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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."
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
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.
No, he was pointing out that rewarding teachers for high test scores is likely to result not in better teaching but more cheating and manipulation of the results.
We've been obsessing over test scores for a while now and it doesn't seem to improve the quality of education.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Racketeering -- "A pattern of illegal activity carried out as part of an enterprise that is owned or controlled by those who are engaged in the illegal activity".
That's the legal def. according to the internet. The RICO statute has a much more specific definition that it would take time to wade through and try to apply. I'm not sure offhand how they did it in this case.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
That is the fault of the No Child Left Behind Act. The act that tied teacher / administrator salaries to the test results. Public schools across the nation stopped worrying about a kids learning and worried about their bottom line. That leads to doing whatever it takes to make sure the test results are positive.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
RICO was intended to be used against violent mobsters. It has been used against political protestors, and now against people that cheat on tests. It was written far too broadly, and should be rewritten, or, even better, repealed entirely.
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.
RICO was intended to be used against violent mobsters.
But these Atlanta "educators" were mobsters -- they used gang tactics to run the schools, kept thousands of children from receiving their educations and ruined the livelihoods of those teachers and principals who refused to cheat.
... 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.
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.
they used gang tactics to run the schools, kept thousands of children from receiving their educations and ruined the livelihoods of those teachers and principals who refused to cheat.
Many of the people caught cheating, made accusations AFTER THE FACT, that they were pressured into it. That could be true, but it is far more likely that they were just trying to shift the blame and squirm off the hook. In any case, these were not teachers that "refused to cheat". I have no idea what "gang tactics" you are referring to. Could you be more specific?
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
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
Right now, in New York State, the governor forced through a budget that "reforms" education. One of his big proposals is that all teachers will be reviewed 50% by high stakes testing of students (where students don't just have to pass but improve their score by an amount set after the kids take the tests), 30% by their principal, and 20% by an outside observer (doesn't need to be an educator so you could get a "plumber evaluating how good a surgeon is" situation). If the teacher fails the annual review 2 years in a row (and 70% of kids failed the tests last year), they can be dismissed within 90 days for "incompetence." If they fail 3 years in a row, they MUST be dismissed in 30 days unless they can prove fraud.
Not only will this result in good teachers being fired because their students don't test well (or because they don't reach the post-test decided improvement amounts), but it will put pressure on teachers to teach to the test (ruining kids' educations) or to even cheat to help their students on the tests (since not cheating might mean more likelihood of being fired - even if you are a good teacher).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
It was appropriate here. The racketeering charge was based on the conspiracy, extortion and bribery they committed, and the corrupted organization was the Board of Ed.
The only guilty verdicts, aside from RICO, were for "making false statements," and only half of the defendants were guilty even of that. The two (3?) people charged with theft were found not guilty. No one was even charged with fraud. This makes it all seem like an organization dedicated to the criminal enterprise of denying its own existence.
I get that it's technically not a crime to change the answers on someone else's test, putting the prosecutors in a bind to impose penalties, but RICO seems really blown out of all proportion. Maybe it would have made more sense if they'd been able to try Dr. Hall before her death. Maybe she's the one who really committed/benefitted from the immoral but not illegal actions of her henchmen, but we didn't get to see that.
It's easy to be moral and ethical when there's nothing to lose. To blame the mechanic providing the "something to lose" when weak, immoral and unethical people decide to act in their own best interest at the expense of children's education is irresponsible.
Federal judges are appointed to life terms in order to reduce the temptation to cheat. It turns out that all people are susceptible to pressure; almost all people will do things they "know" to be wrong if given enough enticement or peer pressure. If you give teachers a system of merit pay, some of them will game the system. If you impose a set of penalties, they will game the system. Pile those rewards/penalties on a system where teachers in districts with engaged and active parents get better resources, and you're just begging for trouble. "Social promotion" is as old as formal education. NCLB was supposed to be an administrative block to it, but it turns out teachers find a way around.
I find it very interesting that, 2 days before these verdicts, the GA legislature repealed the requirement that students pass a standardized test (CRCT) as a condition of graduation. And made it retroactive, so all those students, going back 10 years, who passed all their classes but were denied diploma for failing a section of the CRCT can now get their diplomas. ie: The state has legislated in the same social promotion that APS parents are up in arms over and that drove NCLB.
Oh yes, the ever-blamed teacher unions. You realize teacher unions actually hate standardized testing? And if one is to believe that teacher unions love keeping "bad teachers" around, what could be better than a building full of "exceptional" teachers recognized by nobody else but the teachers themselves?
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
They didn't just cheat, they threatened people with violence, defrauded the government and charitable organizations, committed criminal malfeasance and official corruption, and on and on....
Several posters in this thread have made similar accusations, but, like you, they provide no citation, don't say who was threatened, don't say who was making the threats, and provide no evidence.
Cheating on tests is wrong, and should be punished, but we need to keep some perspective. There was no violence, and the only permanent harm was that money was allocated to some poor students who didn't deserve it according to the official criteria.