验的克里斯托弗•沃勒成为了帕克斯中学的新领导。沃勒身材魁梧，脸上有雀斑，现年31岁，是历任最年轻的校长。一个星期的熟悉情况之后，他发现这里对考试分数的重视程度超过了他以前工作过的所有学校。他对我说：“所有的决策都依赖数据，你必须要宣誓对分数效忠，靠它生活、靠它休息、以它为食。”
他和教师们召开了一个会议，向他们解释说必须要用分数来决定一切行为的方向。路易斯把手举起来说：“我需要离开一会。”他走出房间，另一位学校领导跟出来，在走廊里试图安抚他。但是他说：“你们都跑到这里，要改变我们在过去几年里所做的TMD每一件事。我们已经做出了很多改变，说明以前的方法是有效的。”
第二天，路易斯说沃勒请他到办公室谈话。他对路易斯说：“我听说你在这里工作了很久。”当时，路易斯是橄榄球、足球和垒球的教练，还是体育辅导员和象棋俱乐部创始人。在谈话中，路易斯发现自己被沃勒的学识和见解所打动了。沃勒问他自己该做些什么改变，路易斯告诉他要等待时机。他说：“你就像是刚进入一个家庭的继母，如果立即把一切都改变，会永远遭恨的。”
每年秋天，当地都会举办一个正式的大会，地点通常是亚特兰大猎鹰队的主场——乔治亚巨蛋体育场。达成分数目标的学校坐在场地内，没有达成目标的学校被安排在露天看台上。一整年时间里，教师们都在讨论他们是否能“坐进比赛场地”。沃勒在2005年第一次参加会议，他被看台上的坐席羞辱得无地自容。他说：“那就像是在圣经中读到了麻风病，没有人愿意被贴上失败者的标签。”
沃勒很快发现，校长们基本上都是凭借自己亲手挑选的教师来确保学校内部的上下一条心。在他与贝佛莉•豪尔的第一次见面时，沃勒说他希望与学校现有的老师们继续共事。豪尔笑着说：“你需要你自己的团队。”沃勒于是开始鼓励年长的教师尽早退休，路易斯很快发现自己竟然变成了帕克斯中学最资深的教师，他有些担心，新的教师没有那种“向老教师虚心学习的态度”。
豪尔手下有4个副学监，分别管理4个学区，确保各所学校都向共同的目标迈进。沃勒来到学校一年之后，收到了一封措辞严厉的备忘录，题目是“年中回顾”。负责派克斯中学所在学区的副学监迈克尔•皮特兹在备忘录中说：“请了解，我们不会接受任何借口为不能达成70％以上的标准做辩解。”
沃勒告诉皮特兹，由地区研究规划问责部所设定的目标是不现实的，他花了3个月的时间才赢得学生们的信任。他说，两名学生在附近街区被强奸，其它一些学生完全独立生活，既没有父母陪伴，也无法在短期内进入青少年管理中心。一名学生因为盗窃汽车被捕，沃勒上庭请求法官不要判他入狱。沃勒对我说：“政府希望让孩子摆脱贫困，我完全理解，但是考试分数不应该是唯一的手段。”沃勒说出了他的问题，皮特兹说豪尔不会接受任何理由，“在亚特兰大，一名校长保住饭碗的唯一方法就是提高分数。”
沃勒搞不懂为什么他的学生会在小学里取得不错的成绩，他们在五年级时通过了标准能力测试，但是来到帕克斯中学只能读一年级。他对皮特兹说：“这些学生和他们的成绩不匹配，他们肯定在考试中作弊了，这些分数绝对不是真实的。”一天，他和皮特兹在帕克斯校园里散步。沃勒指着一个调皮捣蛋的六年级学生说，他在去年的考试中成绩优秀，但真正的学识几乎是一片空白。他记得皮特兹笑了笑，说：“有的孩子就是会考试，你别管的太多。”他敦促沃勒与小学校长“保持更紧密的关系”，沃勒把这句话理解为让他去学习小学校长如何人为操纵学生的成绩。
沃勒知道，他的学校在那一年肯定无法达成目标，超过一半的学生都无法胜任自己所在年级的学业。阅读老师桑德拉•沃德告诉沃勒，她听说一家小学的教师曾经用擦掉铅笔乱画的印记作借口，修改学生的答题卡。据沃勒和沃德所说，副校长格雷戈里•瑞德告诉他们，说他知道有另外一家学校的教师在考试前就拿到了题目。（瑞德对此予以否认。）沃勒觉得两个方法都可以试一试，首先要组建一支信得过的教师“团队”。他对自己说：“我们是在帮助他们，到八年级他们就跟得上了。”
他找到的第一个教师就是路易斯，但他拒绝了：“去他的考试！我们的学生做得很好，我们都知道他们在学习。”但是几个月之后，路易斯说，沃勒“把我嚼碎了”。沃勒告诉他，帕克斯中学是社区的“圣坛和避难所”。如果学校不能达成目标，学生们就会被送往匹兹堡之外的其它学校。路易斯说，他感到“自己的责任就是决不能让这样的事情发生”。
2006年，帕克斯中学的一位六年级老师塔米卡•格兰特给贝佛莉•豪尔写了一封信。她说沃勒试图劝说教师们作弊，他讲述了小学教师们的所作所为。她听到他说：“如果你不能打败他们，就加入他们。”她还说，他经常问老师有多少学生可以通过考试，如果他们的回答模棱两可，他就说：“你的团队精神在哪里？我们是一个团队吗？”
亚特兰大教师联合会主席致信这个地区的总部，说“沃勒先生经常威胁员工，告诉他们学校要么被关闭，要么被兼并。”信中描述了一种“员工间一种你我有别的心态，沃勒先生与新员工关系密切，对老员工不理不睬，并试图排挤资深教师。”路易斯和其他几位受宠的教师形成了“沃勒的小圈子”，甚至有些人有自己的专属停车位。
收到这些抱怨之后，副学监皮特兹参加了帕克斯中学的一次教师会议。教师们记得他在会上说：“不要再写信说沃勒的事情了，他不会离开的，无论你们怎么做，都不会让我们对沃勒校长有坏印象。”路易斯说他钦佩塔米卡•格兰特写这封信的勇气，但是不明白为什么皮特兹把她的抱怨当作是可耻的告密行为。“我在想，不会吧，我以为这是我们的职责。”
在地区内部问题办公室的要求下，一位私家侦探雷吉诺•杜克斯调查了教师反馈的问题。2006年3月，他确定帕克斯中学在乔治亚州中学写作考试中作弊，提前把题目透露给学生。杜克把他的发现在一次午餐会议上告诉了豪尔和她的资深员工，但是令他震惊的是，她显然对此缺少兴趣。他说：“我本以为她会立即采取行动。”但是他被告知他不可以聘请更多的侦探。豪尔几乎没有提任何问题，他唯一记得的问题是“还有更多的证据吗？”杜克说：“这个问题几乎让我晕倒，我刚刚费尽口舌所说的都是证据。”
沃勒从未受到任何批评，他说他一直没有听说任何调查结果。第二年，在没有征得塔米卡•格兰特同意的情况下，她被调到朗中学。在当时，那是当地最危险的一所学校。
2007年，帕克斯中学必须要获得比它前一年通过作弊而得到的更高的分数。根据后来教师和学校管理人员提供的证词（通过乔治亚的档案公开活动取得），作弊已经成为惯例。在考试那一周，每当学生们完成当天的考试，沃勒就会支开监考员阿尔弗雷德•基尔，他会带他去亚特兰大市中心吃一顿豪华大餐。他们一出发，沃勒就给阅读教师打电话，告诉她现在基尔的办公室已经没有人了。她马上给6名教师打电话，让他们立即到这个房间来。在学生们课间休息的时候，老师们擦掉错误的答案，填入正确的答案。路易斯在行动前用手机给基尔的办公室拍了照片，确保他们在事后把所有东西都物归原位。
路易斯很害怕做这件事，对他来说，这就像在一次约会中吃得太饱，喝不下东西了。修改答案之后的第二天早晨，路易斯醒来后想，我实在不应该做得这么过分。他担心，由于老师们作弊，学生们没有那种“考试后等待分数揭晓的心情”。他还觉得其他教师被剥夺了抱怨的权利令他有负罪感，路易斯从未告诉他的妻子和其他教师他的所作所为，他说：“我不会破坏她喜悦的心情，我会说：‘太好了，继续努力吧。’”
在私下闲谈时，他和其他教师都会抱怨，“有教无类”法案的编写者一定没听说过有像帕克斯一样的学校。他感觉自己和同事们就是一场全国性“生化试验”的牺牲品，所有重要的因素——有那么多的孩子挨饿、居无定所、暴力缠身——都没有被考虑进去。亚利桑那州立大学教育学院的前院长大卫•伯利纳说，这项法案通过之后，教师们被要求要弥补他们无法控制的那些因素。他说：“说贫穷不是低分的借口的那些人，现在把教师的责任心作为对贫穷袖手旁观的借口。”
豪尔的目标是，通过考试的学生数量每年必须增长大约3％，而且每年还要有一定数量的学生“超过”考试标准。后来，当被联邦调查人员问到她是如何拿到这些数字的，她承认没有任何调查来支持提升比率的数字。据沃勒所说，当地的学校越来越“步调一致”，所有人都在关注“底线”。他把每个老师的目标写在教师门口的地板上，同时也让学生们看到。他告诉老师：“我需要看到数字。你必须以应试为导向，随便你们怎么做。”
安妮E凯西基金会在2007年的一份报告，题目是《亚特兰大帕克斯中学达标》，把这种看似不大可能的成绩提升归功于学校“对数据的不懈追求”。报告说，沃勒在口袋里装着一个索引卡片，上面是学校所有班级的成绩，他把这些数字向学生和家长们汇报。沃勒说：“孩子们都知道自己的成绩。”监考员基尔对基金会说，这些数据“令人振奋。这是一种爱，因为它披露的是事实。并不是我怎么想、我怎么认为、应该是什么，而是彻彻底底的事实。”
在早先，路易斯喜欢用一种看似客观的标准来判断教学质量。从大学时代开始，他发现自己可以用数学等式来解释生活中的现象。他的父亲不断地戒毒，又不断复吸，他已经不再对父亲不回他的电话感到失望了，因为他用数学方式了解到事情发生的概率。如果他把父亲没有来电话的那一天记作是0，把父亲来电话的那一天记作是1，然后把所有的数字加起来，除以365，他可以看到父亲在某一天来电话的概率几乎是0。他的计算方法“让我有把一切掌控在手的感觉”。
但是让路易斯担忧的是，数学在当地扮演了一个不健康的角色。“数据”和“责任”几乎变成了魔法咒语，只要管理者没完没了地重复，他们似乎相信分数就会因此而上升，即使他们的教学方法没有任何变化。路易斯对于强调阅读重要性的做法表示欢迎，因为教师们得到了专业培训的机会，他们也更严格地要求学生，但是其它很多改革内容都有时间限制。路易斯说：“我们只有两周时间教学生学会百分比。如果因为学生没有完全掌握，你在第三周还在教百分比，他们就会说：‘你教的不好！’拜托，我们是在与人类的大脑打交道。我当然相信种族不能决定命运，但你必须要耐心。”
让路易斯感到压力巨大的不仅仅是分数目标，还有高高在上的出勤目标。在经历了两年的改进之后，教师们会在每天稍晚的一些时候点名，确保学生们花费更多的时间在学校里。最终，路易斯记得，老师们形成一种默契，轮流提交缺勤名单。学校的一位秘书拒绝删除出勤表上的缺勤记录，她在一封投诉信中对教育办公室说，她的记录出勤工作因此被转交给“另外一个校长认为更有团队精神的人。我感到很危险，因为有可能随时会失去这份工作。这些事情让我实在难以忍受。”
