Years before “Aunt Becky” and Felicity Huffman were charged in a high profile school bribery case, Atlanta was the focus of an education scandal of its own. But where many would say the situation Huffman and fellow actress Laurie Loughlin found themselves in was born out of privilege, the circumstances in Atlanta’s test cheating scandal evolved from a history of systemic racial and economic injustices.

That’s the case that educator and author Shani Robinson makes in None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators. If it seems a lengthy title, it’s because Robinson covers a lot of ground. While the cheating scandal - in which 35 educators were accused of changing students’ answers on standardized tests in 2013 - could be summarized in fewer than the book’s 220 pages, Robinson and co-author Anna Simonton expand the scope of the event, not only providing autobiographical perspective on Robinson, but also reaching back through the history of public education in Georgia and the U.S. to pinpoint how a situation like the APS scandal could manifest in the first place.

If it sounds ambitious, it is. I was reminded of how much historical ground Ava Duvernay’s masterful 13th documentary covered (slavery, the Black Codes, and Jim Crow laws) to explain the racist engine that drives America’s mass incarceration and school-to-prison pipeline injustices. As Bob Marley sang in “Buffalo Soldier”, “If you know your history, you know where you’re coming from.” This is certainly true in mapping the road that led to the circumstances of the APS cheating scandal.

For Robinson, this means reaching back to the inequities that mar the history of public schools in Atlanta and the south, a list that is both long and thought-provoking. Gentrification, redlining, underinvestment in urban schools, the failures of public housing, and the cyclical trappings of poverty are all highlighted as parts of the recipe for the testing scandal.

Charter schools, viewed as an educational version of ‘white flight’, and President Bush’s 2001 No Child Left Behind Act come under some of the greatest scrutiny as 21st century plagues on the public school system. Certainly, the pressure on performance that standardized testing has brought into the classroom is something most teachers, parents, and students can relate to, regardless of race or economic status. The frustration that second semester was spent mostly in preparation for the CRCT (or now, the Milestones) rather than learning critical curriculum in social studies, math, science and other classes has been well documented as an ongoing issue.

Like a societal game of Whack-a-Mole, it appears every time someone in power tried to address and potentially rectify these injustices inherent to the system, other forces within the government and society found a way to circumvent the efforts.

The other story driving None of the Above is the trial of Shani Robinson and her fellow educators, accused of changing answers on the standardized CRCT test forms their students had filled out. The prosecution claimed that teachers were forced to erase “stray marks” on the tests, which translated into cleaning up incorrect answers. Thirty five educators were indicted, 34 of which were African-American. The charges focused on racketeering, and were leveled through the RICO Act, a 1970 federal law designed specifically for combating organized crime in America.

Given a total of 178 educators were implicated in correcting test answers, and that the RICO Act was more designed for the likes of John Gotti than Mrs. Crabapple, Robinson makes a strong case for politics playing a huge part in determining who got thrown under the school bus, as it were.

A case could also be made, as Robinson shares her perspective of the eight-month trial, that we’re only getting one side, and the essential telling of this story might be best served by a more objective party. Certainly, the more personal elements of her story - including the birth of her son as the trial was culminating, an event that postponed her sentencing - adds a human dynamic to the story that would likely be missing in a purely journalistic retelling of the trial.

However, perhaps the bigger lesson to walk away with from this story isn’t about the guilt or innocence of the educators in question, but the broken system itself and the students who suffer from it, be it because of flaws of high-stakes testing, the pressure on teachers to meet district-set targets, or the long history that preceded these issues.

I finished None of the Above feeling, both, upset and somewhat unsatisfied. Upset that the system was, and remains, broken, and the people who seem to be invested in doing something about it are often the ones most helpless to do so. The educators who are on the front lines for Atlanta’s (and America’s) children receive less support than they deserve as they walk a tightrope to ensure kids learn, targets are met, and budgets are honored. However, I wanted more from this book, and I’m not sure it’s Robinson’s fault that something more isn’t there. Her themes open up a Pandora’s Box of a broken system, and then feed into one defining court case, rather than offering possible solutions to the issues presented.

Perhaps, though, that’s not her job. Perhaps that’s the job of a lot of people, from politicians and educators at the highest level to engaged parents, teachers, and citizens. As a culture, we spend a lot of time complaining about all the ills of the education system. None of the Above shows us plenty of symptoms we should have been treating all along, even if it can’t provide a panacea. Maybe that’s enough to make readers work to improve our own scores, lest the next generation of kids find they’re out of right answers.
( )

The No Child Left Behind program, while sounding like it would help children achieve higher academic scores, had some very serious repercussions.

