Atlanta Schools Cheating

[Renatus]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0...ec1_lnk2|75908

NEW YORK -- Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal announced Tuesday that widespread cheating inflated Atlanta Public Schools' 2009 state standardized tests scores.

The product of a two-year investigation, the report concluded that systematic cheating occurred within Atlanta Public Schools -- which had been lauded for its quick testing gains -- including at least 44 of the 56 examined schools. The report implicated 38 principals, noting that 178 educators pled the Fifth Amendment when questioned. Eighty-two other educators confessed to various forms of cheating, including erasing wrong answers on students' multiple choice exams and then replacing them with the correct ones.

"The 2009 CRCT [test] statistics are overwhelming and allow for no conclusion other than widespread cheating," a summary of the report circulated by the governor's office said.

The cheating can be traced back to as early as 2001, the report found. It detailed how warnings of cheating in late 2005 were ignored and how the school system destroyed documents and provided false statements to hide wrongdoing.

"In a statewide erasure analysis ... the Atlantic Public School system test results demonstrated a pattern of wrong to right changes, evidencing that these changes did not occur in a valid testing environment," Gov. Nathan Deal said at a Tuesday press conference.

"We share a common resolve to address these problems ... so this dark cloud will not continue to hang over the system, the city and the state," he continued.

Deal forwarded the report to several officials to determine whether its conclusions warrant the filing of criminal charges. The report also illuminated painful consequences for APS students: Because the cheating inflated their scores, causing thousands to miss out on remedial education.

Reports of cheating on standardized tests with the goal of bolstered performance have increased in frequency in recent years, according to Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing. Schaeffer, who has tracked such revelations, noted in the past only a few reports surfaced each year, but now several appear weekly.

"The number of confirmed reports of score manipulation has exploded," he said.

Whether the growth is because of better reporting or simply more cheating is unclear. Still, Schaeffer and others say the pressures placed on teachers by policies that stress standardized test scores -- such as No Child Left Behind -- foster an environment ripe for cheating.

"Cheating was caused by a number of factors but primarily by the pressure to meet targets in the data-driven environment," according to the report's summary. "A culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation existed in APS, which created a conspiracy of silence and deniability with respect to standardized test misconduct."

"School districts don’t have incentives for policing themselves. Their reputations depend on a steady rise in performance that accountability mandates of NCLB require," said Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College.

And with about 15 states preparing to tie test scores to teacher evaluations after a nationwide legislative push toward test-based accountability, Schaeffer said, the pressure is only bound to increase. "We know that the more pressure it's brought to bear, the more people crack," Schaeffer said.

Still, the cheating exposed in Atlanta, he said, is more pervasive and widespread than any he'd seen before.

"The size and scope based on the number of names in the Georgia report appears to be significantly larger than anything before," he said.

THE ATLANTA STORY

Investigators spent more than two years looking into much-lauded gains on 2009's state standardized tests after questions about "statistically improbable" test score increases were first raised by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution.

An initial report was deemed superficial, with one high-ranking official saying her testimony had been edited to soften the blow.

Then-Governor Sonny Perdue ordered a new report, this time with the help of Georgia's equivalent of the FBI.

When Deal took office, he allowed the investigation to continue -- and received its results last week. In his Tuesday press conference, Deal told reporters that "there will be consequences" for those implicated by the report.

The report itself was not released to the media, though officials gave the Atlanta Journal Constitution an early look at the document.

According to the AJC, the investigators concluded that APS chief Beverly Hall -- who retired recently after serving the full length of her term despite the investigation -- "knew or should have known" about the cheating. Hall led Atlanta's troubled schools for 12 years, leading to her being named "Superintendent of the Year" in 2009.

"I was really disappointed," said Diane Ravitch, a New York University education historian and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education who has since become a critic of what she sees as the corporatization of education policy. "I had thought that Beverly Hall was one of our best superintendents, that she was the real deal."

The report criticizes a culture of cheating, fear and retaliation. According to the AJC, it also chronicles the lack of cooperation by officials in the investigation. It alleges that school administrators tampered with the investigation and tried to avoid taking blame for the mess.