克里斯托弗•沃勒
沃勒说他一生中从未面对过如此巨大的压力。尽管整个地区的教育管理者都知道有作弊行为，但他说“没有人愿意谈论这个话题，多年来我们接触到了太多的谎言”。2008年，他决定辞职，但是豪尔和凯西基金会承诺给他“激励奖金”，每年1.5万美元。他于是继续留下来，盼望和有一天他可以鼓起勇气让这个地区的教育管理者意识到不能再提高分数的目标了。
到了2008年，沃勒的小团体中有了9位老师，用他的话来说，作弊已经变成了一个“运作良好的机制”。亚特兰大东南部一位小学校长给沃勒发来一封电子邮件，里面是一个表格，详细标明了每个年级的学生需要正确回答出多少道题目才可以通过考试，教育部从未公开发布过这些信息。老师们改在音乐教师修改答案，因为他们不想引起监考员的怀疑，他已经察觉到有人出入他的办公室，所以换了一把锁。（第二天，路易斯就在他的学校邮箱中发现了一把新的钥匙。）房间里实在太拥挤了，两位老师把试卷摆在冰箱上，还有人不得不到隔壁房间去工作。路易斯说：“原来只有两个演员的节目现在已经失去控制了。”一位不愿透露姓名的六年级老师说，他参与这件事仅仅是因为他尊重路易斯，他说他是“这里首屈一指的明星老师”和一个“慈善家”。“如果没有路易斯，沃勒肯定不能让这所学校正常运作。就好像是一个国王下面必须要有一位将军，而将军必须要做一些肮脏的事情。”
当老师们对自身的行为感到慌乱时，路易斯提醒他们，这所学校在5年里已经换过三任校长，“别担心，沃勒很快就会离开，等到那时候就好了。”他尽量不去回想作弊的细节，“我们在4月份的时候做了这些事情，那时候考试还是在学校教学楼里进行。”
2008年春天，帕克斯中学的分数已经几乎与英曼公园中学的成绩持平，那是坐落在一个中产社区里的学校，有瑜伽运动房、自行车道和价值数百万美元的校舍。沃勒觉得这样的成绩肯定说不过去，于是给学监迈克尔•皮特兹打电话。皮特兹把地区研究规划问责部主任莱斯特•麦基的手机号码给了沃勒。当沃勒告诉麦基帕克斯中学的成绩异乎寻常地高时，他记得对方说：“菜鸟也能翻身，有时候不一定是坏事，我们等等看是否有人会说什么。”他们没有采取任何行动调查这些不可思议的分数。（我们无法联系到麦基对此发表评论，他没有受到任何起诉。）
帕克斯中学2009年的家长教师委员会主席莫里斯•约翰逊说，他从未“怀疑过这些分数，从来没有”。他几乎每天都在学校里，他看到学校领导和教师付出了“百分之一百一十的努力”，给学生们灌注“赢家思想”。他们的橄榄球队和篮球队从未被击败。利用基金会和捐赠者提供的资金，学生们到华盛顿特区、新奥尔良和纽约去旅行。约翰逊说：“我很高兴看到这些，沃勒先生想要让这些孩子接触生活的另一面，他们终于可以离开这一小片地区了。”
沃勒在当地广受赞誉，成为了教育改革运动的小明星。豪尔邀请他共同出席哈佛领导力大会，还请市民代表在“乔治亚旅游”期间专门来到帕克斯中学，豪尔对他们发表讲话。会议中，有一名中学校长说他的学生无论如何无法达成分数的目标，豪尔说：“你必须要制定自己的目标，”然后指着帕克斯中学的一张数据表格说：“帕克斯就做到了。”沃勒觉得，“就是瞎子也能看出来这些分数是假的。”
帕克斯中学开始吸引越来越多的来访者了解这个学校成绩迅速上升的原因，老师们必须要有统一的口径做出解释。根据沃勒的指示，他们说自己使用“标准基础学习文件夹”，也就是给每个学生掌握每一门课程都列出具体的目标。路易斯在克拉克亚特兰大大学的教育学院读夜校，他在自己的硕士论文中提到了这个方法。他说：“这是一个非常好的系统，但是我们利用它的目的仅仅是隐瞒作弊的事实。”
路易斯对帕克斯中学所得到的关注感到骄傲，他欣喜地发现学生们也对他们受到的教育感到自豪。有几个学生把学校的学区号码纹在手臂上。唯一一次让他感到不自在的嘉奖是帕克斯中学在2009年赢得了“打破神话奖”。他和其他几位教师被邀请到弗吉尼亚州阿灵顿，在万豪酒店的宴会厅参加颁奖仪式。教育部长阿恩•邓肯在仪式上讲话。路易斯对我说：“我向上帝发誓，我需要给那个人——邓肯——写信道歉。我站在人家的地盘上，装作一副洋洋得意的样子，其实什么也没有做。他把我们推到了教育改革的风口浪尖上。”
2009年9月8日，亚特兰大市议会宣布把那一天定为“贝佛莉•L•豪尔博士日”。豪尔刚刚被美国学校管理者学会任命为当年的超级学监，市政府举办了一个仪式，庆祝她让这个地区成为全国市区学校中成绩排名最高的学校之一。在她的领导下，这些学校从GE基金会和比尔与梅林达盖茨基金会得到了4000万美元的资金。在她刚开始担任学监职务的时候，只有不到50％的八年级学生可以通过全国的语言考试。到2009年，通过考试的比例超过90％。
仪式之后的一个月，《亚特兰大宪法日报》的希瑟•伏格尔和约翰•佩里报道，亚特兰大几所学校的成绩存在着统计学上不合理的现象。豪尔的副超级学监在接受采访时说：“我没有必要去研究这类事情。”这篇报道引起了州长学生成绩办公室的注意，他们开始自行调查、分析考试分数中存在的问题，不仅仅是在亚特兰大，还包括了州内所有的学校。2010年初，州政府官员发现有五分之一的学校都存在答题卡上有不正常擦除的现象，而且都是错误的答案被擦掉，改成正确的答案。在帕克斯中学和它的一所附属小学中，75％以上的试卷有值得怀疑的擦除痕迹。
根据州长桑尼•珀杜的指示，亚特兰大教育委员会成立了一个小组，专门调查答题卡的擦除事件。尽管这项调查应当是独立进行的，但负责人却是对该地区教育有大手笔投资，并宣扬其成功经验的民众代表，豪尔的教育官员也在一旁监督。小组的调查结论是，并没有合谋操纵考试成绩的迹象，这个结论被珀杜称为“令人遗憾地草率”。他知道亚特兰大无法对自身进行调查，于是在2010年8月，他下达行政命令，授权前州司法部长、一位公诉人和一位特别调查员进行更加详细、彻底的调查。
据说数十个城市都存在大范围的作弊行为，包括费城、托莱多、埃尔帕索、巴尔的摩、辛辛那提、休斯顿和圣路易斯。据政府问责办公室在2013年发布的一份报告，过去两年里，40个州曾经发现教育者有作弊行为。但是亚特兰大是为数不多的教育者被法院传唤的城市之一。纽约大学的社会学教授詹妮弗•詹宁斯专门研究标准化考试，她说：“很难在体制内找到一个愿意翻开石头查看地面真相的人。”她提到，即使在德克萨斯这个诞生“有教无类”法案的样板州，学者们也怀疑学生们是否真的像数据反映的那样进步迅猛，有教育官员反映低分学生被阻止参加考试和低报辍学人数的现象。詹宁斯担心，作弊和规避体制的游戏规则等行为所带来的后果是让“政策与反馈过程”不再有效，也就是学生实际获得的知识，与我们所说的改革效果间所存在的差异。她说，鉴于德克萨斯所发生的事情，亚特兰大的作弊行为“早就应该被预料到”。
2007年10月，50名乔治亚调查局的探员造访帕克斯中学和亚特兰大市的其它学校。他们在学校的食堂中就餐，向职员发放名片，在走廊里与教师友好地交谈。路易斯一听说有调查人员进驻，他就做好了坦白的准备。有时候，在一堂课中间，他不得不走出教室，默默地靠在墙上，闭上眼睛。他和妻子已经分居，他们共同抚养女儿。他发现自己晚上躺在床上，被噩梦惊醒。有一次他梦到有人在敲门，他打开门看到以前的一个学生冲他开枪。
他与调查人员的第一次会面是在沃勒的办公室，他怀疑沃勒是否会在房间里安装窃听器，所以说：“我们最好在你的办公室谈话。”几个星期之后，他和另外几位老师在市中心一家律师事务所Balch & Bingham会面，这家事务所的任务是协助调查。调查员对老师们说，只要他们协助调查，就可以免于刑事起诉。一位社会行为老师说：“我们可以商量一下吗？”调查员离开了房间，路易斯对他们说：“现在把戏已经被戳穿了，我不会再让这件事把自己逼疯。”他要求同事们把责任都推到自己头上来，但他们拒绝这么做。
他们决定把事实真相和盘托出。Balch & Bingham的一位律师雷顿•约翰逊旁听了这次面谈，她说，很明显，大部分教师都认为他们实施的是一项没有受害人的犯罪行为。“他们不认为考试有什么意义，所以并没有意识到作弊会贬低孩子们的价值。”与哈佛大学和史蒂文森高中的作弊丑闻不同，学生们并不关心自身的前途，帕克斯中学的作弊者从不相信考试的重要性。他们认为，作弊是他们必须要经历的一个过程，以便他们可以全身心地关注那些看起来与学生生活更相关的问题。
沃勒起初拒绝承认他有作弊行为，他的小算盘是这样的，他并没有亲手参与，所以算不上作弊。调查员希望可以获取更多的信息，他们让一个已经把问题交待清楚的老师拉塔莎•斯迈利私下里录下她与沃勒在帕内拉面包房的一次对话。在交谈过程中，沃勒似乎慌慌张张、疑神疑鬼。他说：“乱套了，一切都乱套了。我们这么辛苦……孩子们努力学习……我不知道……真是破鼓万人捶。”已经到另外一所学校任职的斯迈利说她想念帕克斯中学，他说：“这所学校就要完蛋了。”
在两千多次面谈之后，调查员得出了结论，44所学校有作弊行为，“这个地区弥漫着恐惧、威胁、报复的气氛，让各个级别的作弊行为自由滋生了数年之久。”报告中写到，分数“变成了羞辱和惩罚的残忍工具”。一些教师说他们得到的指示是两个选择：达成分数目标，否则就被列入绩效整改对象名单，这往往是被解雇的先兆。在一所小学的一次教职员会议中，一位校长强迫一名成绩不佳的老师在桌子底下爬。
调查人员的报告并没有得出豪尔指示任何人作弊的结论，但提到了一些她忽略或有意淡化分数被篡改的证据的行为。有一次，她的员工命令一名教育官员销毁一份提到一所小学作弊现象的报告。但是在与豪尔长达8个小时的面谈中，她坚持认为没有理由怀疑学生的分数，因为其它指标也显示了同样上升的迹象。在她的任期中，亚特兰大中学的毕业率提高了30个百分点。在成绩不那么容易被篡改的国家教育进度测试中，亚特兰大学校的阅读分数比其它参与测试的9个城市的分数上升得更快。（评论人士认为，这种现象与人口结构的变化有关，但似乎也的确正明了成绩的提升。）
为了进一步解释分数的提高，豪尔告诉调查员，“一个高效率的老师在三年时间里可以彻底弥合出身贫穷的儿童与出身于中产阶级家庭儿童之间的差距。”这套理论在早期来源于田纳西大学的一位统计学家威廉•L•桑德斯，但是，这个最终导致全国的教师被残酷压榨的理论似乎被过分夸大，成为了一种神话。根据美国统计署最近的一份报告，大部分研究显示，教师对学生成绩的影响在1％到14％之间。
贝佛莉•豪尔
