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.

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: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.

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.