AJC education blogger Maureen Downey spelled out what she saw as the motivations for the drawn-out cheating episode:

I think some of their motivation was less self-serving; they wanted to fulfill Dr. Hall’s vision that low-income children from single parent homes and tough neighborhoods could and would succeed at levels comparable to suburban Atlanta peers.
CHEATING ACROSS THE COUNTRY

Atlanta is not alone in allegedly gaming its numbers. Schaeffer said cheating headlines have popped up in the last month alone from Baltimore, Norfolk, Va., Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Florida.

In June, Andrés Alonso, CEO of Baltimore's schools, announced that evidence of cheating had been found at two elementary schools over the last two years. He accompanied the announcement with a promise that the 2011 standardized tests
would be the most "extraordinarily transparent set of scores of any urban district in America."

Shortly afterwards, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan addressed cheating in a letter to state superintendents of education. Duncan wrote:

I am writing to urge you to do everything you can to ensure the integrity of the data used to measure student achievement and ensure meaningful educational accountability in your State. As I’m sure you know, even the hint of testing irregularities and misconduct in the test administration process could call into question school reform efforts and undermine the State accountability systems that you have painstakingly built over the past decade.
Representatives from Duncan's office said they would let the letter speak for itself in light of the Georgia incident.

While Congress struggles to overhaul No Child Left Behind, it might embed more provisions for monitoring tests. But Pallas said states might see this as yet another unfunded mandate.

Besides, Schaeffer said, more policing doesn’t always work.

"It's like trying to enforce marijuana laws," he said. "The more security personnel you add, the further underground cheating gets."

Standardized tests are easy to game, he added. "There are simply too many places in the process where people touch the test or have the opportunity to manipulate scores," he said.

"I've never seen so many cheating scandals as there have been in the last few years," Ravitch said. "As we get closer to this deadline of [100% proficiency under NCLB by] 2014, it's not surprising that there are schools and districts where these things happen again and again."

This just sickens me, almost an entire school district screwing their students over, who knows how many lives have been ruined by this. I hope they're all prosecuted to the maximum extent that the law allows. Maybe if this had been for just a year this could be dealt with more leniently, but the report says it might have gone on for as long as 10 years. Every single student that was in second grade or higher as of 2001, screwed over completely without chance for making up what they missed, and countless others left with 10 years of mistakes to make up for.

[CptSternn]

Did you watch the documentary 'Waiting For Superman'? A majority of US schools are cheating due to the laws which punish them if students preform bad on standardised tests.

Schools who have students who do bad lose funding. Many schools are already underfunded. They showed schools with crumbling ceilings that leak like a sieve when it rains, no heating or cooling, paint peeling off the walls. Some looked like they had been abandoned years ago, but nope, kids to this day are going there for an education and the government is looking to cut funding based on how well the students do.

It's a catch 22 and the students are getting screwed.

[Grausamkeit]

So I guess that's why they give you extra grants for school if you keep a 4.0 GPA. I definitely don't like the idea of a school or teacher being punished for a kid being too lazy to learn or maybe the kid's parents being too lazy to help them with homework. I really hope that none of my teachers were punished because I chose not to do the work. That's not right. They keep telling us in Psych that punishment only teaches people how to avoid it. Proof right there.^^^

[Mr.Doobie]

You'd think a school where the kids are doing poorly would need more money to help them get their kids to do better.

Owait. It's easier to punish people than to actually fix the problem. My bad.

[Ms.Nelle]

I saw that movie. Its depressing and angering. If anyone wants its on Netflix.

[CptSternn]

Penalising schools that do not do well while at the same time diverting their funds to schools that are doing well seems to be a very stupid idea.

It was of course the whole premise of 'no child left behind' that the bush administration implemented.

Intercity schools that are falling apart and have huge problems to begin with are given even LESS funding and the money they lose is transfered to schools in like Orange County, where they have full theatre centres and cater to kids who come from million dollar backgrounds. Seriously, who thought this would be a good idea?