在美国数学学会任职15年的约翰•尤因对我说，他不明白为什么教育者“如此迷恋数字”，似乎数字的权威远远超过他们自己的判断。他用“坎贝尔原则”来解释这个问题，也就是使用单一标准衡量复杂社会现象中存在的奉献：量化标准（比如考试分数）的比重越大，使用它的人和它所衡量的内容就越容易腐化。他说：“教育的最终目标不是去让学生正确地回答问题，而是去培养有好奇心、创造力、可以应对未来生活的学生。”他在2011年《美国数学学会通讯》上发表的一篇文章中，警告政策制定者正在使用数学“来恐吓、遏制有关教育的目标和成功的标志的讨论”。
2011年7月，当地确定了110名教师，他们都承认有过作弊行为，或者被控有管理层的作弊行为。路易斯收到了一封信，上面写到：“你的行为和你的不作为给亚特兰大公立学校带来了尴尬、猜疑、鄙视和名誉扫地。”地方上打算把他开除，除非他能在一场听证会上证明他是无辜的。其他帕克斯中学的老师也收到了同样的信件，他们想要辞职，但是路易斯说他们应该“手挽手站在行刑队面前”表达对帕克斯中学的忠诚。
一个来自奥克兰的女人从中学时代就与路易斯保持断断续续的联系，她看到新闻中出现了他的名字，就打电话给他，说：“告诉我你没有作弊。你是我认识的人中最聪明的一个，告诉我你没有变。”他请她来到亚特兰大听他的当面解释。2011年秋天，他们结婚了。让路易斯很满意的一点是，“她和我是青梅竹马，依然用我母亲灌输给我的那些品质来要求我。”在他母亲看来，作弊行为是一种温和的不合作姿态。她说当她一看到亚特兰大作弊事件的报道，就知道“我儿子肯定参与其中”。
他的解雇听证会于2012年3月在地区办公室总部举行。这时有关作弊调查的第一个听证会，当地大部分受牵连的教师都已经辞职。三名前教育专员被校董事会任命为陪审员。刘易斯穿着一件灰色条纹衬衫，下摆没有扎起，他坐在那里，手托着下巴，眼睛看着地面。他放弃聘请律师的权利，他说：“我自己惹了麻烦，是自作自受，我自己来面对。”听证会官员请他做开场白，他说：“我相信证据会证明，亚特兰大的公立教育体制存在问题。这就是我的开场白。”乔治亚州调查局的一位探员作为证人出席听证会，在处理完路易斯的问题之后说，他“看起来很受学校和教师们的爱戴，他们都很尊敬他。”
当路易斯被律师提问的时候，他不停地引用宪法第五修正案（译者注：不可自证其罪），小心翼翼地避免牵连他人。他的话不多，直到结尾陈词。他站起来，声泪俱下地朗读他准备好的一篇讲稿，其中提到了他在帕克斯中学十一年的职业生涯。他讲到帕克斯中学如何在每年都取得了令人振奋的进步，但是考试分数“让帕克斯中学陷入了是否可以继续存在的泥潭”。很快，数字变成了“一切行为的基础动因”。他提到了学生们的反对情绪，他们“落后但不掉队，失败但不放弃”。他对听证会成员说：“你们或许不明白我为什么没有辞职，那是因为我内心的道德观念和我多年来教给我的学生们的道德观念是一样的。那就是当你遭遇迫害、面对困境时，你必须坚持到底。”
在所有被列入作弊调查名单的178名教育者中，路易斯是第一个被开除的人。他说：“我觉得像是被斧子的钝头重重一击。”他剃掉了长发绺，在牙买加塔法里教的传统中——他有时会把自己当作这个传统的信徒——表示丧子。他说，最让自己想不通的是“我因为做了自己并不相信的事情而被开除”。
他申请过特许学校、选择学校、社区服务中心和监狱的工作，但都没有成功。他最后说：“教育届已经不接受我了。”他扩大了搜索的范围，开始申请一些需要手工劳动的工作。在面试的时候，他向雇主承诺“他会把一个中学教师的坚持、强悍性格特点带到工作中”。他申请了一个装配电缆的工作，在完成了几乎完美的应聘者测试之后，他开始幻想如何把教书的技巧应用到改进装配流程中。但是几天之后，公司告诉他缺少足够的经验。
他的房子被取消抵押赎回权，车子被变卖。老朋友来探望的时候带来各种各样的挣钱点子。他说：“他们出的都是最不合法的主意，比如‘哥们，记得我们曾经去过圣路易斯吗，再来一趟如何？’”他找了一份汽车修理工的工作，养活妻子、刚出生的儿子和上一次婚姻留下来的女儿。
起初，他高兴地看到律师对克里斯托弗•沃勒、贝佛莉•豪尔和其他33名教育管理者及教师提起诉讼。但是，让他不能理解的是这些人的罪名竟然都是谋财。2013年4月2日，他在晚间新闻中看到，他的同事——几乎都是黑人——在媒体称作“逛街”的一次行动中被送入富尔敦县监狱。他们根据“反有组织犯罪及腐化组织法”被起诉——这条法令经常被用来针对像黑手党那样的犯罪团伙，他们的罪名是谋取高分所带来的奖金。豪尔获得的奖金超过50万美元，她面临45年的牢狱生活。
超过一半的被告，包括克里斯托弗•沃勒，表示认罪以求减刑。沃勒目前在距离帕克斯中学3英里的一所教堂里做牧师，他愿意接受缓刑5年的判决，支付4万美元作为补偿，并担任检方的证人。他对我说，他最无法接受的是他作弊的目的竟然被认为是谋取5000美元的奖金。他和帕克斯中学的其他老师自己掏钱来购买日用品、艾滋病药物、家具、学生和家长们的衣服，即使被开除后他们依然在做这些事。他说：“这不是为了钱，我向你保证。”
在一篇冗长的陈情书中，沃勒和其他被告讲述了过去12年里教育政策的历史。他们认为，有教无类法案加上地区的分数目标，让作弊成为一个似乎无可避免的选择。一位校长讲述了“考试毒性文化中，分数高于一切的方向，即使是用不正当手段获得的”。另一位校长说，当地“主要关注……就是达到分数目标，而不是关注学生们的真正需求。”
在他们的律师发给我的声明中，豪尔和迈克尔•皮特兹均否认有任何过失，并说他们对陪审团判决他们无罪具有信心。豪尔写到：“我从未命令、要求或容忍作弊达标的行为，也不知道作弊的事情。”她说在制定目标的问题上，她“要求当地教育官员正直行事”。她还说，与有教无类法案的目标相比，亚特兰大的标准“肯定更高”，惩罚则不那么“严厉”。（她的很多员工对此表示不认同，当地之所以与众不同，是因为它要求每年都要有特定比例的学生超过既定目标。）
调查事件之后，乔治亚州考试的形势进一步升级。尽管州政府用更全面的衡量方式取代了标准能力测试，但乔治亚州在今年秋天实施了一套新的教师评定规则，教师能力的50％由分数决定。只有实施了套规则，加上绩效奖励制度，学校才有机会得到奥巴马总统价值4亿美元的“力争上游”教改资金。乔治亚教育家协会——代表8.4万名教师的组织——发言人蒂姆•凯拉罕对我说：“整个州和亚特兰大市一损俱损、一荣俱荣，我们对此并不热心。”他说很多教师变得心灰意冷，纷纷选择提早退休，或者到私立学校任职。他说：“我们的教师们那些最优秀的品质——他们的幽默感、对学科的热爱、高昂的情绪、对学生个体的兴趣——已经不再受到推崇和尊重了，因为这些品质无法用数字来衡量。”
今年春天，路易斯在一家抵押放款公司找到了一份数据分析师的工作。他对这份工作极为兴奋，以至于他所释放出的能量与周围的同事不甚协调。我在乔治亚州东中心的一件低矮平房里见到他，他说他觉得同事们都很冷淡，喜怒不形于色。他经常梦到他的学生，“我想念那个有一大堆精力充沛的小孩子们的房间。”在他的梦里，沃勒也会出现，有时候向他道歉，有时候请他回学校工作。
路易斯期望可以听到贝佛莉•豪尔在审讯中如何解释，听证会本来安排在8月，但推迟了几个月，因为豪尔正在接受癌症治疗。她目前卧床不起，恐怕无法出席庭审了。多年来，路易斯一直以为是豪尔指示别人作弊，但现在，他开始怀疑她是否真是一个理想主义的化身，根本不了解她所营造出来的这个环境，即使当一切慢慢变得清晰，她也不愿承认摆在自己面前的证据而改变自己的初衷——也就是教育改革必将让孩子们摆脱贫穷。路易斯说：“我知道有时候你会身处战场，当你挥拳的时候，你那么迫切地想要获胜，根本没有看清你打到的究竟是什么。”
去年，帕克斯中学与森林山中学和平，路易斯曾经说那是“我们的竞争对手”。学生们依然在帕克斯中学的校舍里上课，但是这里已经改名，而且下一年他们就要搬到匹兹堡以外一座翻新的校舍里去。社区里的人都不知道这所空置的建筑物未来会派什么用场，路易斯觉得是自己的错误才让帕克斯中学不复存在。根据地区教育部门的说法，这所学校关闭的原因是新生数量太少，但是匹兹堡居民认为原因是帕克斯中学的声誉受损。在针对作弊行为的调查，以及9名教师和校领导离开之后，学生们的成绩每年都在下降。
路易斯告诉我，还有一个星期，他最有希望的一个学生，2006年毕业于帕克斯中学的尼基西亚•杰克逊就要从埃默里大学毕业了。她邀请路易斯和其他两名老师去参加她的毕业典礼。路易斯发现自己情不自禁地谋划起杰克逊的未来。她将会进入一家法律学院，成为一名法官，无论什么样的被告出现在她的法庭里，她都会全身心地投入感情。之后她会成为匹兹堡孩子们的榜样，就像他曾经的那样。过去一年来，他总是把自己可怜的薪水省下一小部分，这样他可以经常给杰克逊汇去一些钱。“这是生活留给你的一点点积蓄，”他打算在毕业典礼上对她说，“展开你的翅膀吧，就要起风了。”
原文：
Christopher Waller, the principal of Parks, was lauded in Atlanta, and became a minor celebrity of the school-reform movement.
One afternoon in the spring of 2006, Damany Lewis, a math teacher at Parks Middle School, in Atlanta, unlocked the room where standardized tests were kept. It was the week before his students took the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, which determined whether schools in Georgia had met federal standards of achievement. The tests were wrapped in cellophane and stacked in cardboard boxes. Lewis, a slim twenty-nine-year-old with dreadlocks, contemplated opening the test with scissors, but he thought his cut marks would be too obvious. Instead, he left the school, walked to the corner store, and bought a razor blade. When he returned, he slit open the cellophane and gently pulled a test book from its wrapping. Then he used a lighter to warm the razor, which he wedged under the adhesive sealing the booklet, and peeled back the tab.
