Columbus Public Schools Scandal

Top administrators of the Columbus, Ohio city school district engaged in systematic, dishonest manipulation of certain student enrollment records and grades, for the purpose of making the district's academic performance look better than it actually was.  This week, the district's former "data czar", Steve Tankovich admitted he designed the record-changing system and taught others to use it.  He pleaded no contest to a felony charge of records tampering and received two years probation.

Tankovich (center) in court

Some people think he got off easy.  They feel he should do some hard time behind bars for his "crime."  And they feel the same way about his his former boss, ex-Superintendent Gene Harris.  They want to throw her in the slammer too.

Harris, Tankovich and others knew what they were doing, and they knew it was wrong.  They'll pay a price for their misdeeds, but it shouldn't be jail time.  Like all public school officials these days, they were under heavy pressure to make their district "look good" in the official state evaluations.  We shouldn't excuse their behavior, but we shouldn't be surprised that they felt compelled to do it.

Instead of focusing on punishment, let's ask why they felt the need to cheat in the first place.

Start with a simple fact:  The GOP hates public education -- it's taxpayer-funded, it's small-d democratic, and it's teachers are unionized.  Republicans believe government has no place in the education "business," and a business opportunity is what they see.  They're eager to charter-ize/privatize all K thru 12 education and turn the whole thing into a strictly economic proposition.  "Can't afford that private school tuition?  It must suck to be poor.  Here's a voucher.  We call it 'choice'."

The conservatives come up with the No Child Left Behind Act and other data-driven/testing-driven/metric-driven education "reforms."  All that proficiency testing and accountability might sound good, but it's also inherently unfair to large urban public school systems.  The socio-economic deck is stacked against them, and no big-city district will ever post test scores comparable to smaller, more affluent districts.  For conservatives, this "proves" their point that public education is failing and not worthy of support.

So, in this test-scores-are-everything environment,  if you're a believer in public education and you don't want to see some of your low-ranking schools closed or reconstituted as charter or private schools, the incentive to manipulate the numbers is strong.  Statistical gamesmanship and data-scrubbing are almost inevitable.

Columbus is not alone.  The same sort of record-tampering has occurred elsewhere in Ohio and across the country.  It's not right, but it's not exactly high crime either.  And it certainly doesn't warrant jail time.