One of the primary ones was the money that flowed into schools as a result of scores. It forced many schools to close because of low scores, encouraged cheating by school personnel in order to survive, took money away from working to strengthen schools by providing better supplies, more teachers and aides, and more training. Instead, it blamed teachers, demonized schools, and encouraged more charter schools.

Atlanta, Georgia, was one of the hardest hit and became a famous target. In 2013, thirty-five black teachers and administrators were charged with racketeering and conspiracy for changing answers on students’ tests to improve their scores by a vindictive judge. The media went wild pushing the scandal theory. While there were incidents of that occurring in both schools that were primarily white as well as integrated or primarily black, only the black educators were charged.

The trials went on for an excessively long time. Eventually, many of those charged, even if they were not guilty, admitted guilt so they could get on with their lives and stop increasing their costs for court and attorney fees.

One of them did not. Shani Robinson was the youngest of the accused, was a three-year teacher and pregnant. She taught first grade. While her students all had to take the tests, their scores had no effect on the results that determined the school’s ranks. Before turning in the answer sheets, she was ordered to erase some extraneous scribbling on some of them. She did not change any of the answers and was charged. She kept fighting the charges despite facing a jail term of twenty years. She was told she could avoid jail if she pleaded guilty. She refused to do so.

NONE OF THE ABOVE is her story. It is very well-written and I shared her frustration and disgust with the city, school system, and courts.

I received a copy of this book from LibraryThing Early Reviewers ( )

This was not the book I wanted it to be. I come from a family with three generations of educators. Over the years I've heard countless stories about the changing face of education - the pressure to increase test scores, the funding cuts, even the outright vilification of teachers in general.

What I expected was an insider's look at what really happened in Atlanta, and how it could serve as a microcosm for the testing culture nationwide.

Instead I got a one-sided, hostile narrative that amounted to I didn't do it. My friends didn't do it. Everyone else is lying. They probably did it, but it wasn't their fault. Generations of greedy white men are really responsible.

Did Shani cheat? I don't know. The evidence presented in the book is too slim and one-sided to make an informed decision.

What I do know was that Shani was ill-prepared to be a teacher. She left her job as a television news producer after the station cut her hours when her "attention noticeably waned." She became a substitute teacher based on the belief that her mother's experience in education and her own years of babysitting gave her enough background. After a quick summer training with Teach For America she became a full time Atlanta Public Schools teacher (a job she left a few years later to become a counselor - with apparently no training whatsoever).

Her first grade students (like all Georgia students) were required to take proficiency test. She says at the end of the testing day she was instructed to meet with other teachers and erase stray marks and doodles from her students tests. She also says she was told to write-in or correct missing or inaccurate demographic information. Two of her fellow teachers say she also changed answers.

She admits her students "wrong to right" erasure marks were statistically improbable. (Actually she incorrectly and repeatedly states that any data falling three standard deviations or more from the norm is "considered impossible without human intervention." This makes my head explode. I defy you to find me any statistic book that makes such judgement calls. What statistics books will tell you is that 99.7 percent of all data in a normal population falls within three standard deviations of the mean. You actually EXPECT 0.3% of data to be more than three standard deviations from the mean. That the wrong to right erasures on her tests were 11.8-13.5 standard deviations only shows that it was highly improbable (ridiculously so). You might infer that human intervention was involved, but that's your judgement call not a statistical fact /end rant).

She suspects one of the teachers that testified against her was responsible. Or possibly the principal. She is angry that prosecutors never called the principal to testify others had access to the tests - strangely she doesn't fault her own attorney for failing to call any witnesses.. She claims because her students were too young to be counted in the schools measure of Adequate Yearly Progress and she earned very little bonus money she had no incentive to cheat. There are other motivations. In my district a teacher broke into the principal's office prior to the exam, looked through the content and spent a week pre-teaching exactly the questions that would appear on the test (administrators reported this violation immediately to the state). The school's AYP was excellent and no bonus money as a stake, so by Shani's reasoning he had no reason to cheat. But the teacher was young and insecure, and wanted to prove he was a good teacher by having the best test scores. I can imagine a scenario where a new, under-qualified teacher might feel the same. Or perhaps feel pressure to go along with colleagues. I'm not saying that's what happened, I'm just saying that AYP didn't count for her isn't proof of innocence.