He photocopied the math, reading, and language-arts sections—the subjects that would determine, under the No Child Left Behind guidelines, whether Parks would be classified as a “school in need of improvement” for the sixth year in a row. Unless fifty-eight per cent of students passed the math portion of the test and sixty-seven per cent passed in language arts, the state could shut down the school. Lewis put on gloves, to prevent oil from his hands from leaving a residue on the plastic, and then used his lighter to melt the edges of the cellophane together, so that it appeared as if the package had never been opened. He gave the reading and language-arts sections to two teachers he trusted and took the math section home.
Flipping through its pages, he felt proud of how much material he had covered that year. “Without even reading the question, I could tell you just by the shape of the graph, ‘Oh, my kids know that,’ ” he told me. He put the test in his fireplace once he’d confirmed that he had taught the necessary concepts. But he worried that his students would struggle with questions that were delivered in paragraph form. Some of his seventh-grade students were still reading by sounding out the letters. It seemed unfair that the concepts were “buried in words.” Lewis felt that he had pushed them to work harder than they ever had in their lives. “I’m not going to let the state slap them in the face and say they’re failures,” he told me. “I’m going to do everything I can to prevent the why-try spirit.”
The principal of Parks, Christopher Waller, knew that he had seen the questions before the test. Waller told me that Lewis was a “star teacher,” a “very hard worker, who will go the extra mile.” When the math portion of the test had been completed, Lewis said that Waller asked him how his students had done. Since Lewis had looked at the questions, it no longer seemed like a big deal to review the answers. Lewis returned to the testing office and opened up the answer sheets of a few students in his class who got average grades. He looked for a hard question and, when he saw that they’d solved it, he moved on, assuming that they had done fine. Then he said that he “piddled” in the room, wasting time. When he felt that he had been in there long enough, he told Waller that it looked as if his students had done O.K. But Waller told him to check the answers of students who weren’t in his class. This time, when he looked, Lewis saw that some of the smartest students at Parks had the wrong answers.
At the end of the testing week, Lewis went back to the testing office with Crystal Draper, a language-arts teacher. For about an hour, they erased wrong answers and bubbled in the right ones. They exchanged no words. Lewis couldn’t even look at her. “I couldn’t believe what we’d been reduced to,” he said. He tried to stay focussed on the mechanics of the work: he took care to change, at most, one or two answers for every ten questions. “I had a minor in statistics, and it’s not that hard to figure out windows of probability,” he told me. Many students were on the cusp of passing, and he gave them a little nudge, so that they would pass by one or two points.
A month later, when the scores came back, Waller told the students to gather in the hallway outside the cafeteria, where there was a spread of ice cream, pizza, and hot wings. A teacher announced, “You did it! You finally made it!” For the first time since the passage of No Child Left Behind, Parks had met its annual goals: the percentage of eighth graders who passed rose thirty-one points in reading and sixty-two points in math. “Everyone was jumping up and down,” Neekisia Jackson, a student, said. “It was like our World Series, our Olympics.” She went on, “We had heard what everyone was saying: Y’all aren’t good enough. Now we could finally go to school with our heads held high.”
