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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."
IANAL but I don't see how this could be considered racketeering.
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.
46137
I'm used to theodp putting things into selective context so they sound better or more usually worse than they are, but WTF is up with this one? Would higher teacher salaries somehow have something to do with a culture of fear and retaliation? Do well paid people not feel this kind of pressure?
They got em.
Private sector too whenever the sole and only focus is on metrics. Like how Pepsi loaded all their inventory on a truck moved it 1 foot then did an inventory count each quarter is a classic example.
People will find a way a number is met
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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.
So yes, when presented with the opportunity, some educators will cheat for personal and professional gain. This has undoubtedly going on for years but is easier to catch with more standardized testing regimen with better checks in place. The solution is not to get rid of standardized testing, but to have an orientation every year to remind teachers of their contracts, ethical obligations, and professional and legal consequences if they choose to cheat, just as works in the private sector. It is impossible to eliminate cheating, but it can be minimized with the right combination of education and enforcement.
Because their salaries, bonuses and the school's reputation (hence more funding for being a "good school") were based on the test results and they all colluded to change the scores to achieve the higher salaries and bonuses. In short, they colluded to illegally enriched themselves.
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I suspect that this is irrelevant to your little rant; but it's commonly the case for teachers(and some; but not all, flavors of support staff) to be unionized; but administrators, principals, and the superintendent almost certainly weren't.
That is the fault of the No Child Left Behind Act.
This is such a small part of the problem that it is really not worthy of discussion. Centralized testing has been mandated since the mid to late 80s. The government mandated testing, and the bureaucracy that has to follow it around is the problem. The Feds have school districts handcuffed with this, since funding is all tied to test results. Kids are stuck not learning, because constantly cramming for test problems means you rarely if ever get to learn.
Just like everything else in the Federal sector, the corruption is simply massive in the DoE. It has been for as long as the agency has been active, but today we are seeing the full force of the corruption. They are not even bothering to hide it any more.
Yeah, the "fix" is to get rid of the agency and start jailing all the people abusing offices for personal gain. Nothing likely will happen though, it's easier still to bitch about the problem than band together and take action.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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.
I agree on most of what you say, except that private schools are often not much better. You need to find a private school where they actually are not seeing them as a commercial enterprise. The problem is that good education is manifesting itself often only years and sometimes a decade or more later. Short-term test-based evaluation is not an useful metric.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Who let the mentally disturbed cave-man in?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You still cannot teach stupidity. But you can successfully distract and slow-down those 10-15% of pupils that could actually have developed real understanding otherwise.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution sowed suspicion about the veracity of the test scores in 2009
Actually, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) newspaper was one of Beverly Hall's biggest cheerleaders. Bloggers were pointing out problems with the Atlanta test scores for years before the AJC looked into it. The cheating wasn't really a secret -- someone was even using the screen name "Beverly FRAUD" to post comments on the AJC's own website.
The AJC ignored all those allegations of cheating until Beverly Hall was named 2009 National Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators (AASA).... and then the newspaper reluctantly started investigating her.
I do not condone the actions of the teachers, but I also disagree with the outcomes of high stakes testing in general. High stakes testing has been in place long enough to know that it has failed to improve outcomes. The problem is that these tests take the focus away from the student and put it on the subject. Every course is one size fits all and it does not matter if a student has mastered or will never master a subject.
No Child Left Behind is a rallying cry for the ignorant and idealistic. It does not take into account the capacity of the student. The solution really is to abandon standardized tests. The nation often cited to have the best education system in the world, Finland, has no standardized testing.
In their place, I would like to see locally or regionally developed pretests and posttests. Student progress would be determined by the difference in the two scores. This puts the focus back on the individual student where it belongs.
I have taught students to pass high stakes tests, I have also written questions for high stakes tests. The bottom line is that teachers can not win given the rules.
-If students do well on a test, the test was too easy or the teachers were cheating. The test must be re-normed. An investigation ensues. The teachers may be fired.
-If students do poorly on a test, the teacher did not do their job. A State take over is imminent. The teachers must be fired.
-If students learn about science, teachers are violating their religious beliefs. A church rally gathers at the school board meeting to fire the teacher.
-If students learn that the United States committed genocide against native Americans, teachers are unpatriotic. Teachers must be fired.
-If students come to school hungry, tired, or beaten by their parents, teachers must resolve all of those issues and teach the student (with no support). Failure to do so may result in loss of license.
For anybody reading this who is considering becoming a teacher - DO NOT BECOME A TEACHER IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! I have to get back to my lesson plans now - during spring break.