She also claims as a defense that she and the other teachers simply didn't have time to cheat. And again I wonder how long do you really need to figure of the right answer to a first grade test?

I guess my disappointment stems from wanting a different narrative. I wanted (and thought I was getting) a book on the testing culture in this country. The pressure to cheat isn't limited to poor, predominately black schools (see the recent college admissions scandal). I wanted to hear from someone who admitted to cheating and discussed the multitude of reasons why teachers and schools cheat. Because the problem is nationwide, in all communities and the causes are certainly more complex that developers wanting to gentrify neighborhoods or corporations wanting to privatize schools. ( )

Written by a teacher convicted for altering student test score in the Atlanta School Public System, this book is not an unbiased journalist tome. Readers will find that education is a big business in which the providers of education are not valued. At the core of the cheating was an organized plan to alter student scores in order to receive more money. There is discussion about the environmental factors that lead to limited resources and low scores in Atlanta schools. Statistical reviews showed Robinson is one of the teachers that had a high percentage of test scores changed. While she admits that she erased stray marks on the tests, she maintains her innocence regarding changing answers on her first-grade students’ tests. Even if she had changed answers, it would not matter since the results were not included in the benchmarks that affected funding. The jury determined that is did matter and found her guilty. What is missing from the discussion is the impact on the students. Cheating may have gotten additional resources for education in the short term, but changing student test scores implies a competence for the students that is not there and those students will set up to struggle for a life time. Endnotes and an index are provided. ( )

When I put my name in to try and win a copy of this book, I was hoping that I would be able to read an unbiased report of what happened in Atlanta. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. It seemed like the author couldn't do any wrong, and it was all the fault of others. If she didn't like a person, that person "snarled", "badgered", "yelled", "thundered", etc. It's hard to say what really happened, as this is just one side of the story. Maybe at some point someone will write the book that explains what really happened. ( )

Takes a while to get into it, but it is worth reading and checking out. ( )

The tone of this book is different than I expected--it reads more like a memoir than a strictly historical account, which isn't my preferred genre. I did want to learn more about this testing scandal, and I believe the authors are correct to make the case that the teachers involved were scapegoated for many pervasive systemic problems involving racism and classism in our public education system. That said, I feel that the personal memoir style of this book was not the best choice for making that argument. I found the personal details distracted from the account of what actually happened.

While this book takes a bit to get started, one of the most concerning things I've seen some reviewers say is that the backstory doesn't matter, or is an excuse.

The history here does matter, and even if I believed that Shani Robinson cheated, I couldn't really blame her for it.

Whatever your feelings are for this scandal, this book needs to be read. I'm sure it'll be dismissed by many, most likely because's it Atlanta schools and Shani is black, and blah blah blah. This book does lay out that there is no real evidence of the teachers cheating as a RICO level scam, and if they had, they didn't do anything that would result in better consequences for themselves. I was more concerned about the two "politicians" who used known inflated test scores and used them to scam the feds for money. To me, even if Shani cheated, I would have to say that a teacher cheating on a test that is known to be absolute garbage, especially when applied to underserved populations so that she can get more pencils for her classroom, is the much much lesser crime than knowingly trying to scam the feds for millions that would likely not have gone to the students or the teachers - given what I know about admins up the line who rarely have a teaching degree, let alone experience.

How teachers are treated in the US is laid out in brutal blistering truth here, and I think everyone needs to read this, because if you don't go, "Man, even if she cheated, I guess I can understand at least why she did it," then you're part of the overall problem with education, because Shani didn't see a dime, and wasn't set to see a dime, so I have to wonder exactly what people who blame her - are seeing. And I think I have a pretty good idea. ( )

I read about this scandal in the newspapers years ago and was always curious about it. The cheating that allegedly took place went from the teaching staff all the way up to the Superintendent, allegedly. While the cases did not seem strong, the sentences seemed extreme. Many of the accused plea bargained or stood trial. The author explains many things and is able to present her case to the reader. Greed was a popular motive as the teachers and administrators received additional compensation if the scores rose. The problems of educating low income students are discussed as well. If you are interested in public education, you will enjoy this book. ( )

For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com

None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators by Shani Robinson and Anna Simonton is a non-fiction book about the experiences of Mrs. Robinson who has been involved in this humiliating and undignified event. Mrs. Robinson. After several years, Mrs. Robinson, whose appeal is still pending, is able to talk about this issue.