What really sickens me, and should sicken ye if ye live in the states, is they way school funding works. They get funding from the community in which the school is located. That is why the schools in and around Hollywood look like this -

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.s...ew_578_mi.html

They spend $580 million building it. It is like a small town and has a full gymnasium with multiple swimming pools, opera house, symphony theatre, and more.

Then schools around say DC and Maryland have no heat or cooling (they were built before A/C and the heating is boiler based and never works) and the ceiling is caving in so they have had to close down class rooms due to falling debris, and they have been closed for 5-10 years since there has been no funding to fix them.

More and more schools are finding themselves in the latter category as there is no funding for renovations.

What are the right-wing in America doing to fix this? They want to calculate how much it costs per year for a student to attend a crappy public school and issue them a voucher they can use to send their kid to a private school. That will offset half the cost, so parents who say can cough up another $3,000 a year or so can send their kids to a nice school while the rest of America can basically fuck off.

Real good idea there lads. Instead of fixing what is broken they want to get the rich kids out of the mess and leave everyone else to rot.

It's that kind of mentality which really sickens me. You would never want to be on a lifeboat with any of those bastards now would you?

Yet they are the first to wave the flag and scream about patriotism. Just don't look too close at their support of America, as you will see it is only for the rich, white, privileged they really are talking about - everyone else can go shit in their own respective hats.

[Ben Lahnger]

Originally Posted by Grausamkeit

I definitely don't like the idea of a school or teacher being punished for a kid being too lazy to learn or maybe the kid's parents being too lazy to help them with homework.

Well, to be honest, among people my age that I talk to, we're all in agreement in the opinion that they don't teach as well as they did when I went to school. There's simply no other way to explain the preponderance of bad grammar, spelling and math errors exhibited by the latest generation of graduates. I'm not talking about internet 133t speak ... I'm talking about how they fill out job applications. It's stunningly abhorrent to see how little grasp they have of how important it is to communicate well and use basic skills.

We have young newscasters who only seem to know the adjective "amazing". Many of the younger movie reviewers working today only seem to know the word "ginormous" (why is that even a word?) out of the 100-plus synonyms for "big". People don't know how to paint a picture with words any more, they can't count their change correctly at the grocery store and they have to put pictures of burgers and fries on the cash registers at McDonald's to accommodate people who may not be able to read "Big Mac" or "Large Fries".

The primary problem of underfunding schools is criminal in nature, but it's not the only problem. While directing funds based on test scores is a mistake, and school districts being driven to cheat on reporting test scores should have been the expected outcome, I wouldn't be too fast to point the finger at lazy students or parents. There's something wrong with the curriculum and how it's being taught. Is that the result of teachers that have been lead to teach other things besides the core competencies of reading, writing and arithmetic?

[Saya]

No. Teaching things outside the core curriculum doesn't make school harder. Usually they are electives, taken for fun and students enjoy them.

A huge problem with the pressure to keep scores up is to simply lower the standards.

There's also a shift in thinking on whats important to teach. My old school has more emphasis on math and science now, but the arts have been dumbed down, in that the reading material up until the last few grades are pretty basic. I think the thinking is that not too many people go into University anymore and when they do, they go for the sciences. Most people go on to get trades because the mentality is that its the best way to make a living. Fuck getting a useless degree.

[Grausamkeit]

Ben, in my case it had nothing to do with the teachers or curriculum. I was just too lazy to do the work and didn't really care about school. I had no intrinsic motivation for doing anything scholastic. I honestly think that is more the problem than the teachers. Most people are not intrinsically motivated to just do well for its own sake. I keep seeing the same attitude in college that I did in grade school. People are perfectly okay with barely squeaking by doing as little work as possible to get their barely-a-C grade because they see homework as boring and dull. They'd rather hang out with their friends or waste time on facebook or twitter.

