Time for Ethics 101

It's one thing to create incentives; it's another to figure out exactly what behavior you're incentivizing.

Think of it this way: Your company makes widgets; they're OK widgets but senior management wants them to be the best widgets. A manufacturing consultant tells the CEO to provide big bonuses to the workers who make the best widgets and their supervisors, and the program is implemented. Now, you're a supervisor for a dozen people on the widget-production line. At the end of the shift, when they've gone home, you notice that a few of the widgets aren't quite right. With the new bonus program, your salary, your very job in fact, depends on the percentage of perfect widgets produced. If you could fix those wacky widgets quickly, without anyone noticing, would you?

That was pretty simple, but let's turn to a more complicated question: public education. More and more schools, locally and nationally, have instituted testing programs to determine how much children have learned. Teachers, principals, and superintendents are frequently praised or punished, depending on the test results. Not only are bonuses tied to test scores, but jobs are too. Teachers whose students don't improve enough risk being let go. In a tough economic climate, that incentive might easily incline someone to fudge the data a little bit.

And so it has. Only more than a little bit.

According to an article by Kim Severson in today's New York Times (and widely reported elsewhere), a Georgia state investigation has shown "rampant, systematic cheating on test scores" in Atlanta's public schools (the full report, divided into three volumes, is available here, here, and here).

Cheating "occurred at 44 schools and involved at least 178 teachers and principals, almost half of whom have confessed..."

The investigation has centered on former Atlanta school superintendent Beverly Hall, "who was named the 2009 National Superintendent of the Year and has been considered one of the nation's best at running large, urban districts."

Hall was superintendent from 1999 until June of this year. She had announced last November that she would be leaving at the end of the 2010-2011 academic year. According to Severson's story, she left Tuesday for a vacation and was apparently unavailable for comment.

However, according to an article in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Heather Vogell, Hall has issued a statement through her lawyer, "denying that she, her staff or the 'vast majority' of Atlanta educators knew or should have known of 'allegedly widespread' cheating. 'She further denies any other allegations of knowing and deliberate wrongdoing on her part or on the part of her senior staff,' the statement said, 'whether during the course of the investigation or before.'"

Questions have been raised about Atlanta schools' performance -- and that of Dr. Hall -- for many years. Last August, the Times ran a story by Shaila Dewan about a 2009 investigation that "centered on suspicions that answer forms on the state achievement test used to measure progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law had been tampered with by educators."

Dewan reported that during Dr. Hall's tenure,

...[The] graduation rate has increased by 30 percentage points. In the last three years, the college scholarship money offered to Atlanta graduates has doubled. And in the urban district tracking program, where progress is measured by a gold-standard test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, scores have continued to climb.

Now it appears that it was all -- or largely -- a mirage. Instead, there was, as the report states, a "culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation." Those teachers and principals who were willing to report cheating or other misconduct often found themselves "the subject of an investigation and were disciplined."

After reading the stories, what saddened me most was that I wasn't surprised. Assuming that what the state's investigation indicates is true, it's shameful. But I doubt that it sprang into being full-blown. Most likely it started with one or two schools, one or two teachers, one or two principals. And one superintendent for whom winning was apparently not everything, but the only thing.

Sound familiar?

Instead of focusing only on testing math and reading skills, maybe we need to send everyone back to school for a quick brush-up on ethics skills.