I like to point out right off the bat that I am a cynical man. I don’t believe everything I read, and if I do I check it with a several reliable sources.
Most of the time.
I’m also a big supporter of public education.

None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators by Shani Robinson and Anna Simonton was an interesting as it was informative, it actually tells two stories though. One that of Mrs. Robinson who was charged as one of the teachers who allegedly changed the grades of her students to conform with standardized testing requirements, the other is about the circumstances that caused public schools to be considered failures.

I will start with the second part, as it has to do with the reasoning behind schools changing grades. The book goes to blame politicians working together industrialists, as well as “do gooders” (mostly evangelical Christians) who are rich enough to have their voices heard as to the issues with public schools. The politicians and industrialists set out to take over poor neighborhoods, demolish them, and build more expensive residences (and thus higher tax revenue), at the expanse of the lower socioeconomic class who are mostly African American. The rich “do gooders” mainly want vouchers and charter schools as a form of subsidy (one might even say government welfare) for private schools.

The part where Mrs. Robinson claims her innocence, is where my cynicism takes over. Not that I think Mrs. Robinson is guilty, I’m simply not convinced either way and this book is very one sided in that regard (please note that I have no reason not to believe her). The part about her short teaching experiences, trial, and the media circus that followed, even though it is from her point of view, is fascinating and I did feel as if her and her friends got steam rolled over by an overzealous prosecutor. I feel justified in saying that because out of all the teachers that were prosecuted none where white, or rich, even though it was proven that the rich white districts “cheated” by a larger margin than the poor ones.
Also, a twenty year sentence for changing scores on a test?
Even if true, it is outrageous.

This book, I felt, is a short, incomplete introduction to a much larger problem. The conclusions the authors reach are very important to our society and justice system and do deserve a longer, more thorough book or most likely a series of books. ( )

None of the Above from Shani Robinson and Anna Simonton tells a contextualized version of the Atlanta cheating scandal. Events in the public sphere do not happen in a vacuum and knowing the background helps to keep everything in perspective.

First, this book reviews the various forces that have come together to undermine this country's public education system. While some may complain that this is not on a par with a book devoted to analyzing these ills, that is a disingenuous way of displaying their inbred elitism. I don't rewrite Foucault every time I use his ideas. This book summarizes accurately the studies and theories used. That is sufficient for a book using this as context for the main narrative. Applaud the person who wants applause for name dropping as a way of denigrating but pay it no mind, it is empty pseudo-intellectual blustering.

Also, while Robinson maintains her innocence she does, contrary to what another "reviewer" (with a red ballcap agenda no doubt) claims, acknowledge that there must have been cheating and the work she did contextualizing the entire situation in Atlanta points toward motivation for whomever did it. Not condoning or approving but making the motivation at least understandable. Such is the nature of testing in contemporary American schools. Maybe you'll believe Robinson about her innocence maybe you won't, but she is not claiming there was no cheating and she is not condoning cheating.

To look at any issue within a public school system in the United States one can not, in good conscience, do so in isolation from the other facts that have contributed to the larger problem. To do so either means you don't understand how these things work together or, worse, you condone hurting poor children and children of color for political and economic gain.

The value of this book far outpaces the writing. At times it was slow and plodding and, probably, caused some of these "reviewers" to quit reading and run their little dog whistles out to show their true allegiance. If you have an interest and care at all about the children being hurt in this current regime's joke of an education system, you should read this book. Less for whether you believe Robinson and more to understand what, using Atlanta as the example, is wrong with the corporatization and privatization of the education of our future generations.

Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads' First Reads. ( )

#LibraryThing #EarlyReviewers

I’ll be putting this book into as many hands as I can. As a resident of Atlanta, it’s a must read. Robinson and Simonton address much more than the immediate issues surrounding the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal and takes a deeper dive into the larger problems in Georgia and the country faced by educators trying to give adequate education to lower income students. Highly Recommended.

None of the Above is the story of the Atlanta cheating scandal of 2013 as told by one of the educators convicted of cheating. I will make known my prejudice at the start: whatever happened, I believe the sentences were way out of whack for the possible crimes committed. Also, I find it suspicious that it was primarily African-American educators who were targeted when the cheating apparently took place throughout the city.