Parks Middle School is three miles south of downtown Atlanta, in Pittsburgh, a neighborhood bordered by a run-down trucking lot and railway tracks fallen into disuse. Founded after the Civil War, Pittsburgh was a black working-class area until the nineteen-sixties and seventies, when residents began leaving for the suburbs. Half the homes in the neighborhood are now vacant. Lewis’s students called the area Little Vietnam and Jack City, because of all the armed robberies. Once, when Lewis stopped at a convenience store to tell his students to go home and do their homework, a prostitute approached him. “I’m, like, ‘Whoa, whoa, I’m a teacher!’ ” he said. “And she’s, like, ‘I don’t care. Teachers get down.’ ”
Lewis grew up in a violent neighborhood in East Oakland, California, in a house built by Habitat for Humanity. His father was a crack addict, and his mother supported four children by working as a bank teller; she later opened a safe house for ex-prostitutes. “She’s a real underdog-lover,” Lewis told me. On the weekends, she took Lewis to picnics hosted by the Black Panther Party. She worked so much that the neighbors helped raise Lewis: they often told him to wash his face or tuck in his shirt or put Vaseline on his chapped lips. His football coach became a father figure and encouraged Lewis to go to college in Atlanta so that he could have a “historical black experience.”
Lewis received a scholarship to attend Clark Atlanta University, which is less than three miles from Parks. He was homeless for several months and got arrested for possessing marijuana, but he still earned good grades. He was a “lightweight nerd,” as he put it. When he graduated with degrees in math and philosophy, his mother urged him to try teaching, since he’d always had a talent for simplifying complex ideas. In 2000, he started working at Parks and was immediately moved by his students’ despair. “Being born in the seventies, coming out of the civil-rights movement, amidst the Black Panther meetings in Oakland, I didn’t have limitations,” he told me. “I was raised in the generation that lost the shame of being black.”
His students, who came to school with bad breath and parkas that smelled of urine, seemed to lack the conviction that they would ever leave the neighborhood. Parks was run by an older woman who was not inclined to innovate. Homework was a joke. There was litter in the hallways, and students urinated in trash cans. A veteran teacher told Lewis that only twenty per cent of his students would grasp what he was teaching, so he should go over each lesson five times. “Please—I’m a better teacher than that,” he remembered thinking. “She was just making excuses for why she spiralled in circles.”
Atlanta’s school superintendent, Beverly Hall, who was hired in 1999, quickly became aware of the problems at Parks. A neighborhood minister repeatedly called to complain about drug dealing in front of the school. Hall, who was born in Jamaica, had spent her career in underperforming urban districts: she began as a teacher in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in the seventies, and moved on to become a superintendent in Newark. At one of her first meetings in Atlanta, she said, someone “got up and was literally screaming, ‘Just tell us what to do. We’ve got to do something about education in Atlanta.’ ” Three-quarters of the students in the district were living near or below the poverty line—ninety per cent were black or Latino—and fewer than forty per cent graduated from high school.
Hall belonged to a movement of reformers who believed that the values of the marketplace could resuscitate public education. She approached the job like a business executive: she courted philanthropists, set accountability measures, and created performance objectives that were more rigorous than those required by No Child Left Behind, which became law in 2002. When a school met its targets, all employees, including bus drivers and cafeteria staff, received up to two thousand dollars. She linked teacher evaluations to test scores and warned principals that they’d be fired if they didn’t meet targets within three years. Eventually, ninety per cent were replaced. She repeated the mantra “No exceptions and no excuses.”
In 2001, she hired a new principal for Parks, a former college-football player named Michael Sims, whom Lewis described as the “father I never had.” Sims focussed nearly as much on building a sense of community as he did on academics: he renovated the school, hired guidance counsellors, and replaced the “P” that had fallen off the sign at Parks’s entryway. He told students that they were representing their school even when they were off campus. If they got into a fight over the weekend, they would be suspended on Monday. The school provided computer classes to parents, who had been so removed from their children’s academic lives that it was a struggle to get them to sign progress reports. “We had to trick the parents and give away this, that, and the third in order to get them into the building,” Lewis said. “Some of them looked like they were on drugs—not fun drugs but ruin-your-life drugs.”
Parks started to feel like a place where both teachers and students, nearly all of them black, could expose their vulnerabilities. “All our little problems that we grew up hiding from the rest of the world—it became our line of communication,” Lewis said. He told students to dump their laundry into the back of his pickup truck, so that he could wash it for them, and encouraged them to sleep at his house when their mothers were absent or high. (Few had fathers in their lives.) He became the football coach, and if practice ran late he dropped students off at their homes. Several ended up calling him Dad. He told them, “I don’t know how you feel about me, but I, at least, feel like I made it. If you want to know if you can make it, look at me.” He married a language-arts teacher at Parks, who was similarly devoted to the students. “She was a great model of what an adult woman is supposed to act like, talk like,” Lewis said.
With the help of a college-prep program called Project Grad, which Beverly Hall implemented after securing millions of dollars from donors, Parks set up after-school programs and hired tutors. A 2004 documentary called “Expect the Best” explained that Parks, which had previously functioned like “day care,” had become a “model of what a good school can and should be.” The video shows Lewis on his porch, playing chess with a student who had moved in with him. The narrator of the video explains that the student, Antonio, was living with his math teacher “because his mother is in no shape to support or care for him. This arrangement, though temporary and unusual, has done a lot to stabilize Antonio’s life.”
The school steadily improved, but students’ test scores were never high enough for Parks to make “adequate yearly progress,” a measurement defined by No Child Left Behind, a nearly utopian statute that required all public-school students to become proficient in math and reading by 2014, as judged by their test scores. The reform model, which drew on an accountability system used in Texas in the nineties, ignored less quantifiable signs of intellectual development. Schools that didn’t progress at an appropriate pace were eligible for federally funded support. They also received a series of escalating sanctions, including state monitoring, a revised curriculum, replacement of staff, and restructuring or closure of the school. LaShawn Hoffman, the head of the Pittsburgh Community Improvement Association, told me that when Parks opened, in 1966, it was a source of pride for the community, the neighborhood’s “jewel.” Now he worried about the burden of another large abandoned building in the neighborhood.
When Lewis showed up for the new school year in 2004, Parks’s principal was absent. Lewis knew that Sims would never miss the first day of school and assumed that he must have been in some sort of accident. Then a district administrator called a meeting and explained that Sims would not be returning; he had resigned after being accused of sexual misconduct in a previous job.
After a few months, Christopher Waller, a Methodist pastor who had worked in public schools for nine years, became the new leader of Parks. Waller was burly and freckled, and, at thirty-one, he was the youngest principal in the district. After a week of introductory meetings, he saw that the district prioritized testing results more than any other place he’d ever worked did. “All decisions have to be made by data—you have to be baptized in it,” he told me. “I lived it, slept it, ate it.”
He held a meeting with the faculty and explained that teachers needed to use data to drive every aspect of instruction. Lewis raised his hand and said, “I need to be excused from this meeting.” He left the room. Another administrator followed him into the hallway and tried to appease him, but he told her, “You all come in here trying to change every goddam thing we’ve been doing for years. We’ve been making step-by-step progress, and it’s working.”
The next day, Lewis said that Waller asked him to come to his office. “I hear you’re the man around here,” he told Lewis. At that point, Lewis was the football, soccer, and softball coach, the athletic director, and the founder of the chess club. As they talked, Lewis found himself impressed by Waller’s intellect and social awareness. When Waller asked him what changes he should make, Lewis told him to bide his time. “It’s like if you get a new stepmom in the house,” he said. “If she immediately comes in and changes everything, she’ll be hated forever.”
Every fall, the district held a convocation ceremony, which was usually in the Georgia Dome, where the Atlanta Falcons play. Schools that met their performance targets were seated on the field, while schools that fell short were relegated to the bleachers. Teachers spoke nervously all year about whether they would “make the floor.” At Waller’s first convocation, in 2005, he was humiliated by his seat in the bleachers. “It’s almost like having leprosy in the Bible,” he told me. “No one wants to associate with failure.”
Waller quickly learned that principals in the district insured loyalty by working with teachers whom they had personally selected. At one of his first meetings with Beverly Hall, Waller said that he was willing to work with the school’s current teachers. Hall laughed and told him, “You will need your own team.” Waller began encouraging veteran teachers to retire early. Lewis soon found himself one of the most senior teachers at Parks. He worried that the new faculty were being deprived of the “ethical guidance that comes from listening to older teachers.”
Under Hall, four sub-superintendents oversaw different regions within the district, making sure that schools advanced toward their targets. After Waller had been at the school for a year, he received a stern memo, titled “Mid-year Review,” from Michael Pitts, the sub-superintendent who was responsible for Parks. “Please understand that no excuse can or will be accepted for any results that are less than 70% of school-based target acquisition,” Pitts wrote.
Waller told Pitts that the targets—set by the district’s Department of Research, Planning, and Accountability—were unrealistic. It took a quarter of the year just to gain students’ trust. Two students, he said, were raped in the neighborhood that year. Others lived alone, with neither parent at home, or were on the verge of being placed in juvenile detention. When a student was arrested for stealing cars, Waller went to court and asked the judge not to send him to jail. Waller told me, “The administration wanted to move kids out of poverty—I do believe that. But test scores could not be the only means.” When Waller expressed his concerns, Pitts reiterated that Hall accepted no excuses, and told him, “The way principals keep their jobs in Atlanta is they make targets.”
