RALEIGH — Educators, lawmakers, parents, and citizens across North Carolina have been paying increasing attention to a developing story in Moore County, where school administrators reportedly used a variety of questionable techniques to push their average SAT scores up. This week, an internal investigation by the county board of education was supposed to get to the bottom of the allegations and offer some sort of accountability.
Unfortunately, school-board members seemed intent mostly on proving that Moore is less, at least where ethics and responsibility are concerned. On a 5-3 vote Thursday, the board decided to retain the system superintendent, Patrick Russo, even after corroborating much of the initial suspicions of misbehavior and malfeasance.
The abuses were appalling. Students at one high school that were identified as potentially doing poorly on the SAT were advised to take the ACT, an alternative test, or even the community-college entrance test. The system used state tax dollars intended for remediation efforts for low-achieving students to help finance test-prep classes for kids taking the SAT, with the money being used for refreshments, among other things. High scorers were rewarded with cash or by having their testing fee reimbursed.
Russo said he took “full responsibility” for the transgressions, and then proceeded to fight for his job anyway. School-board members stressed their concern for the system’s integrity and for earning the public’s confidence once more — and then retaining the superintendent.
Would it have been unfair to discharge the CEO of the system for the misguided actions of his school principals and employees? Careful before you answer that. Contrary to good sense about the proper use and intrepretation of SAT scores, the school board had included SAT performance goals in Russo’s own contract as superintendent. The problem didn’t bubble up from the bottom in this case, it seems to me. It started at the top, with Russo and with the elected officials who were supposed to be overseeing him.
The principle that leaders bear responsibility for the good and the bad that happens on his or her watch is well established in a variety of fields of endeavor. I’m not suggesting that a school superintendent should be held personally responsible and discharged for any and all cases of misbehavior. That would be extreme and absurd. But a fair-minded reading of the SAT scandal in Moore County would suggest that it was not a phenomenon of a few isolated incidents by over-zealous educators. It was by all accounts a widespread policy, a corrupt one that sacrificed the personal educational needs of students in order to manipulate numbers for public and political consumption.
Surely it deserved more of a response than, essentially, “Sorry, it won’t happen again.”
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.