DHS teacher Chris Billingsley points to a recent op-ed in the WSJ by AJC Columnist Kyle Wingfield, where he recaps the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal, scolds those who say that less emphasis should be put on standardized tests as a result (In his words “…that makes as much sense as saying the Tour de France should de-emphasize racing times this summer, or not keep them at all, because some cyclists have been caught doping.”), and points to the City Schools of Decatur for a potential solution…

Still, there may well be better ways to use tests to measure teachers’ effectiveness while reducing the temptation to cheat. One possibility that’s already being tried by a number of school systems, including the one in nearby Decatur, Ga.: so-called value-added tests, which gauge a student’s progress over the course of a school year rather than merely determining whether the student is performing at grade level. A teacher who brings a fifth grader from a second-grade reading level to a fourth-grade level, for instance, has helped him make up a lot of ground in one year. She shouldn’t be punished because he’s still behind.

Mr. Billingsley says “He must be referring to…the testing program we use (called MAPP).”

I’m sure many of you school-junkies have been closely following Georgia’s ongoing CRCT “cheating scandal”, where many panicked administrators in certain schools systems across the state made many students instantly and suspiciously brilliant with just an eraser and a pencil.

Just this week the AJC released the list of “severe” schools, those where 25% or more of classrooms had a significant number of erasures from wrong to right answers on the CRCT tests.  More than half of the schools labeled “severe” were within the Atlanta Public School system.  Play them off Keyboard Cat!

Closer to home, according to the AJC’s database, none of the City of Decatur’s schools registered above the “clear” category (“0%-5.4% of classrooms in this school flagged with wrong-to-right changes that fell above the state average”), in the CRCT investigation.

Here’s the percentage of classes flagged by CSD school…

• Clairemont Elementary: 0%
• Oakhurst Elementary: 3.7%
• Winnona Park Elementary: 0%
• Glennwood Academy: 5.3%
• Renfroe Middle School: 4.2%