That being said, I was sympathetic to Robinson's claims of innocence. And if her account is to be trusted (and it is backed up by references), the trial itself was a scandal of frightened people making plea bargains that can hardly be trusted, since naming names was the way to personal freedom. All the makings of a witch hunt. And the scandal served the purpose of distracting the city from plans to turn over more public schools into the hands of charters.

Robinson began as a hopeful Teach For America participant. TFA is devoted to the destruction of public schools and with replacing career teachers with (usually white) Ivy League graduates looking to pad out their resumes with two years of public service before heading off to corporate or political careers. As a public school teacher with strong beliefs that public education is a necessary prereq for a democracy, I am not a fan of TFA. And although there are some excellent charter schools, as a group, despite the ability to choose their students for better test-takers, most charters do not score appreciably better than public schools and often do worse. All of which is not to deny that there is plenty of work to be done to make public education more equitable, providing high quality schools for all. But I believe the answer is to invest in public schools, not destroy them.

It was difficult to read Robinson's book. The destruction of African-American neighborhoods, the effects of mass incarceration, the greed of corporations, and the destructive actions of neo-liberals in both the Democratic and Republican parties is extremely painful to read. And if the trial was accurately described, than the judicial system also comes off looking incompetent at best and indifferent to innocence or trust at worst.

I feel I need to read more accounts of this scandal to reach a better understanding of the case. However, applying RICO charges, designed to catch gangsters, to this group of educators (even if guilty) seems excessive. And, again, the fact that the convicted people (the ones who refused to make plea deals) were people (mostly women) of color seems to me suspicious. As in the case of the charter school takeover after Hurricane Katrina, the people who are held up in one way or another as unfit to teach are less affluent (women) of color, to be generally replaced by young, white, usually from affluent backgrounds women and men also feels indicative of both this country's racism as well as conviction that the best model for education is that of business.

So I recommend this book to educators and to those interested in the destruction of black neighborhoods in the interest of wealthy, white inhabitants and investors with the warning that it is 1) clearly slanted in favor of the author and the other convicted educators and 2) it is an enraging and painful, albeit, I believe, important indictment of the political and corporate powers that are the ones who actually cheat the poorer students of color as well as their families.

I thank LibraryThing.com for providing this book to me free of charge in exchange for an honest review. ( )

This is a story of the 2009 Atlanta standardized test cheating scandal, from the perspective of one of the teachers, Shani Robinson, who was accused and convicted. Yes, it is self-serving. All books of this type are. We know, when we sit down to read a book like this, that the protagonist will be kind, virtuous and full of integrity, that prosecutors will be over-zealous, politically-motivated hacks, that prosecution witnesses will all be liars, hoping to save their own skin, and that the judge will senile, impatient and incompetent. In sense, "None of the Above" delivers a solid exemplar of the genre.

Where the book does best is in retelling the core story, from the initial interview of Robinson by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, to grand jury testimony (she pleads the Fifth) to indictment, booking, trial, judgement and sentencing (As the book ends, Robinson is free on bond, awaiting appeal.) This part works well, a good pace, told smartly, engaging the reader, hard to put down.

However, padding out the rest of the 250+ pages, are less-interesting passages discussing the evils of urban gentrification, arguments against charter schools, land speculation, racism, and a full litany of complaints. It is enough that the author professed her innocence. It is not required that she solve all of society’s ills at the same time.

So, is Shani Robinson guilty or innocent? Hearing only the case for the defense, one cannot really say. But, the book does make a good argument for the case being over-charged, in that RICO statutes, created to prosecute organized crime, were stretched nearly to the breaking point, to take what, at most, should have been a matter for discipline within the school district, and turned it into a felony. This should concern us all.

(I received an review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.) ( )

There were massive problems at the schools in Atlanta. Funding problems choked schools from needed capital investments and programming dollars. There was pressure to perform well on standardized tests under the No Child Left Behind Law, with fewer resources.

That pressure was too much for some principals and school teachers. They cheated and changed answers on their students tests.

Shanti Robinson is one of the teachers who went to trial for cheating on the standardized tests. She tells her story in None of the Above.

The cheating was discovered with statistics. The tests for the whole school system were reviewed to see how often there were signs of erasure which resulted in answers being changed from wrong to correct. They found some statistical anomalies where some classrooms had a much larger amount of those correcting erasures. So much so, that the only way it could have happened was someone changing the answers.

Post-test, Ms. Robinson and other teachers were told to erase “stray marks” from the test booklets. Some teachers interpreted that to mean fix the wrong answers. Ms. Robinson claims that she just erased the doodles in the test booklets.

