The investigation The Charlotte Observer mounted into actual reports of violence and crime at CMS was certainly welcomed and paper even had the good sense to seek out the Reason Foundation’s Lisa Snell, who has been researching this topic for years. The evidence is clear that CMS has systemically covered up violence problems and that some schools have chronic discipline problems. But the issue is already veering towards a reporting or semantics problem with officials pledging a change in definitions and some different check boxes on some forms.
This misses the point.
As Snell makes clear, and thus far the Observer has resisted, public schools under-report problems and over-report success not because of fear of bad PR or simple confusion, but because money is at stake. Money. M-O-N-E-Y. Snell explains:
But while federal and state legislators congratulate themselves for their newfound focus on school accountability, scant attention is being paid to the quality of the data they?re using. Whether the topic is violence, test scores, or dropout rates, school officials have found myriad methods to paint a prettier picture of their performance. These distortions hide the extent of schools? failures, deceive taxpayers about what our ever-increasing education budgets are buying, and keep kids locked in failing institutions. Meanwhile, Washington?which has set national standards requiring 100 percent of school children to reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014?has been complicit in letting states avoid sanctions by fiddling with their definitions of proficiency.
The federal government is spending billions to improve student achievement while simultaneously granting states license to game the system. As a result, schools have learned to lie with statistics.
The rest of Snell’s June 2005 Reason cover story, How Schools Cheat, is simply required reading.
However, until CMS and educators state wide come clean about the funding incentives to keep just about any warm body enrolled in public school systems, improving matters will be a stretch.
Addendum: These undeniable facts about violence in CMS make me wonder if the Observer would like to recant its past support for forcing the best teachers into the worst schools. Do we still think that would solve anything other than school staffing issues for surrounding counties?