The first day of my English class the teacher told us to write down the last book we had read 'for fun' and damn near the whole class LAUGHED or said that reading was a chore. That is probably the main problem with how people view school. If you read you are a pathetic nerd and have no life; you're not one of the cool kids. People/kids are taught(probably mostly by their slacker peers) that doing well in school is something to be made fun of, reading simply for the sake of enjoyment is pointless when you need to be chatting with you friends about things that are going to be irrelevant and forgotten in 10 minutes.

In the work force it was the same thing. Not only do people do just the bare minimum, they dislike the people(like me) who do their work thoroughly and make them look like the slackers they are.

I don't think that it's a teacher's job to instill the motivation to do well in school in their students. It's a parent's job to teach their children the value of doing well in school so that they can do well in life. Intrinsically motivating students isn't something that I think kids can learn in school if they aren't learning it at home.

[Ben Lahnger]

Originally Posted by Saya

No. Teaching things outside the core curriculum doesn't make school harder. Usually they are electives, taken for fun and students enjoy them.

Wrong answer. I didn't say electives were the problem. Graduating people without competence in the core skills of reading, writing and arithmetic is the problem. I'm asking if teachers are being told that those skills are no longer critical to an adults survival in the world.

Or, to head off your next diversionary critique, why are teachers and schools turning out kids who can't read, write or do basic math, if you think they're spending sufficient time on those subjects?

Originally Posted by Grausamkeit

Ben, in my case it had nothing to do with the teachers or curriculum. I was just too lazy to do the work and didn't really care about school. I had no intrinsic motivation for doing anything scholastic. I honestly think that is more the problem than the teachers. Most people are not intrinsically motivated to just do well for its own sake. I keep seeing the same attitude in college that I did in grade school. People are perfectly okay with barely squeaking by doing as little work as possible to get their barely-a-C grade because they see homework as boring and dull. They'd rather hang out with their friends or waste time on facebook or twitter.

...

I don't think that it's a teacher's job to instill the motivation to do well in school in their students. It's a parent's job to teach their children the value of doing well in school so that they can do well in life. Intrinsically motivating students isn't something that I think kids can learn in school if they aren't learning it at home.

Wrong answer. I was one of those students too. I averaged a C, with a rare B here and there and plenty of D's along the way. I got an F once and forged my report card so it looked like a B, because my parents WERE involved and were frustrated by the teachers saying things like I just wasn't living up to my potential and wasn't applying myself (and I was scared of what my dad would do.) I had ADHD before anyone generally knew what ADHD was, and I daydreamed a hell of a lot in school.

And yet I can communicate clearly and descriptively. I CAN paint a picture with words and check my receipt to verify I got the right amount of change and describe things to people in more terms than just "those fireworks were amazing" and "this muffin is awesome."

And YOU CAN TOO. I've seen enough of your writing to know that you, for all the trouble you described, came out of the school system being able to share your thoughts here and elsewhere quite eloquently. That's not true of a large segment of the graduating youth of today, and I'd like to know why. It hasn't got anything to do with faking test scores or laziness.

[CptSternn]

My American mother was a school teacher. She taught for 40 years, first grade. I remember when she told us there was going to be a problem - when they eliminated all grades for K-6. They now can only give a check, check plus, or check minus as a grade for any class. You can't fail, as there is no 'F' or any other letter.

When I was in school in the states even at age 7 we had A-F grades. They eliminated that over a decade ago. The teachers no longer write their own courses based on a list of topics they are supposed to cover, it is written by the state and they are given what to say day to day.

Then there is the whole fiasco I posted on here a few months back about how states are using certain companies to source their books, companies that intentionally skew their lessons and the actual facts based on their conservative political views.

Add that all up and throw in mandatory testing for school funding and you have a pretty crappy system that is failing everyone.

Another issue which is semi-related that irks me is school sports now have to give trophies to EVERYONE. If you play a school sport, you get a medal or trophy, whichever they are giving out, no matter if you win or come in last. It's this mentality which is an extension of the no kid gets F's but only a check minus as no matter how bad you do you are still a winner.

It is not helping anyone to tell kids they are great when they are failing.