The problem is that Ms. Robinson’s class was one of those with a statistically high number of erasures from wrong to right answers. Someone changed her students’ answers.

She goes down a common path of criminal mentality by loading up None of the Above with all of the other problems with the Atlanta school system and all of the other people who are doing things that hurt the students in the school system. The authors attack real estate deals that use a projected increase in tax revenue in an area to help fund a real estate development project. They attack charter schools and the state bureaucrats. There were lots of problems in the Atlanta school system greater than Ms. Robinson’s alleged cheating.

Spoiler alert: Ms. Robinson goes to trial after prosecutors play hardball with the principals, teachers and administrators accused of cheating. They bring RICO charges. Ms. Robinson complains about the prosecutor’s zeal and overly harsh charges. She complains about the fairness of the judge.

I didn’t find Ms. Robinson’s story compelling or believe her claims of innocence. I’m not sure she made the changes, but she fails to acknowledge that someone clearly made changes.

There are better sources for discussions of public education, testing and charter schools. I found the authors’ discussion of them to merely be a distraction from the cheating scandal.

Disclosure: The publisher sent me a copy of the book and asked for a review. ( )

None of the Above by Shani Robinson and Anna Simonton
Disclaimer: I received a copy via a giveaway on Librarything.

This book about the Atlanta school test cheating scandal is really two books in one body and as such is not as good a book as it could be.
Shani Robinson was a teacher at Dunbar Elementary in Atlanta. After she left the school, she was charged as one of the teachers who allegedly changed answers on standardized tests. Robinson plead not guilty, but sadly, lost in court. She is appealing. I hope she wins.
Part of the book, the first book struggling to get out as it were, is Robinson’s memoir of the trial. Not so much her experience schooling but of the trial and, to a degree, the events leading up to. Because this concedes with her major events in her personal life, the reader is treated to descriptions of these events. And while that might be interesting in a general life type of way, in a book about schools, or at least one where the title suggests schooling as a center topic, every time it comes up it feels like digression or it becomes so tempting to scream, “you shouldn’t be focusing on that”. So, it feels like a quasi-memoir with not enough depth to it. This is particularly true in the Teach for America section. Robinson is even handed when discussing the program, but one is also aware that Robinson herself, one could say, is also an embodiment of what is wrong with the program – she leaves teaching, true she goes into counseling, but she does leave teaching.
The second book struggling to get though is about the circumstances that cause the downfall of public schools. At first, it seems like the reason for why cheating might occur, but then shifts to become a tracing of forces determined to close down public schools and replace them with charter schools, as well to replace poorer and minority (largely African American) residents with richer, predominately white ones.
The problem with this thesis or focus isn’t that its wrong. It’s that in order to see the thesis, to believe in the thesis, it helps if you have read the work of say Diane Ravitch, Marta Nussbaum, and Richard Rothstein. Diane Ravitch for the whole bit about testing and charter schools, Nussbaum for the purpose of education, and Rothstein for redlining and other city development issues. And you can replace those with at least a dozen other books that cover the same material. It’s that the authors don’t footnote their source – they do – but the connections and developed are so crammed and cramped that some things must be accepted by faith, which is fine but you need the background to do that.
So, the book isn’t a full memoir but it isn’t a full societal analysis either. In fact, considering Robinson’s only three years teaching experience the look at the focus driving and pressuring the teachers seems facile. Not that I think she is wrong but one does wonder how an educator with more experience, of the women whom Robinson worked with say. It is so unclear, mostly because Robinson is not in a position to know, whether or not cheating actually occurred. At times too, bias comes out – Robinson’s view of the press is, understandably, negative but it does color parts of her memoir when she uses descriptions that verge on petty. This all contributes to a wanting more feel to the book.
It is like there are two books that could be really good, or one longer book, screaming to get out. And this is a shame because what Robinson and Simonton are dealing with and the conclusions, they reach are vitally important both in the terms of race and education. Robinson is one of the people who should be telling it, not only about education but about the justice system as well. We do need to think seriously about education and the place if any testing has in the educational system. We do need to examine how and if we should hold teachers accountable. We should examine how race is a factor in who is charge for a crime. You should read this book, but you are going to be wanting a bit more afterwards.
Yet, there is much promise in the writing, and hopefully there will be a second book to pick up the themes of this one. ( )