Norfolk schools face critical test

Something has gone wrong in the Norfolk Public Schools. When a fourth school was shown to have "testing irregularities," what had been a problem became something else, and what had been isolated episodes became the signs of a systemic breakdown.

So far, administrators have responded as if these episodes remain isolated. Since the first, they have underreacted when - if anything - they should be overreacting to what appears to be a spreading scandal striking at the heart of the school division's mission.

Parents who don't trust test scores will not trust the schools that give them.

Unless and until officials take dramatic and corrective steps to ensure that scores are credible and that oversight has been improved, a decade's worth of progress in the Norfolk schools remains under threat.

The most recently reported incident is one of the most damaging. At Dreamkeepers Academy, a magnet school, 16 of 160 students were excluded from taking portions of the Standards of Learning exams, according to reporting by The Pilot's Steven Vegh. A former teacher has said educators were asked to cheat - an accusation far more devastating than a simple problem in the testing protocol.

It seems clear that somewhere along the long chain of command in the Norfolk Public Schools, someone - and perhaps several people - decided that test scores were important enough to justify cheating. Whether that message came directly or indirectly from an administrator, it is indisputable that it was heard in the classroom.

The trouble at Dreamkeepers follows similar irregularities at Lafayette-Winona Middle School and problems at Northside Middle and Campostella Elementary schools. The cumulative effect is a growing blemish on a school division that for years has prided itself on progress.

More worrisome, though, is what Vegh heard from teachers at Dreamkeepers.

One former Dreamkeepers teacher, now teaching in Indiana, said that the pressure was immense. "They came down on us hard because we had to maintain the high scores. They came down so hard, many teachers would quit yearly either out of moral and/or stress-related reasons."

Teachers are a selfless lot, working too hard for too little money. For decades, they have argued that an emphasis on numbers has required them to elevate test scores above learning. It is also clear that in recent years, thanks to both federal and state accreditation programs, the emphasis on test scores has grown.

That has made some people desperate to do anything to make the grade, while others have been too inattentive to that temptation.

If stressing test-score excellence isn't accompanied by an even stronger emphasis on ethics and doing the right thing - by everyone up and down the chain of command - incidents like the ones in Norfolk can happen. The Norfolk Public Schools must make it clearer to every teacher, administrator, student, politician and parent that honor is more important than numbers.

On Wednesday, the Norfolk City Council called on the school division to immediately disclose any other irregularities. It is past time for that.

The council also asked for a financial audit of the school division. That isn't enough.

The division must begin an immediate, intensive and independent investigation into what went wrong, how and when. No less than its credibility - and its future - is at stake.