Birmingham cheating: Artilce #5 - Background to BOE

[Anne Nonniemouse <ShopMathEdu@AOL.COM>]

Dear Fair Test list folks:

There are many issues raised in this article which should be responded to or
amplified, but I would like to address one:

The affected students were not urged or "pressured" to drop out.  They were
summarily withdrawn.  They signed no statements of agreement to withdraw.
There was nothing voluntary about this procedure.  It was like a lightening
bolt operation and there was little the students could do to resist.  They
were sent to the office; sometimes individually; sometimes in groups;
sometimes without parental knowledge or approval; sometimes over the
objections of the parents.  The paperwork was already prepared and the
withdrawals were a fait a complit.  The students were PUSHED OUT.  They did
not drop out.  For example, one student in our program signed a statement
explaining that he went back to the school with an adult member of the
community and they would not reinstate him.  He was told that he would be
disruptive to the SATs.

Please let us hear from y'all.  We need advice and assistance.

================================
School board troubles revisited
Commentary by ELAINE WITT
BIRMINGHAM POST-HERALD

In speaking of Tuesday's aborted meeting of the Birmingham Board of
Education, it's hard to know where to begin.
Does one start by discussing board member Virginia Volker's troubling
assertion that dozens of failing high school students might have been
pressured to drop out of school before this spring's administration of
Stanford Achievement Tests? Or would it be more germane to discuss this
board's chronic in-fighting, which culminated in its failure Tuesday to
approve even an agenda for a scheduled meeting? The two issues are linked,
and so one might as well begin with the background.

Although all five members of the Birmingham Board of Education were appointed
by the seemingly monolithic majority on the Birmingham City Council, it is
hard to remember a time when the board did not include renegades and
dissenters.

The City Council majority, which until recently was assumed to be controlled
by former Mayor Richard Arrington, had full say over board appointments.

But once board members were sworn into office, nothing stopped them from
thinking and acting independently when they believed the board majority was
guilty of cronyism or faulty policy-making.

Former board members such as Hank Nelson and J.J. Johnson lost their standing
with Arrington's political coalition when they broke off and began to
question the status quo. And they eventually lost their seats on the board.

Enter board member Mary Moore, who has taken the role of the renegade to new
lengths.

Moore shows up to vote but refuses to attend the work sessions at which much
board policy is worked out. And in 1999, she helped to instigate an illegal
teacher strike against the very administration of which she is, technically,
a director.

Volker, although less strident, also has fallen out with the board majority
and the administration. The manner in which she raised the question of
student withdrawals, and the manner in which her questions were handled, is a
prime example of how ineffective communications between this board and the
administration have become.

At an April 25 board meeting, according to Volker, she first reported she had
heard rumors that large numbers of students recently had been dismissed from
Woodlawn High School. A couple of days later, she said she received a letter
from the area director of high schools, Mallory Coats, responding that no
student had been expelled from Woodlawn in March.

"I may have used the word 'expelled' " Volker said later. "I just heard they
had been put out."

Later Volker received information from other sources that large numbers of
Woodlawn students had been urged by the school principal to withdraw. With
the support of Moore, she attempted to have the issue placed on the agenda
for Tuesday's meeting. But their two votes only matched up against the two
votes of Rev. Larry Coleman and Annie Davis, who voted against the
last-minute agenda change. With the board's fifth member, Rev. Daryl Lee,
absent, the stalemate led to the cancellation of Tuesday's meeting for lack
of an agenda.

In an interview this week, Coleman charged that Volker had attempted to
ambush the board with allegations that should have been investigated
beforehand, in private.

Volker said she tried to get her questions answered previously but felt she
was stonewalled when she was given the expulsion figures.

Deputy Superintendent Abbe Boring, in a separate interview, said she asked
Coats to provide expulsion figures because that was what Volker asked for.

"She asked very specifically ... for the superintendent to provide her a
report on the number of students who had been expelled from Woodlawn in the
month of March. We really were not sure why the question was being asked. ...
We, having no other way to frame the question, looked at what she had asked
us."

Underlying this semantical comedy of errors is a basic dispute over how and
where board members should be discussing administrative issues.

At a retreat in November, the board majority, excluding Volker and Moore,
agreed that only "policy," rather than "administrative issues," were to be
discussed at board meetings.

Since then, board members in the minority have been cut off when they
attempted to bring up unscheduled topics at meetings.

The fact that the members being stifled tend to be late or absent at work
sessions doesn't help their case. But the board majority's assertion that
administrative issues should not be discussed at board meetings is absurd.

Coleman said he did not want Volker's questions discussed because she alleged
that administrators were dumping students to enhance standardized test
scores.

"She said it was cruel and unethical, but she didn't get any facts," he said.
"Get your facts first, go to the superintendent. Get in a private setting.
Don't get in the public and grandstand."

Volker said she felt brushed off when she first addressed the question,
although she admits she never directly asked Superintendent Johnny Brown to
investigate a possible relationship between student withdrawals and
standardized testing dates.

"I wanted to discuss it with the board, and the sunshine law is important.
You don't go and discuss everything behind the scenes. We need to discuss
everything as a board."

Her position, of course, is correct. But it also would have been legal, and
more effective, for her to have gathered what information she could before
Tuesday's meeting.

As for Coleman, he admitted in an interview that he didn't consider Volker's
concerns about the dumping of failing students for the sake of overall test
scores to be plausible.

"I just don't believe we'd do our students like that. I believe in our folk.
I believe in our administrators. I believe in our teachers," he said.

It is well for board members to have faith in school personnel. But in light
of the high stakes attached to the Stanford Achievement Tests in Alabama, in
light of the fact that Woodlawn could face state takeover if its scores don't
improve and in light of the fact that cheating on standardized tests has been
a problem in other districts, such blind faith on the part of the school
board president is more disturbing than heartening.
Elaine Witt's column appears on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays in the
Birmingham Post-Herald.


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Copyright (c) 2000 Birmingham Post Co. All rights reserved.
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