The teachers played along with your idea of having schools emulate corporations: They ignored your laws and did what they could to "optimize" the results. Now what you have to do is to release them acquitted, hand them big bailouts to recover their losses and let them retire with golden parachutes.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
YAAFM
It is when money is tied to it like it was in this case. You are acting as if it was the students that were cheating. It was the teachers changing wrong answers on the tests after the students were done. They did it for the money plain and simple since they got bonuses based on those test results.
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... that the school district in question is largely black and relatively poorer than most. The convicted school administrators and teachers were also black.
I doubt the same verdict and punishments would have occurred had the defendants been whiter and more affluent. Our society's conscience has a much easier time jailing black Americans than any other, and race factors into even white collar crimes.
...send your kids to private schools. It would be nice if more parents can do that (via vouchers or similar mechanisms),...
My mom teaches at a charter school - that is, a private school supported by the state. Most of the teachers are dedicated and creative but there are ridiculously high levels of corruption in the school administration. There are almost as many administrators as teachers and the administrators get paid a lot more than the teachers. But the top level administrators live thousands of miles away and only come to the school campus once or twice a year for a couple days. No one actually knows what these top level administrators do - other than collecting their full-time salaries - supposedly it's something about providing the school with "vision".
But the real fun begins when you look at the school assets. Somehow these top level administrators got a government grant to buy up 30 acres of prime real estate including a number of residential rental properties. Well, this prime real estate is owned by a "non-profit organization" that consists of about 5 of these top-level administrators. They do rent a couple acres to the school but then they are free to do what they want with the rest of the property. Of course, this real estate, that the government bought for them, generates a lot of revenue - which they then pay to themselves as administrator salaries. Some of the land is still undeveloped, though, so they're hoping to get more government grants to put in some more buildings (that they would own - through their "non-profit organization") - and which would, of course, increase the profitability of the land and enable them to increase their salaries.
I'm not opposed to having the government utilize private enterprise when there's a healthy free market. If the government needs to buy some screws there's no reason to build it's own screw factory. But there are significant problems when the government can't participate in a market without distorting it. And there are huge problems when the government deliberately distorts the market. Imagine if the government gave some random person a grant so that person could buy a screw factory and then the government bought up all the screws that were produced by that factory. That kind of thing does actually happen all the time in corrupt third world dictatorships. But it sure ain't right.
These days in the USA, though, charter schools are sacred cows. So even blatant corruption gets completely ignored. Instead, everyone rants about the evils of teacher's unions.
This same AC has posted so many "evil Republican" stories, that are so outlandish, I can't decide if he is a moron liberal that just loves ranting idiotically about Republicans, or if he is a moron conservative that loves planting a false-flag attack in a thread.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Your test scores, sir.
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there should be a college GED or at least some way for people to take a test to get a piece of paper and with out having to spend 30-50K + 2-4 years for it.
Gaming the system goes on in the private sector too. About fifteen years ago I was doing tech support for an ISP. One of the metrics used to judge each team of techs was the average wait time for callers. Then, somebody discovered that if you connected to whoever had been in the queue the longest and told them that somebody would be with them shortly, it reset the timer. This made their wait times look great, until management caught on and the offenders were fired for falsifying company records. Not something they'd want on their job history, but well deserved.
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They did it for years.
They did it thousands of times each year.
They conspired to punish teachers that threatened to expose the test cheating.
Their annual salary increases were based in large part on the test scores.
The teachers organized "erasure parties" to facilitate their crime in a fun, social setting.
Ken
Racketeering requires an underlying crime - it is an aggravating crime, not an independent crime.
They were convicted of fraud, that they worked together opened the door for a racketeering conviction.
Ken
And by "repealed" you mean defended and threatened to veto the Republican bill to eliminate federally mandated testing in 2013?
Ken
There are a few schools that offer essentially that. I'm doing it at WGU.edu, which is a state school in many states (WGU Texas, for example, is a state school in Texas). You finish each class whenever you can pass the test, which in many cases is an industry-recognized certification test from CompTIA, CIW, Microsoft, etc. I just finished my database course, which took me a week to get four college credits since I know the material very well. If you knew ALL the material well enough to pass all of the tests, you could get a bachelor's degree in six months or so. They ALSO provide curriculum to teach you the material, but you study it only as much as you need to.
You mentioned the cost. With WGU, you don't pay per-credit or per-class, but per-semester, and you can take as many courses in that semester as you want. (Minimum 12 credits for financial aid.) IF you knew everything you need to know for your degree, you could do the whole thing in one six-month semester at a cost of only $3000. The tax credit is about $1,200, so the net cost to you is only $1,800.
Personally, I have a full time job, a part-time business, and a family, so I'm doing it in just a few hours per week and it will take a while.
