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."

Comments

Wrong profession

[labnet]

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.

Re:Wrong profession

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wrong profession

[MillionthMonkey]

By inflating their grades, the students were denied the education they deserved, many of which were special needs students.

This would have been true 15 years ago, before we decided to go test crazy in an effort to identify and defund the schools that are wasting taxpayer money simply by being below average. That created a perverse incentive. Nowadays, when they don't help the kids unwittingly cheat, teachers will get laid off or not replaced, funds get diverted to charter schools, and class sizes eventually balloon to more kids than can fit in the room. The fact that we're now charging teachers with "racketeering" for merely trying to keep the schools funded (which wasn't a concern when I was growing up) shows how drastically we've destroyed the country's 170-year-old public education system in just a few years.

Re:Wrong profession

[Anonymous Coward]

> By inflating their grades,

It was not grade inflation. It was standardized test score inflation. Poor test scores wouldn't stop them from graduating, but poor test scores would cause an underfunded school to receive even less resources. Test scores were used to punish "bad schools" by making them worse schools rather than as a diagnostic to find schools in need of help.

Re:Wrong profession

[Jason Levine]

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!

Re:Wrong profession

[Jason Levine]

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.

Well they wanted the results

[Billly Gates]

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

Re:Well they wanted the results

[bangular]

Statistics and economics. It's always statistics and economics.

The vast majority of decisions and funding in this country come from statistics. Unfortunately, the powers that be rarely have that background and don't understand that most statistics act as a proxy for the underlying issue they are trying to affect. We want "smarter" kids, so we give them a test which measures their "smartness." If their test scores improve, we give the schools more money. What we've actually done is incentivized everyone to cheat and disconnect that proxy measure from the child's "smartness."

That's the problem we have when the administrators of this country have degrees that never required a calculus based stats course. They don't understand the complexity of the numbers and think all numbers are equal.

Re:Well they wanted the results

[penix1]

There was a joke on NPR the other day it went like this:

3 economics statisticians went deer hunting. The first just missed the back end of the deer while the second just missed the front. The third yelled, "We got him!"

What this shows is there is always a margin of error and as long as the numbers are within that range they got it.

Racketeering, Ouch...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:Racketeering, Ouch...

[gweihir]

I think the problem is that measurements are hard to get right. Engineers learn this. There is an old German engineering saying: "Wer mist mist Mist." ("Those who measure measure crap.") Any good engineering curriculum does not only teach this, but demonstrates it to students time and again. In the end, the students learn that metrics are useful hints but can never replace actual understanding and at that time they are qualified to use metrics.

These pedagogics people have zero clue about all the problems with metrics and how to do them right and what they can and cannot deliver. Hence they are making all the really bad beginners mistakes.

Re:How are these related?

[pushing-robot]

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.

Re:Racketeering

[Etherwalk]

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...

Re:How are these related?

[penix1]

We've been obsessing over test scores for a while now and it doesn't seem to improve the quality of education.

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.

Re:Racketeering

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

If all you care about are numbers

[gweihir]

... 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.

Re:If all you care about are numbers

[Opportunist]

There is no solution to the problem. Especially as long as everyone working for a corporation doesn't give a rat's behind about it. CEOs have no connection whatsoever to the company they run anymore, and neither do workers care about it in a hire and fire world where any kind of "loyalty" is simply not rewarded at all. There is no reason to do any work past the bare minimum to not get fired. So of course when some bonus system was invented as an "incentive" to do more work, what happened is what would logically happen: People started to game the system. The "goals" they get set are supposedly improving the company's state, but in the end all they accomplish is that people try to find out how they can accomplish as many of them while at the same time spending as little time and effort doing so as possible.

And exactly the same happens in our schools. Teachers know what the tests will be like, so what is taught is exactly and only what will make the pupil pass that test. There is not only no incentive to teach beyond that, it's actually discouraged because it bear the threat that something you show to your pupils that's not going to be in the test is more interesting to them and they will "waste" their time doing this instead of learning what will make you hit your mark on their test scores.

And that, people, is pretty much the worst kind of bullshit.

Bloggers, not Newspapers, revealed the cheating

[McGruber]

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.

Re:More widespread than thought

[kenh]

part of the "No Child Left Behind" act that Obama later repealed by decree

And by "repealed" you mean defended and threatened to veto the Republican bill to eliminate federally mandated testing in 2013?

House Republicans voted Friday to dismantle the troubled No Child Left Behind law for evaluating America's students and schools, saying states and local school districts rather than Washington should be setting rules for ensuring that kids are getting good educations.

The legislation would eliminate federally required testing of students, which has been controversial from the start. But the measure passed with no Democratic support and drew a veto threat from the Obama administration, which said it would be a "step backward" in efforts to better prepare children for colleges and careers and to bring improvements to low-performing schools.

Democrats in the Senate, where they hold the majority, are working on their own bill. It would also give states greater flexibility in designing school improvement standards. But it would maintain the authority of the federal education secretary to approve those plans. A Senate vote on that legislation is unlikely until autumn.