Waller struggled to understand his students’ success in elementary school. They had passed the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test in fifth grade, and yet when they arrived at Parks they were reading at a first-grade level. “The students and the data aren’t matching,” he told Pitts. “They’ve got to be cheating at the elementary schools. There’s no way those scores are real.” One day, when he and Pitts were walking through Parks, Waller pointed out a disruptive sixth grader who had excelled on the test the year before, even though his academic skills were dismal. He recalled that Pitts laughed and said, “Sometimes children just test well.” Then Pitts told him, “You need to keep your mouth shut.” He urged Waller to “forge stronger relationships” with the principals at the elementary schools, which Waller interpreted as a message to learn how they’d artificially boosted their scores.
Waller concluded that the school couldn’t meet its targets that year. More than half of the students were performing below grade level. The reading coördinator, Sandra Ward, told Waller that she had heard about an elementary school where teachers changed students’ answers under the pretense of erasing stray pencil marks. According to Waller and Ward, the vice-principal, Gregory Reid, informed them that he knew of another school where teachers were obtaining test questions in advance. (Reid has denied this.) Waller decided to adopt both strategies by recruiting a “team” of teachers who could be trusted. He told himself, “We’re helping them. They’ll catch up by eighth grade.”
The first teacher he approached was Lewis, who was resistant. Lewis told him, “Fuck the test. Our students are doing hot. We know they are learning.” But after several months, Lewis said, Waller “chewed away at me.” Waller reminded him that Parks was a “sanctuary,” a “safe haven” for the community. If the school didn’t meet its targets, Waller explained, the students would be separated and sent to different schools, outside Pittsburgh. Lewis said he felt that “it was my sole obligation to never let that happen.”
In 2006, Tameka Grant, a sixth-grade teacher at Parks, sent a letter to Beverly Hall. She wrote that Waller was attempting to persuade teachers to cheat by describing how the teachers at elementary schools did it. “If you can’t beat them, join them,” she heard him say. She also noted that he often asked teachers how many of their students would pass the test, and when they equivocated he said, “Are you a team player? Are you on my team?”
The president of the Atlanta Federation of Teachers sent a letter to the district’s central office, reporting that “Mr. Waller frequently intimidates the staff by telling them that the school will either be closing, or will be taken over.” The letter described an “us/them mentality among staff where Mr. Waller works with new staff and not old and is trying to divide and conquer the seasoned staff.” Lewis and other favored teachers were part of what became known as “Waller’s circle.” Some had their own reserved parking spaces.
After learning of the complaints, Pitts, the sub-superintendent, attended a faculty meeting at Parks. Teachers remember him saying, “Stop writing letters about Waller, because he is not going anywhere. There is nothing you can do to make us think negatively of Principal Waller.” Lewis said he admired Tameka Grant for writing the letter, and he found it confusing that Pitts seemed to view her complaints as a low form of snitching. “I was, like, Damn, I thought that was kind of our obligation,” he said.
At the request of the district’s Office of Internal Resolution, a private investigator, Reginal Dukes, looked into the reported problems and, in March of 2006, concluded that teachers at Parks had cheated on the Georgia Middle Grades Writing Assessment, leaking the essay prompt to students. Dukes presented his preliminary findings to Hall at a lunch meeting with her senior staff and was shocked by her apparent lack of interest. “I expected her to take definite action,” he told me. Instead, he was informed that he couldn’t hire any additional investigators. Hall asked few questions. The only one he remembered was “Is there any more evidence?” “That question floored me,” Dukes said. “I’d just gone through this litany of violations.”
Waller was never reprimanded, and he said he never heard anything about the outcome of the investigation. The next year, Tameka Grant was transferred against her will to Long Middle School, known at the time as one of the most dangerous schools in the district.
In 2007, Parks had to score even higher to surpass its falsely achieved scores from the previous year. According to statements later made by teachers and administrators (obtained through Georgia’s open-records act), the cheating process began to take the form of a routine. During testing week, after students had completed the day’s section, Waller distracted the testing coördinator, Alfred Kiel, by taking him out for leisurely lunches in downtown Atlanta. On their way, Waller called the reading coördinator to let her know that it was safe to enter Kiel’s office. She then paged up to six teachers and told them to report to the room. While their students were at recess, the teachers erased wrong answers and filled in the right ones. Lewis took photographs of the office with his cell phone so that he could make sure he left every object, even the pencils on Kiel’s desk, exactly as he’d found them.
Lewis dreaded the process. It felt to him like “a bad date where you’ve had too much to drink.” He woke up the morning after erasing answers and thought, I shouldn’t have gone that far. He worried that, because of the cheating, students wouldn’t develop “the feeling you get when you take a test and know whether you did all right or whether you knocked that shit out of the park,” he said. He also felt guilty that other teachers were deprived of feedback. Lewis never told his wife that other teachers were correcting her students’ answers. One year, she got the highest scores in the building. Lewis said, “I wasn’t going to burst her bubble. I was, like, ‘Good job. Keep going strong.’ ”
At happy-hour drinks, he and other teachers complained that the legislators who wrote No Child Left Behind must never have been near a school like Parks. He felt as if he and his colleagues were part of a nationwide “biological experiment” in which the variables—the fact that so many children were hungry and transient, and witnessing violence—hadn’t been controlled. David Berliner, the former dean of the school of education at Arizona State University, told me that, with the passage of the law, teachers were asked to compensate for factors outside their control. He said, “The people who say poverty is no excuse for low performance are now using teacher accountability as an excuse for doing nothing about poverty.”
Hall’s targets required that the number of students who met standards rise by nearly three per cent annually; in addition, a group of students had to “exceed” standards each year. Later, when asked by a state investigator how she had arrived at those figures, she acknowledged that there were no studies supporting that rate of improvement. According to Waller, the district became increasingly “corporate,” with every school focussed on the “bottom line.” He wrote teachers’ targets in marker on the floor of the entryway to their classrooms, in view of the students. He instructed the teachers, “I need those numbers,” and, “You need to teach to the test. Do what you’ve got to do.”
A 2007 report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, titled “Beating the Odds at Atlanta’s Parks Middle School,” attributed its unlikely progress, in part, to its “relentless focus on data.” The report noted that Waller kept an index card in his pocket listing all the school’s achievements, which he read aloud to parents and students. “Even the kids know their data,” Waller said. Kiel, the testing coördinator, told the foundation that data is a “passion, it’s a love, because it tells the truth: it’s not what I think—and what I feel, and what ought to be, and how I perceive it—but how it actually is.”
Lewis was initially enthusiastic about judging teaching by what appeared to be an objective metric. Since college, he had found himself devising mathematical equations to make sense of events in his own life. He was no longer as disappointed when his father, who was in and out of rehab, didn’t return his calls, because he saw the situation in terms of mathematical probability: if he assigned a zero to every day that his father hadn’t called and a one to every day that he had and added all the digits and divided them by three hundred and sixty-five, he saw that the probability that his father would call on any given day was about zero. His calculations “gave me back my sense of control,” he said.
But Lewis began to worry that mathematics had assumed an unhealthy role in the district. “Data” and “accountability” had become almost magic words: if administrators repeated them enough, it seemed they believed that scores should rise, even if there hadn’t been significant enhancements in instruction. Lewis welcomed the district’s new emphasis on reading—teachers got specialized training and taught reading more intensively—but many of the other reforms were oriented around deadlines and time frames. Lewis said, “We had two weeks to teach percentages, and if you’re still on percentages at week three, because your kids don’t get it yet, they’ll say, ‘You don’t teach well enough!’ Well, come, now, we are dealing with human brains.” He continued, “I sincerely believe that demographics does not determine destiny. But you have to be patient.”
Lewis felt pressure not only to make testing targets but to meet more ambitious attendance goals. After two years of improvement, teachers began taking attendance later in the day so that students had more time to get to school. Eventually, Lewis recalled, the teachers ceased marking absences altogether. In a letter of complaint, the school secretary, who refused to delete absences from the records, informed the district’s central office that her attendance duties had been taken away and “given to someone whom my principal calls a team player.” “I am lying low because I feel my job is on the line,” she wrote. “I am so overwhelmed by what I’m seeing.”
Waller said that he had never experienced so much pressure in his life. Although administrators throughout the district knew that there was cheating, he said that “nobody wanted to talk about it.” “We’d been cultivated in so many untruths throughout the years,” he told me. In 2008, he decided to resign, but Hall worked with the Casey Foundation to give him an “incentive award grant” of fifteen thousand dollars. He agreed to stay, believing that soon he would have the strength to tell the district that its targets couldn’t continue to rise.
By 2008, there were nine teachers on Waller’s team, and cheating had become a “well-oiled machine,” as he put it. A principal at an elementary school in southeast Atlanta e-mailed Waller charts detailing the number of questions students in each grade needed to answer correctly in order to get a passing score—information that the state’s Department of Education does not publish. The teachers now changed answers in the chorus room, because they didn’t want to raise the suspicions of the testing coördinator, who noticed that someone had been in his office and had changed the lock. (A day later, Lewis found a copy of the new key in his school mailbox.) The room was so crowded that two teachers placed test booklets in a cooler and took them to another room. “It went from a two-man show to out of control,” Lewis said. A sixth-grade teacher, who asked that his name not be used, told me that he got involved only because he respected Lewis, whom he described as the “alpha male of the building” and a “humanitarian.” “I don’t think Waller could have run the school without him,” he said. “It’s kind of like every king has to have a general, and the general gets his hands way dirtier than the king does.”