Other schools offer similar programs. WGU offers low cost and reasonable credibility - it's a state school just like Texas A&M, University of Texas, etc. Not AS flagship prestigious, but also not a joke like some online programs. Exclesior is somewhat similar in that you get credit for knowing the material, not for attendance or homework.
Probably just a troll. Possibly insane.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Prosecutors Get an 'A' On Convictions of Atlanta Ed-Reform-Gone-Bad Test Cheats
Try again, I don't think your headline was quite convoluted enough.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
In the long run, companies can't fake how much money they have made: the money is either there or it isn't.
I take it you work in the public sector. There are actually two schools of deception in play in the private sector, The Wall Street School and and the Hollywood School. The Wall Street school is about making it look like you have more profits than you do to get your stock price up higher. Higher stock price means bigger bonuses for the people at the top at the expense of reducing head count and squeezing the remaining employees for all you can get out of them. Then you have the Hollywood school of cooking the books to make it look like you are taking massive losses so you can write off all your expenses, get out of paying profit-share contracts, and get massive tax breaks.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
It wasn't just, "Hey, lets cheat!", there was also quite a lot of, "Play along or we'll burn your house down."
Except the situation was far worse than you think, and Hall wasn't a Republican.
So my guess is that you didn't actually read up on what happened. I live just outside Atlanta, and this has been a big story for over a year. What happened was far worse than you seem to think.
Well, she would have been, but she died. Hence "11 of 12".
I'm not "liberal" but I can address the Wall St. issue.
The point is that it is an absolutely glaring double standard in the administration of justice. Government convicts these people of "racketeering" while ignoring literally 1000s of instances of fraud, forgery and perjury committed by the big Wall St. banks.
The whole "robosigning" thing wasn't just some minor problem with the paperwork. It was an absolutely massive effort to create and file false affidavits, create and improperly notarize official documents and submit those forged documents to courts and government agencies. If a dozen people conspiring to cheat on standardized tests is "racketeering" what do you call a giant conspiracy to cover up fraud and use forged documents in order to illegally evict people from their homes?
What's wrong with treating education as a commercial enterprise?
Shouldn't the truly relevant metric, short term and long term, be customer satisfaction, with parents and students being the customers?
Get rid of government education entirely. Let the market differentiate the good schools and good teachers from the bad. There is no 100% ideal outcome, but the results produced by a system based on competition and the profit motive are going to be superior to the government model.
If only we had such good and motivated prosecutors to go after the massive banking fraud that caused the 2008 crash.
My kids' school district has a bunch of charter schools - a model which our governor loves and wants to convert all public schools to. The charter schools take in government money that otherwise would flow to public schools. They use this money as they see fit - no oversight at all. How much do they spend on the students versus funneling back to the parent company? Sorry, but they'll refuse to disclose this. They also don't need to hire people with any education background to be teachers. You too can take a 5 week course to become a "teacher."
The charter schools also get to pick and choose which students they get. Does your child have special needs? Sorry, don't bother applying. Kids with special needs cost more and thus aren't as profitable. Send them back to the public schools which now have less funds than before to handle those students.
See how the public schools are failing since they have less funds? That means that you need to open more charters and send more money away from the public schools.
My oldest son is one of those special needs students. His grades are exceptional, but he requires supports which cost more than the average student. In the charter school model, he'd be tossed aside as costing too much instead of being educated and developing a love of learning (as he currently is doing in his public school).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
He somehow managed to find slashdot. Happens sometimes. Always a crank.
There is something to be said for black students. I was waiting for my Son who was in elementary school. That'd be about 15 years ago. On the lobby table was a book of performance on standardized tests. At the top were the white girls, then boys, then asian girls, asian boys.... bottom of the list black girls - 1 passed, no black boys. I thought WTH? I knew there were probably a dozen black boys in that grade for that school, about the same number of girls. Same school, same books, same teachers, same lesson plan, etc.. The one thing I did find is that the parents of the black kids couldn't seem to care less about them. I couldn't even help them. White guy trying to help black kids - must be up to something.
How terrible.
I did have a lot more success at the 4-H. Some black parents brought their kids by. I'd teach them anything. Anything at all. Sadly, it was just a fraction of a percent of black kids.
I didn't say that there was no "gaming" in the private sector; there is plenty of it. I said companies can't fake how much money they are making in the long run.
I take it you can't read: In the long run, companies can't fake how much money they have made: the money is either there or it isn't.
There are many schools of deception in play in the private sector. But those kinds of deceptions don't work in the long run because you can't hide arbitrary amounts of losses forever; sooner or later the accounting is going to catch up with you.
(What you can do, of course, is keep asking for a "government stimulus" or "government bailout", but then you aren't really private sector anymore.)
