Live by the test scores . . .
There is palpable concern in the air about the reputation of Chapel Hill High School. It might be a good time in the midst of all the concern about tests and cheating to look for a moment at how we’ve judged that school, and all schools for that matter.
In short, there’s been an emphasis on numbers and not so much on reading comprehension.
In 1999 for instance, a weekend real estate edition of The Wall Street Journal contained a chart — one of those little snapshot info boxes — from an Ohio-based research firm. Using a combination of mainly SATs scores and percentage of students taking AP courses, the company named CHHS one the top ten schools in the U.S.
Not long after that, the school and the district were noting quite often that The Wall Street Journal itself had named Chapel Hill High one of the top ten in the country.
Folks at East Chapel Hill High, which hadn’t been around long enough to make it to the Journal’s chart, were miffed. But not long after, Newsweek, owned by the same corporate media giant that owns Kaplan testing, gave both schools high rankings based mainly on the number of students taking AP tests. (Kaplan, by the way, makes a good bit of its money by helping kids prepare for those tests.)
For its part, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools administration did a lot more student measuring and reporting and was fairly transparent about its struggles to reach all students. And even though disaggregated test scores pointed to trouble, the top ten label wasn’t discarded.
Then the state followed the federal government in getting involved in measuring schools in a more comprehensive fashion. No Child Left Behind, the federal accountability program, has many, many flaws but it did serve to open more eyes to the work before us to live up to education ideals.
By many measures, Chapel Hill High has long deserved its reputation as providing one of the state’s best high school educations. But it is far from perfect. No high school is.
And one of those imperfections, named by students on surveys again and again, is the high stress atmosphere that accompanies the growing reliance on tests and testing to measure student achievement.
The school administration is trying to put the situation in perspective, but in a region where the brand “Chapel Hill High†is highly regarded, the cheating scandal is likely to snowball. It’s one of those “bigger they are/harder they fall†stories and the school community is trying to sort this out under intense and often simplistic media scrutiny.
Just like the athletes on a team disqualified because one of their teammates cheated, the rest of the student body at Chapel Hill High and its many proud graduates will be unfairly sullied.
It’s unfortunate, but it’s also a teachable moment for everyone involved. As this year began, Chapel Hill High’s School Improvement Team recognized that the school needs to improve in the area of honor and integrity. And we have years of reports from students that they feel like they’re in a testing pressure cooker.
As for the scandal in question, we don’t know the specifics or even if reports that this behavior has gone on for a while are true or exaggerated.
The school and district administrations are promising to deal quickly with the issue. Let’s hope that in their haste to get past this episode, they do not fail in fully examining the extent of the cheating and, perhaps even more importantly, the atmosphere that fueled it.