Its part of a bigger con that is going on to all of the American people. The idea of the 'American Dream'. You can be anything you want! You can make a million dollars if you have a good idea! That whole Horatio Alger outlook on America died back in the 1960's.

Statistics show a few things about American life. 95% of people stay in the same tax bracket or drop back one, they don't move forward anymore. If you are born poor, you will die poor. Chances of you getting out of poverty are the same as you winning the lotto or getting struck by lightning. You can't work yourself out of poverty. The tables are stacked against the working class and it gets worse every year.

There is a class warfare going on right now and most people have no idea because they have been raised in the above education system and have the false hope they can rise above where they are now. The reality is if you are 24 or older in America, have a good look around because your life right now is pretty much what it will be 50 years from now, actually it is probably better now so enjoy it while you can.

[Grausamkeit]

Originally Posted by Ben Lahnger

Wrong answer. I was one of those students too. I averaged a C, with a rare B here and there and plenty of D's along the way. I got an F once and forged my report card so it looked like a B, because my parents WERE involved and were frustrated by the teachers saying things like I just wasn't living up to my potential and wasn't applying myself (and I was scared of what my dad would do.) I had ADHD before anyone generally knew what ADHD was, and I daydreamed a hell of a lot in school.

And yet I can communicate clearly and descriptively. I CAN paint a picture with words and check my receipt to verify I got the right amount of change and describe things to people in more terms than just "those fireworks were amazing" and "this muffin is awesome."

And YOU CAN TOO. I've seen enough of your writing to know that you, for all the trouble you described, came out of the school system being able to share your thoughts here and elsewhere quite eloquently. That's not true of a large segment of the graduating youth of today, and I'd like to know why. It hasn't got anything to do with faking test scores or laziness.

I forgot about the trend in the school system to pretend that kids with ADHD were just problem children. I do think that the dumbing down that went on in the schools with that 'no child left behind' BS has taught people that it's okay to be lazy and coast through life giving the bare minimum of effort.

I still think it all boils down to intrinsic motivation. There's nothing inside people these days that motivates them to do better in life. There is always the exception to any rule, but for the most part I think that's the problem. A bad system and people with no motivation for getting out of it. The main reason that I can and do express myself so eloquently(at times!) is because I was always encouraged to read. I can remember being praised for learning new things growing up. I think one of the few things that my mother did right when bringing me up was bragging about how 'smart' I was, it motivated me to want to lern more. My grandmother used to reward our A's by giving us a quarter for each one when our report cards came in. My grandparents used to give us books like Little Women, Moby Dick, Sherlock Holmes the Nancy Drew series was a hit with my cousins and I, as well. We were never punished for bad grades, although we were made to understand that it was disappointing. We had praise for good grades and a stern talking-to about C, D & F grades.

It would've been easy for me to keep an A average in school. It actually astounds me how easy it is for college. If it's easy for me why can't it be that easy for others? I'm not above average in any way.

Sternn, I do hate that 'no losers' policy that people seem to embrace these days. That seems like something people would endorse if they had grown up being the 'losers'. Unless your kids are special ed(like mine) then that kind of thing just doesn't make sense. If there are no losers then there's no motivation to be a winner.

[Ben Lahnger]

Considering the fact that human laziness has always been present to the same degree all along, Wolfie, I think you actually just made my point.

[Ben Lahnger]

Originally Posted by CptSternn

My American mother was a school teacher. She taught for 40 years, first grade. I remember when she told us there was going to be a problem - when they eliminated all grades for K-6. They now can only give a check, check plus, or check minus as a grade for any class. You can't fail, as there is no 'F' or any other letter.

When I was in school in the states even at age 7 we had A-F grades. They eliminated that over a decade ago. The teachers no longer write their own courses based on a list of topics they are supposed to cover, it is written by the state and they are given what to say day to day.

Then there is the whole fiasco I posted on here a few months back about how states are using certain companies to source their books, companies that intentionally skew their lessons and the actual facts based on their conservative political views.

Add that all up and throw in mandatory testing for school funding and you have a pretty crappy system that is failing everyone.

This is another way of saying what I was saying.