Of course, most private businesses suck, just like government services. The difference is that with private businesses, you have a choice not to give your money to businesses that you have found to suck, whereas with government services, you keep having to pay for bad services no matter what.
It's basically the same idea as evolution. It's kind of funny that progressives pay lip service to evolutionary ideas in biology but believe in intelligent design in economics.
Yet, that is exactly what the US government is advocating. Furthermore, even if it were a useful metric, it would get gamed. That's, again, why it's important to leave the choice of metric up to individual parents, just like the choice of school. If you have a diversity of metrics and a diversity of choices from parents, not only do you avoid nationwide educational disaster, but also models that are particularly successful will thrive, while those that aren't will disappear.
Many different people have many different beliefs about what constitutes a good school. Again, that's why a free market in education is so important; free markets, of course, also have nonprofits operating in them.
In the US, public school performance does not improve with increased funding, and US public schools spend several times what public schools in other countries spend for comparable or better educational results ($PPP). So the idea that public schools are failing because they aren't getting enough money is total b.s.
First of all, many charter schools are non-profits. In addition, charter schools have a higher percentage of special needs kids than public schools. In different words, your reasoning is based on fabrications.
In different words, you live in a nice neighborhood with nice schools. You don't care how inefficiently your school operates because it's mostly other people's tax dollars that pay for it. And you don't care how many students are f*cked over by the public school system, as long as you get your stuff for free. It's selfishness like yours that causes America's school system to deteriorate further and further.
I take it, then, that you're not familiar with the term "creative accounting."
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The charter schools by us are run by for-profit companies and routinely kick out special needs students or deny them entry in the first place. No one cares to force the charter schools to accept all students because our governor wants to push charter schools as a complete replacement for public schools.
As far as me living in a nice neighborhood with nice schools? Hardly. My district is labeled a failing district with a high rate of poverty. We were able to get supports for our son after years of fighting the district. Even so, we're going to head into our latest IEP meeting fearful that the supports will be removed because our son is doing well academically. (Which is sort of like saying "this guy is standing well with a cane so therefore we can yank the cane away no problem.")
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
As I understand it, companies pop up and go away in Hollywood, because incorporating a new company for each movie is cheap compared to all the other costs of making a movie, and it provides protection for the people supplying the money. It also means that Hollywood accounting doesn't have a "long run", and profits can be manipulated almost at will.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If you think that religion is a good basis for doing the right thing you seriously need removed from the gene pool.
If you think that religion is a good basis for doing the right thing you seriously need removed from the gene pool.
You totally missed the point, on multiple levels.
Religion provides a way for people to address and understand what is right and wrong. Understand that this doesn't mean Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, all of them get into this. Some better than others. Sure beats the heck out of the atheists I know. Every one of them is despicable. A used car salesman is a step up.
As for your gene pool remark, I have a feeling you'd be a great one to remove. Already way to late for me, my kids are probably older than you are. I could have grandchildren that are developmentally older than you are.
Probably just a troll. Possibly insane.
What an epitaph!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You still cannot teach stupidity. But you can successfully distract and slow-down those 10-15% of pupils that could actually have developed real understanding otherwise.
However crappy your education system, clever kids will still end up understanding more than less intelligent ones.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
When you start off with religion, and it doesn't matter which one, as your frame of reference for what is good and evil you have already failed. You may end up with a decent moral answer for some things, but you will end up perpetuating the hate of those who came before you.
I highly suspect that the reason you think the atheists you know are terrible stems directly from you knowing that they are atheist and nothing to do with how they actually behave. Or is it just that your set of morals, which were beaten into your head as a child, are as fucked up as the way they were taught to you.
Since you mentioned it in your previous post, good and evil are just opinions. The idea of what is good and what is evil is nothing more than a sliding scale comparing one action against another. There is no list delivered by some supreme being laying out any absolute morality, to think that such a thing exists is the height of ignorance, and to think that you know for certain what is moral and what is not is the height of arrogance.
Creative accounting can be used to manipulate stock prices in the short run; it doesn't work in the long run.
Overall, they don't need to be "forced", they already accept special needs students. Perhaps you are looking at the wrong charter schools. Or perhaps you have irrational expectations of the kind of education your kid should get paid for courtesy of the tax payer.
I see no justification why your kid should receive more resources than any other kid. Sure, your kid does better with more resources, but so do other kids. I think you illustrate why charter schools and portable funding are a good thing, namely to stop abuses of the system from people like you.
My child gets more supports because he has a diagnosis that requires such supports and because he has an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) approved by the district. It's not just that we walked into school and said "We feel like our kid deserves X. Give him it or else." This involved years of encountering problems, medical diagnoses, and working with the school district to come up with the best approach to maximize my child's education.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.