When teachers panicked about what they’d done, Lewis reminded them that the school had already gone through three principals in five years. “Calm down,” he told them. “Waller’s going to be gone in a minute. Let’s just survive until he’s gone.” He tried not to reflect on the cheating process at all. “Cheating was just something we did in April, when the tests were in the building,” he said.
In the spring of 2008, Parks’s scores were almost as high as those of a middle school in Inman Park, a gentrified neighborhood with yoga studios, bike paths, and million-dollar houses. Waller thought the results seemed obviously false, and he called his supervisor, Michael Pitts, to warn him. Pitts gave Waller the cell-phone number for Lester McKee, the executive director of the district’s Department of Research, Planning, and Accountability. When Waller explained that Parks’s results were unusually high, he said that McKee responded, “Shit happens, and sometimes when it happens it’s not always bad. Let’s see if anyone else says something.” The district took no action to investigate the improbable scores. (McKee, who could not be reached for comment, was not charged with any wrongdoing.)
Morris Johnson, the president of the parent-teacher association at Parks in 2009, told me that he never “questioned those test scores—not for one minute.” He was in the school nearly every day, and he saw administrators and teachers giving “a hundred per cent plus” and instilling in students a “winning attitude.” Both the football and the basketball teams were nearly undefeated. Using money from fund-raisers and donations, students took field trips to Washington, D.C., New Orleans, and New York. “I was so impressed,” Johnson said. “Mr. Waller wanted to expose these kids to other parts of life. They were finally escaping their Zip Code.”
Waller was lauded by the district, and became a minor celebrity of the reform movement. Hall invited him to attend the Harvard Leadership Conference with her, and she arranged a “Tour of Georgia” bus ride for civic leaders which made a stop at Parks, where Hall gave a speech. Once, at a meeting, when the principal of a middle school said that the targets were out of his students’ reach, Hall responded, “You have to make your targets,” and then pointed to a chart with data from Parks, explaining, “Parks did it.” Waller thought it would have been “evident even to a blind man that the scores were not legitimate.”
Parks attracted so many visitors who were eager to understand the school’s turnaround that teachers had to come up with ways to explain it. At Waller’s direction, they began maintaining what they called “standard-based mastery folders,” an index of all the objectives that each student needed to grasp in order to comprehend a given lesson. Lewis, who was taking night classes at the School of Education at Clark Atlanta University, wrote his master’s thesis on the technique. “It was a wonderful system,” he said. “But we only put it in place to hide the fact that we were cheating.”
Lewis took pride in the attention that Parks was receiving, and he liked the fact that his students had developed egos about their education. A few tattooed the number of the school zone on their arms. The only time an accolade made him uncomfortable was when Parks won a 2009 Dispelling the Myth Award. He and other teachers were sent to Arlington, Virginia, for a ceremony in the ballroom of a Marriott hotel. Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, gave the keynote speech. “I swear to God, I need to write that man, Duncan, a letter of apology,” Lewis told me. “I stood in his court and acted like I was doing something I wasn’t. He held us at the tip-top of education.”
On September 8, 2009, the Atlanta city council declared that the date should be known as Dr. Beverly L. Hall Day. Hall had just been named Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators, and the city held a ceremony to honor her for making the district one of the highest-performing urban school systems in the nation. Under her leadership, the district had received more than forty million dollars from the G. E. Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. When she began as superintendent, fewer than fifty per cent of eighth graders met the state’s standards in language arts. By 2009, ninety per cent of eighth graders had passed the exam.
A month after the dedication, Heather Vogell and John Perry, of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, reported that there were statistically improbable testing gains at several schools in Atlanta. Hall’s deputy superintendent told the paper, “I don’t have any reason to look at that.” The paper’s reporting prompted the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement to conduct its own analysis of testing improprieties, not only in Atlanta but throughout the state. In early 2010, the office found that one in five schools exhibited an abnormal pattern of erasure marks, in which a wrong answer had been corrected. At Parks and at one of its feeder schools, there were suspicious erasure marks on tests from more than seventy-five per cent of the classrooms.
At the instruction of the governor, Sonny Perdue, Atlanta’s Board of Education formed a panel to investigate the erasures. Although the investigation was supposed to be independent, it was run by civic leaders who had invested in the district and touted its success, and Hall’s administrators sat in on interviews. The panel concluded that there had been no coördinated effort to manipulate test scores, a finding that Perdue called “woefully inadequate.” He decided that Atlanta was incapable of investigating itself. In August, 2010, he issued an executive order that granted authority to the former state attorney general, along with a prosecutor and a special investigator, to conduct a more thorough investigation.
There have been accounts of widespread cheating in dozens of cities, including Philadelphia, Toledo, El Paso, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Houston, and St. Louis. According to a 2013 report by the Government Accountability Office, forty states detected instances of cheating by educators in the previous two years. But Atlanta is one of the few districts in which educators have been subpoenaed. “It’s hard to find anyone in the system who wants to look under the rock and see what’s there,” Jennifer Jennings, a sociology professor at N.Y.U. who studies standardized tests, said. She noted that even in Texas, whose reform model inspired No Child Left Behind, scholars doubted whether students had progressed as rapidly as the data suggested—administrators exempted low-performing students from taking the test and underreported dropouts. Jennings worries that one consequence of cheating and other forms of gaming the system is that it interferes with the “policy-feedback loop,” the conclusions we draw about student learning and the narratives we tell about reform. Given what happened in Texas, she said, the cheating in Atlanta “should have been very easy to anticipate.”
In October, 2010, fifty agents with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation visited Parks and other Atlanta schools. They ate in school cafeterias, handed out their business cards, and befriended teachers in the doorways of their classrooms. As soon as Lewis learned of the investigation, he was ready to confess. Occasionally, in the middle of teaching a lesson, he had to step outside the classroom and lean silently against the wall, closing his eyes. He and his wife had separated—they shared custody of a young daughter—and he found himself lying in bed, startled awake by nightmares. In one, he heard a knock at his door, and when he opened it one of his former students shot him.
His first meeting with investigators was in Waller’s office. He wondered if Waller was clever enough to bug the room and told the agents, “I’d feel a lot more comfortable at your office.” A few weeks later, he and several other teachers met at the downtown law office of Balch & Bingham, which was assisting with the investigation. The agents told the teachers that anyone who coöperated would be granted immunity from criminal prosecution. A social-studies teacher asked, “Can we all huddle for a minute?” When the agents left the room, Lewis told everyone, “The jig is up. I’m not letting this shit drive me crazy.” He urged his colleagues to blame the cheating on him, but they refused.
They all decided to tell the truth. Righton Johnson, a lawyer with Balch & Bingham who sat in on interviews, told me that it became clear that most teachers thought they were committing a victimless crime. “They didn’t see the value in the test, so they didn’t see that they were devaluing the kids by cheating,” she said. Unlike recent cheating scandals at Harvard and at Stuyvesant High School, where privileged students were concerned with their own advancement, those who cheated at Parks were never convinced of the importance of the tests; they viewed the cheating as a door they had to pass through in order to focus on issues that seemed more relevant to their students’ lives.
Waller initially refused to acknowledge to the agents that he’d cheated. He told himself that, since he hadn’t physically handled the tests himself, he hadn’t committed the act. Hoping to extract more information, the agents asked Latasha Smiley, a teacher who had already confessed, to surreptitiously record a meeting with Waller at a Panera Bread. Waller seemed flustered and suspicious when he spoke with her. “It’s messy—it’s messy,” he said. “We’ve worked too hard . . . all kids can learn. . . . I don’t have—a lot of people kick a dog when they down.” When Smiley, who had transferred to a different school, told Waller that she missed Parks, he responded, “That school is going to hell.”
After more than two thousand interviews, the investigators concluded that forty-four schools had cheated and that a “culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation has infested the district, allowing cheating—at all levels—to go unchecked for years.” They wrote that data had been “used as an abusive and cruel weapon to embarrass and punish.” Several teachers had been told that they had a choice: either make targets or be placed on a Performance Development Plan, which was often a precursor to termination. At one elementary school, during a faculty meeting, a principal forced a teacher whose students had tested poorly to crawl under the table.
The investigators’ report didn’t conclude that Hall had directed anyone to cheat, but it did recount a number of episodes in which she ignored or minimized evidence that scores had been falsely achieved. In one instance, her staff had ordered an administrator to shred a draft of a report that described cheating at an elementary school. But in an eight-hour interview with investigators Hall insisted that there was no reason to doubt students’ scores, because other metrics showed the same trajectory. During her tenure, the graduation rate in Atlanta rose by thirty percentage points. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, which is less susceptible to tampering, Atlanta’s reading scores rose more rapidly than those of the other nine cities where students took the test. (Critics have suggested that the gains may be partly the result of a demographic shift, but it appears that there was also authentic improvement.)
To explain the improvement in scores, Hall told the investigators that “an effective teacher three years in a row will completely close the gap between a child born in poverty and a child born to a middle-income family.” This theory, in its earliest form, derives from a study by William L. Sanders, a statistician formerly at the University of Tennessee, but the findings, which have contributed to a nationwide effort to rate teachers rigorously, have been overstated to the point of becoming a myth. According to a recent statement by the American Statistical Association, most studies show that teachers account for between one and fourteen per cent of variability in test scores.
