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Prosecutors Get an 'A' On Convictions of Atlanta Ed-Reform-Gone-Bad Test Cheats
theodp writes Just weeks after an L.A. Times op-ed called on public schools to emulate high-tech companies by paying high salaries to driven, talented employees whose productivity more than compensates for their high pay, the New York Times reported on the dramatic conclusion to perhaps the largest cheating scandal in the nation's history, which saw a Judge order handcuffed Atlanta educators led off to jail immediately for their roles in a standardized test cheating scandal that raised broader questions about the role of high-stakes testing in American schools. Jurors convicted 11 of the 12 defendants — a mix of Atlanta public school teachers, testing coordinators and administrators — of racketeering, a felony that carries up to 20 years in prison. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution sowed suspicion about the veracity of the test scores in 2009, and while investigators found that cheating was particularly ingrained in individual schools, they also said that the district's top officials, including Superintendent Beverly L. Hall, bore some responsibility for creating "a culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation" that had permitted "cheating — at all levels — to go unchecked for years." (More below.)
Officials said the cheating allowed employees to collect bonuses and helped improve the reputations of both Dr. Hall and the perpetually troubled school district. Dr. Hall, who died on March 2, insisted that she had done nothing wrong and that her approach to education, which emphasized data, was not to blame. But a Fulton County grand jury later accused her and 34 other district employees of being complicit in the cheating. Twenty-one reached plea agreements, and two defendants died before they could stand trial. Interestingly, in early 2010, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported on how Hall and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation were bringing a "fair and transparent evaluation and support mechanism" to the Atlanta Public Schools. "We are excited to continue our [$23.6 million] partnership with APS and Dr. Hall," said Gates Foundation director of education Vicki L. Phillips. Five years earlier, in a 2005 Gates Foundation press release, Hall said, "We look forward to partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to take our reform efforts to the next level."
Moral of the trial appears to be "Don't mess with the feds unless you've been granted too big to fail status".
Moral of the story seems to be that, surprise surprise, if you attempt to rule by the metric, you'd better be damned good at using it or all you'll get is peons who are good at gaming the metric. You'll get there even faster if you make demands that can only be satisfied by gaming the metric; with extra credit for exquisitely defeating the purpose of data-driven-improvement by creating a class of people whose organizational survival depends on gaming the metric, and who can then be reliably expected to intimidate and retaliate against anyone who makes gaming the metric harder (like any honorable and/or competent enough to succeed without cheating employees you might have...)
Obviously, you can't get much of anything done if you just pretend that the world, is, like, fundamentally inaccessible to your reductionist empirical 'measurements', man... and sometimes there's simply no pretending that it isn't time to cut some dead weight; but the sheer naivete of these test score based funding allocation proposals(and implementations) seriously makes me wonder if the people proposing them are just dumb, actually believed that most schools that suck suck because of slacking and can be fixed just by whipping the slackers a bit, or whether the intent was always just to find a nice, 'objective' way to declare the schools a write-off and purge them.
Based on the results, it's impossible to argue that these schools are just A-OK and peachy keen; but it's not exactly news that "just intimidate and fire workers until Wall Street smiles" has not worked all that well as a corporate management strategy, and many of these testing initiatives seem to be largely the same plan, adapted for the public sector.
Corruption is "massive in the DoE"? Really? I don't think your premise is common knowledge, so please cite a few sources.
The DoE doesn't pass any laws; it enforces the ones passed by Congress. And as it's a cabinet-level department, Congress approves all cabinet appointees, so blame them on both fronts. And while the DoE does a lot of things, its central mission, and its reason for its establishment, is to assure access to equal educational opportunity for every individual. Take the DoE away, and we've lost the primary means of enforcement against educational discrimination of children in our nation. Even if you do happen to somehow prove that the DoE is full of corruption, I don't think you want to throw that baby out with the bathwater.
Speaking with 10 years of experience in public K-12 schools, blame lies with the superintendent. Superintendents are the leaders of a district, and they can and often do set a strong tone of expectations that are carried out by administrators, including principals, which then trickle down to teachers and support staff. There's no doubt in my mind that the superintendent, tacitly if not directly, created this cheating culture in Atlanta. We can blame the law all we want for encouraging the genesis of such an environment, but that's like blaming cheese for mold growth. Yes, an optimal environment was created for this cheating scandal to take root and grow, but it was disgusting school leaders like Dr. Hall that caused it to happen.
... all you get is numbers. This testing-mania is hurting education badly. In cases where the numbers are not outright made up, they are subject to over-fitting (pupils learn jut for test-scores, not for knowledge and skills anymore), where they become just as meaningless. The underlying problem is that politicians are so abysmally dumb these days that they cannot comprehend anything about any real question but whether a number is higher or lower.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well, they obviously chose the wrong profession. Had they been Wall Street hedge fund bankers, they would have got an invite to the next country estate deer hunt.
I saw (read?) a documentary on the scandal over a year ago. It focused on one guy and to boil it down he wasn't cheating for himself, what he got out of it was minimal - he was still putting in (in the form of school supplies that he purchased, etc) way more than he got out. He ended up cheating because it was so prevalent that his own students would be unfairly penalized if he didn't inflate their scores. They were at a bottom of the barrel school and yet they were learning, they were rising above their circumstances. But their legitimate scores would have still put them on the bottom compared to all the other fake scores. He saw cheating on the tests (changing their answers sheets to have more correct answers after the fact) as the only way to do right by his students.
It kind of reminded me of reading about corruption in China. In some government departmets corruption is so prevalent that the honest people are not trusted. That if you didn't take bribes everyone else in the office treated you with suspicion, that because you weren't as vulnerable as them to possible criminal charges they thought you might rat them out. You basically couldn't get your job done because no one wanted to have anything to do with you.
Its kind of like there is a "tipping point" for corruption in a system where once it reaches that point you simply have no hope of survival unless you join in, which ultimately makes anti-corruption drives extremely difficult because even the "good guys" are corrupt. You pretty much have to clean house and start over from scratch.
If I had mod points (and hadn't already commented), I'd mod you up. Not sure where you're from, but here in New York State, we've just codified this in the latest budget. Teachers will be evaluated every year and 50% will come from high stakes tests. If the students don't not only pass the tests, but improve by an amount that's decided after the tests, the teacher gets rated ineffective. 2 ineffective ratings in a row and the teachers could be fired in 90 days. 3 in a row and the teachers MUST be fired within 30 days. If a school gets enough low ratings, they are placed in receivership with one of the options being they are taken over by a charter school.
It's an insane system and we're very angry with our legislators who passed it by saying that it's horrible legislation but they were approving it "with a heavy heart" in order to get the budget passed on time. Way to sell out the kids/teachers/schools in order to keep the on-time-budget streak going!
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The problem is that the tests a) are being developed by Pearson and other companies with a financial stake in having students fail (so they can sell "solutions"), b) aren't audited by any third party to ensure they are developmentally appropriate (if you test first graders with multiplication, they WILL fail), and c) have their "pass" threshold set AFTER the fact by politicians with an agenda to push. On that last one, before the last round of testing, we were warned that 70% of kids might fail. After the results came in, it turned out that exactly that number failed. They set the pass-fail line after the scores came in to get the result they wanted.
So a teacher could teach their kids, have the kids improve from an average of 75% to 80% on the tests, but wind up being marked "ineffective" because the politicians decided (after the tests were given and the results were in) that they needed 10 percentage point improvement, not 5.
I'm not against tests in general, but the way these are administered isn't just ripe for abuse, it's DESIGNED to abuse teachers.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.