Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade - Hardcover

Prologue

Ain’t No Stopping Us Now

You could not tell by looking that Tina McKnight was in pain. Her hair was perfectly curled and she sat up straight in her desk chair, underneath a series of watercolors of Taxco, the Mexican town she loved to visit. That morning Tina had chosen a pantsuit of salmon pink and pinned a matching silk flower to her lapel, as if she could will good news through cheerful attire. Her back throbbed, sore from hours of bending over the toilet, possibly from food poisoning but more likely from stress. It was a week and a half before the end of the school year, and McKnight, the principal of Tyler Heights Elementary School in Annapolis, Maryland, had a lot on her mind.

She was worried about her sick mother, whom she could not care for the day before because she’d been stuck babysitting strangers who had appropriated the playground for an illicit soccer tournament. (Corona bottles and Pampers had been scattered all over the grass until Tina appeared with trash bags; god knows what was still left.) Today drops of water plopped rhythmically into strategically placed trash cans on the fifth-grade hall—trouble with the air conditioning, one more thing that needed to be fixed.

Other problems obsessing McKnight: It didn’t look like she’d get the school uniform plan in place by fall, as she’d wanted to. The discipline data had stopped improving, even with all the prizes given to students as behavior incentives, so McKnight hoped another principal in the district would call to chip in for the five-thousand-dollar consultant whose book promised “discipline without stress, punishment and rewards.” Then there was the secretary whose father had suffered a stroke, the assistant whose dad was headed to the hospital for his heart, and the kindergarten class that at the moment had neither teacher nor assistant nor substitute.

On top of all that, something far bigger was looming.

It was the first Monday in June 2005, a D-day of sorts for the principals of Anne Arundel County: They were about to receive their students’ scores on Maryland’s annual standardized test. For McKnight, and educators across the nation, test score day had accrued such monumental importance that it provoked more jitters than the first day of school, more emotions than fifth-grade graduation. Since McKnight’s arrival at 6:30 a.m., she had spent much of the time intensely drumming her hands on her prized Harvard desk blotter, a gift from her son. She had dug through the mailbag and found nothing. She kept looking out the window for deliveries but saw nothing.

“Good morning!” McKnight called to one little boy who came into the office to sign in. She greets every child she sees coming in tardy—and at Tyler Heights there are many, particularly in the last days of school. “Running late?” she said. “We’re glad you’re here.”

“Why is it so quiet?” the boy asked.

“Because everybody’s learning,” the principal told him.

She signed checks, one after the other, to keep up with the school’s bills. When the phone rang but no secretary picked up, she grabbed the receiver. “Hello, Tina McKnight, Tyler Heights.” Ms. McKnight—no longer Mrs., since her divorce had become final months before—dispatched the call and greeted another latecomer. “Good morning! Running late? We’re glad you’re here.” Then a man in a ball cap and khakis appeared in the outer office, holding a manila envelope.

McKnight walked over to greet him, and he handed her the envelope, marked maryland school assessment.

“Am I going to be happy after I open these?” she said.

“I have no idea. I’m just the delivery man.”

The principal shut her office door, bracing herself for the moment she had anticipated with anxiety pretty much every day for three months, ever since her third, fourth, and fifth graders took the state reading and math exams. McKnight pulled a sheaf of papers from the envelope, columns and columns of numbers, and paged through them. What she saw just didn’t make sense—not for a school that so many middle-class parents had rejected, not for a school that mainly served the poor, not for children who had arrived in the building with so few skills and so many problems. Such was the school’s reputation that when McKnight was appointed principal five years back, colleagues had said, “Congratulations, I think.”

Baffled, McKnight flipped back and forth to assess the numbers. Her hand was at her chest.

“Oh, I have to be sure I’m digesting what I’m digesting, because I’m, like, really . . .” She couldn’t finish her sentence. She sniffed. Her brows scrunched behind her glasses, her dark brown eyes practically closed. “I don’t know if I’m really looking at the right numbers.”

Overall, according to the results, 86 percent of the students passed reading. Eighty percent passed math. Black fourth graders—91 percent passed reading! Hispanic third graders—100 percent passed math! McKnight compared the county numbers and the school numbers, side by side. Hers were higher in many categories. “I don’t believe this. It’s, like, what . . .”

Maybe, she wondered, she had been sent some other school’s results. Maybe this was a mistake.

Or maybe not. Definitely not.

McKnight screamed. The reading teacher came in, saw the numbers, and she screamed too. McKnight grabbed a compact disc from her desk and went to the PA system in the outer office. She was forbidden to officially reveal the results to teachers...