John Ewing, who served as the executive director of the American Mathematical Society for fifteen years, told me that he is perplexed by educators’ ”infatuation with data,” their faith that it is more authoritative than using their own judgment. He explains the problem in terms of Campbell’s law, a principle that describes the risks of using a single indicator to measure complex social phenomena: the greater the value placed on a quantitative measure, like test scores, the more likely it is that the people using it and the process it measures will be corrupted. “The end goal of education isn’t to get students to answer the right number of questions,” he said. “The goal is to have curious and creative students who can function in life.” In a 2011 paper in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, he warned that policymakers were using mathematics “to intimidate—to preëmpt debate about the goals of education and measures of success.”
In July, 2011, the district placed a hundred and ten teachers who had either confessed to having cheated or been accused of it on administrative leave. Lewis received a letter that read, “Your actions and inactions brought embarrassment, suspicion, scorn, and disrepute upon APS”—Atlanta Public Schools. The district intended to fire him unless he could prove at a hearing that he was innocent of the charges. His colleagues at Parks got similar letters and wanted to resign, but Lewis felt that they should express their devotion to Parks by “standing arm in arm before the firing squad.”
A woman from Oakland who had dated Lewis on and off since middle school saw his name in the news and called him, and said, “Tell me you didn’t cheat. You were the smartest guy I knew. Tell me that guy didn’t change.” He invited her to Atlanta so that he could explain himself in person. In the fall of 2011, they were married. Lewis was comforted by the fact that “she knew me as a child and could hold me to the character that my mom instilled in me.” To his mother, his decision to cheat was an act of civil disobedience. She told him that as soon as she heard about cheating in Atlanta she thought, “I bet my son was part of that.”
His termination hearing was held in March, 2012, at the district’s headquarters. It was the first hearing to arise from the cheating investigation; many of the other teachers in the district who had been implicated resigned. Three former educators, appointed by the school board, served as the jury. Lewis wore a gray striped button-up shirt, untucked, and sat with his chin resting on his hand, looking down. He waived his right to an attorney, thinking, he said, “I did this shit—I brought it onto myself—and I’m going to take it in the face.” When the hearing officer asked him to give an opening statement, he said, “I think the evidence will prove that there was a systemic problem in the Atlanta public schools. That’s my statement.” An agent from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation served as a witness for the district, and, after detailing Lewis’s wrongdoing, explained that he “seemed to be well liked by the school and the teachers that were there. They kind of looked up to him.”
When Lewis was questioned by the district’s lawyer, he repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment, taking care not to incriminate anyone else. He didn’t speak at length until his closing statement, at which point he stood up and began reading, through tears, from a long speech that he had written about his eleven years at Parks. He described how Parks had made incremental progress each year, but its test scores “cast a cloud of doubt over whether Parks Middle School even deserved to exist at all.” Soon, data became the “underlying force behind everything we did.” He described the resilience of the students, who were “down but never out, losing but never lost.” He told the panel, “You may wonder why I haven’t resigned. It’s because the morality that resides within me are the same morals I taught my students for years; that is, whenever you are persecuted or face challenges or circumstances rise against you, you must see things through to the end.”
Of a hundred and seventy-eight educators named in the cheating investigation, Lewis was the first to be fired. “I felt like someone had hit me with the butt end of an axe,” he said. He shaved off his dreadlocks, which, in Rastafarian tradition—a culture with which he sporadically associated—signalled the loss of a child. What troubled him most, he said, was that “I was fired for doing something that I didn’t even believe in.”
He applied for jobs at charter and alternative schools, community centers, and jails, but he didn’t get any of them. “Education let me go,” he finally concluded. He broadened his search, applying for positions that required manual labor. In interviews, he promised employers that he had the “persistence and tough skin of a middle-school teacher to bring to the workforce.” He applied for a job installing cable, and, after getting a nearly perfect score on the applicant test, he daydreamed about how he would use his teaching skills to help employees streamline the process. But a few days later the company told him that he didn’t have enough experience.
His house was foreclosed on and his car was repossessed. Old friends came to him with alternative methods of earning money. “They had some of the most illegal propositions,” he said. “They were, like, ‘Man, remember when we used to take that trip to St. Louis? Don’t you want to take over that run?’ ” He supported his wife, their newborn son, and his daughter from his previous marriage by working as an auto mechanic.
At first, he was glad to see the district attorney bring charges against Christopher Waller, Beverly Hall, and thirty-three administrators and teachers, but he became troubled by the portrayal of their crimes as mercenary. On April 2, 2013, on the evening news, he watched his colleagues, nearly all of them black, report to the Fulton County Jail in an event that was described in the media as a “perp walk.” They were charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute—used to apprehend criminal organizations like the Mafia—and accused of conspiring in order to receive the bonuses tied to high test scores. Hall, who earned more than five hundred thousand dollars in bonuses, faces up to forty-five years in prison.
More than half of the defendants, including Christopher Waller, pleaded guilty to lesser charges. Now the senior pastor at a church three miles from Parks, Waller agreed to serve five years of probation, pay forty thousand dollars in restitution, and testify as a witness for the prosecution. He told me that he was offended by the idea that he would cheat in order to get what amounted to five thousand dollars in bonuses. He and other teachers at Parks spent their own money to buy groceries, H.I.V. medications, furniture, and clothes for students and their mothers, and this continued even after he was fired. “It wasn’t because of the money—I can promise you that,” he said.
In lengthy plea statements, Waller and the other defendants provided a miniature history of the past twelve years in education policy, describing how No Child Left Behind, in conjunction with the district’s targets, created an atmosphere in which cheating came to seem like a reasonable option. One principal described a “toxic culture throughout APS where all that mattered was test scores, even if ill-gotten.” Another said that the district’s “primary focus . . . became meeting targets instead of focusing on the needs of the students.”
In statements sent to me through their respective lawyers, Hall and Michael Pitts both denied wrongdoing and said they were confident that a jury would find them innocent of the charges. Hall wrote, “I did not order, request, or condone cheating to meet targets nor did I have knowledge of cheating.” She explained that in setting targets she had “relied on APS educators to behave with integrity.” She also said that, compared with the objectives set by No Child Left Behind, Atlanta’s targets were “decidedly more incremental in nature,” and the sanctions less “draconian.” (Many of her employees disagree; the district was unusual in that it required a certain percentage of students to exceed targets each year.)
Since the investigation, the stakes for testing in Georgia have escalated. Although the state is replacing the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test with a more comprehensive method of evaluation, this fall Georgia is implementing a new teacher-evaluation program that bases fifty per cent of a teacher’s assessment on test scores. The program, along with a merit-pay system, is required as a condition for receiving a four-hundred-million-dollar grant from President Obama’s Race to the Top program. Tim Callahan, the spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, which represents eighty-four thousand teachers, told me, “The state is going down the same path as Atlanta, and we are not exactly enthused.” He said that many teachers have become so demoralized that they’re retiring early or transferring to private schools. He told me, “Our teachers’ best qualities—their sense of humor, their love for the subject, their excitement, their interest in students as individuals—are not being honored or valued, because those qualities aren’t measurable.”
This spring, Lewis was hired as a database developer at a mortgage company. He was thrilled by the job, to such a degree that his energy level was out of synch with that of his colleagues. When I met him at his home, a small ranch house in East Point, Georgia, he said that he found his co-workers surprisingly detached and unemotional. He often dreamed about his students. “I miss having a classroom full of Energizer bunnies,” he told me. In his dreams, Waller occasionally apologized or offered him a new job.
Lewis was looking forward to hearing Beverly Hall explain herself at the cheating trial, which is scheduled to begin in August. It had been delayed several months, because Hall is undergoing treatment for cancer. She’s now bedridden and may not be able to attend her trial. For years, Lewis had assumed that Hall instructed people to cheat, but now he began to wonder if she’d been so idealistic that she didn’t understand the environment she had created and, when it became clear, didn’t want to undermine her cause—the idea that educational reform could swiftly lift children out of poverty—by acknowledging the evidence that was in front of her. Lewis said, “I know that sometimes when you’re in the fight, and you’re swinging, you want to win so badly that you don’t recognize where your blows land.”
Last year, Parks merged with Sylvan Hills Middle School, which Lewis called “our archrival.” The students were still in the Parks building, which had been renamed, but in a year they would move into a renovated building outside Pittsburgh. No one in the community knew what would become of the vacated building. Lewis blamed himself for the fact that Parks had ceased to exist. According to the district, the school closed because of low enrollment, but Pittsburgh residents believed that it was because Parks’s reputation had been ruined. After the cheating investigation, and the departure of nine teachers and administrators, students’ scores dropped each year.
Lewis told me that in a week one of his most ambitious students, Neekisia Jackson, who graduated from Parks in 2006, would receive her diploma from Emory University. She had asked Lewis and two other former teachers from Parks to come to her graduation. Lewis found himself, almost against his will, plotting out Jackson’s future. She would go to law school, become a judge—no matter what kind of defendant was in her courtroom, she would be able to “empathetically go there”—and then become a model for kids in Pittsburgh, just as he’d been. For the past year, he’d been putting away a small percentage of his paycheck so that he could give Jackson some cash. “This is a real drop in the bucket for what life has in store for you,” he planned to tell her at graduation. “Just spread your wings—the wind is coming.”
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发表于 2015-5-6 09:01
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发表于 2015-5-6 10:22
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