CHAPTER 1: CHEATING BUT NOT CHEATED

 

September 23, 2014, it is 4:15am and I have something I need to say…

 

I want to clarify the difference between cheating and cheating children. One of the major media frenzies out of this scandal was that children were cheated. After working at the school for more than five years and seeing the means of the students and the families in the Parks Middle School community, I highly took offense to that, so I wanted to take a moment to reflect on why I know children at Parks Middle School were not cheated. Cheating did take place at Parks Middle School, but our children were not cheated. 

 

Students lived in a very rough community; they also had very low socioeconomic bases. Some of these students were growing up in a single-parent environment; others were living with grandparents; some were raising siblings. We tried to put things in place to make sure the kids came to school every single day and they recognized the school as a sanctuary. We did not use the ‘pull the cat out of the hat’ approach to academic learning. We taught standards. We taught to the tests. We tutored. We used differentiated instruction. We did all of the stuff that are best practices that needed to take place for instruction. I’m willing to bet that is what occurred at most, if not all, of the Atlanta Public Schools.

 

The initial onset of cheating was not to get kids to meet the standard. Cheating started because of the targets that had been handed down from APS administration. You were constantly in competition against yourself to meet the targets. Even though the kids who performed at one level moved on to another grade level; they set the standard for the grade level behind them. It became increasingly more difficult to meet that target of kids exceeding the standard from year to year. Once you get up beyond the 84th or 85th percentile in a Title I school, it’s more difficult to get to the 90th percentile or above. 

 

Federal Title I funds are given to schools where at least 35 percent of the children in the school attendance area are from low-income families or at least 35 percent of the enrolled students are from low-income families. The proportion of low-income families is most frequently measured by the percentage of students eligible to receive free and reduced-price lunches. Title I funds are to be used for programs designed to improve the academic achievement of children from low-income homes. Over half of all public schools receive funding under Title I. 

Because targets continued to grow at a much faster rate than Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), it became increasingly difficult to meet the target as set by the Atlanta Public School system. AYP is a measurement defined by the United States federal No Child Left Behind Act that allows the U.S. Department of Education to determine how every public school and school district in the country is performing academically according to results on standardized tests. Targets were set by Dr. Beverly Hall for our schools to meet each year in testing.

 

Kids at my school were exposed to a lot of opportunities. Teachers provided both morning and afternoon tutorials. We started contracts with private companies to assist the teachers.  Educators would take kids out of class to hold additional tutorial groups during the day to catch students up, as well as Saturday tutorials. We held lock-ins at the school to prepare kids for the writing test. Several teachers stayed after work and were not paid extra to prepare. How many people would do that in their professions?

 

Our kids were sent to places that their peers in other schools never had a chance to go. We wanted the kids to realize that the world was much larger than the community in which they resided. Our kids had opportunities to go on trips to Canada, Washington, D.C., and the rain forests of Puerto Rico. We took several trips trying to go above and beyond what was expected of us as educators. Even though the parents could not pay for those trips, we found a way. We raised money. We gave money. We found a way that no child was left out that deserved to go. We wanted them to be exposed to other areas of the world. All of our children had opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities, whether they could afford it or not. If the parents could not pay for uniforms, supplies, camps, or other needs, we found a way to make it happen. We ensured every kid could be included. Any activity that was done at any other school in APS, the kids at Parks had, if not the same activity or better activity, they had a similar activity. They were never left behind.

 

We made sure that our teachers had the proper professional development, and we did evaluate teachers and sent them to workshops and gave workshops to make sure that teachers taught and students learned. Nobody wants to talk about the success of the students at Parks Middle School. We didn’t follow the kids to high school. We didn’t see what Patrick E. did when he went to high school, how he graduated first in his class. We didn’t follow Montenez B. to high school. We didn’t follow any of the kids over to high school. If we had followed them to high school, we would have seen a lot of them go to college - a lot of them succeed in college - and some of them that went to college would not have gone to college had they not had the support that we were able to give them while they were at Parks Middle School.

 

Students increased their self-esteem; they started seeing things differently. They saw a way out. So one of the major things that I want to really make sure that we put on the record, and as a part of what we do and say, is that there was cheating, but the children at Parks Middle School were not cheated. I would argue that you would not get a child from Parks that would really tell you directly that they missed out on something academically or socially because of the erasures that took place at school.

 

            I am not suppressing or denying the fact that cheating took place at Parks. I am simply stating that even though there was cheating, the children were not cheated. The children were held in the highest regard and in the heart of everybody in that school. As a matter of fact, you didn’t come to work there if you didn’t. If you didn’t have a passion for those kids, you couldn’t work at that school.

 

            Parks required passion. It was not a nine to five. You had to adopt children; sponsor clubs; send kids on trips; buy clothes and more[GD1] . It was not a typical go to work, get off at five type of school. You had to have a passion to work in that neighborhood, I cannot think of anyone that took a job under my leadership at Parks Middle School that didn’t have a passion for the kids in that community and the work that it took in order to make the children successful.

 

            There are many students from Parks who have finished high school, finished college, some in graduate school, law school or medical school. They’re making a difference in our local and global community. Children were not cheated, even though cheating did take place.