Atlanta cheats -- did it happen here?
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Atlanta cheats -- did it happen here?
So what happened in Atlanta's public schools was this: The superintendent told the prinicipals (allegedly, allegedly) that they'd be fired if they didn't bring up test scores. So they all worked overtime to make the kids smarter and better prepared for the working world, overcoming indifferent parents and numbing poverty and cruel budget cuts and.....just kidding.
The long-simmering cheating scandal in Atlanta public schools exploded Friday when a Fulton County Grand Jury indicted former Atlantic Public Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall and 34 other education professionals in the school district. According to a statement from the office of the Fulton County District Attorney, the indicted parties allegedly “conspired to either cheat, conceal cheating or retaliate against whistleblowers” in order to boost the school district’s scores on Georgia’s Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT).
Prosecutors say that the educators cheated on the CRCT in order to reap “the benefit of financial rewards associated with high test scores.” Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), school districts which turn in low standardized test scores could be seriously penalized and even lose federal aid. Critics of NCLB and other recent school reform measures argue that the Atlanta cheating scandal is not an isolated incident of criminal activity.
“We don’t condone cheating, but when you have high-stakes testing, which are one-shot deals that don’t tell you whether a child is going to fail or succeed, the whole setup in terms of No Child Left Behind was unfair to children, unfair to educators,” Verdaillia Turner, president of the Georgia Federation of Teachers said to MSNBC Monday.
Since NCLB, signed in 2001, first mandated high-stakes testing in every state and tied it to federal funding, a wave of cheating scandals has swept the nation. In 2011, USA Today investigated standardized test scores in six states and Washington, D.C., and found “1,610 examples of anomalies in which public school classes—a school’s entire fifth grade, for example—boasted what analysts regard as statistically rare, perhaps suspect, gains on state tests.”
Did these things happen in Philadelphia and elsewhere in our corner of the world? Of course they did -- the only question is how much. During the disasterous reign of the late Arlene Ackerman as Philadelphia schools chief, the only "positive" thing that kept her on the job as long as she lasted was a rise in test scores. Uh huh. Last year, after an investigation into testing irregularities, Philadelphia increased security -- and standardized test scores plummented.
Which begs two more questions.
First, why has no one in Philadelphia been caught...and punished?
Second, and more importantly, how long is the corrupt and poorly thought out testing regime going to wreak havoc with the education of our children? In other cities, some teachers have had enough:
Seattle Public Schools will not punish educators who staged a boycott of a widely used standardized test in January and has loosened testing requirements, in a victory for a local revolt that stoked the national protest movement over assessments in U.S. public schools.
Teachers, educators, and students at several Seattle schools decided to boycott the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test starting in January, saying it was not aligned with Washington state's curriculum and produces "meaningless results" upon which teachers' performances are evaluated.
The school system, which serves more than 45,000 students, had initially threatened protesting teachers with punishment, including a possible 10-day unpaid suspension, according to a memo obtained by Reuters.
Now, could that happen here? It's not a bad idea.
Who again do the Teacher's Union align with? Democrats.
Who ruins every city they run in the U.S.? Democrats.
Who votes thes democrats into office? Brain Dead Unions, people who love free handouts and Main Stream Media employees.— Keep The Change- Union membership is at an all-time low in the country, about 11% of the workforce, so yeah, it's those dang ol' unions fault. — Sanchez
- So Democrats are a bunch of brain dead zombies, yet the Republicans can't figure out a way to win elections against them? Sounds like the Republicans are pretty stupid if they cannot outsmart the Democrats. — AreaMan
- Happened under Vallas in Chicago and here too! If you think it didn't you are naive. The states are taking money away from the schools constantly. Is it any wonder that people would do this? They care about their kids. They don't want to shortchange their kids like the governors of their state wants to do. People have to rise up and elect people who won't steal from the kids.— sjkolman
- "In late June, Stockton became the nation's largest city to fail financially. At that time, all eyes were on the port city of 300,000 as experts warned the action could set off a string of similar filings among cash-strapped municipalities. Since then, a half-dozen cities have filed for Chapter 9 protection under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, including the city of San Bernardino." the future of Philadelphia.— Fisher
- I know that this happened in the Reading School District. When the state officials were notified they turned around and told the Superintendent who the teachers were who complained. At least fifteen teachers reported cheating and now all fifteen teachers are out of teaching. The superintendent and director of personnel are now retired raking in a very large retirement. If the state did their job and actually investigated the cheating there would be many teachers , principals and the former administrators without teaching certificates today. The only thing that happened was the teachers were quietly dismissed without the union protecting them and the administration getting away with cheating. This is all due to the PA Department of Education telling the school district itself to quietly do their own investigation. Tell me who is stupid enough to turn themselves in for academic cheating and lose their retirement or teaching certififates.— Anthony Grant
- THis is in part a side-effect of using test scores to evaluate teachers. Perhaps this kind of evaluation is not a great idea.— Archimedes
- So how bad are our schools? We don't know what our children are really learning, or if they are learning at all. Why must schools cheat instead of teaching what the children should know? Who is to blame? Are the children unteachable? Why? We are heavily taxed for education and we should be getting our money's worth.— harbo
- Cheating is ok. It is done in every aspect of life including business. The sooner one learns how to cheat without getting caught, the better. Cheaters always prosper.— ToniBaloney
- Everybody thinks that their children are little Einsteins...truth is that there are a hell of a lot of not very smart people and their children are just like mommy and daddy. Live with it, dumbshits.— Harry Hoopes
- Is this column just a series of April Fools jokes? First the one about the kid breaking his leg, and now this one? "Of course they did."? Ever hear of libel?— verve
- We spend millions on standardized tests, scoring, training people to score them, proctors....and what do we get? Certainly not an increase in learning or achievement and that is the whole rationale behind NCLB. Really, it's no child left untested. It's been a massive waste of money and it takes the focus off of what needs to be done for poor students to achieve at or near the level of middle class and wealthier peers.
We haven't answered that one yet in this country which is why we continue to lag behind other nations who simply don't have the crushing child poverty problem that we do.
Now I am not at all against standardized testing. I think it provides an important snapshot of a student's ability to perform grade level work. It does not, however, diagnose learning disability or tell you how far a child has made progress during the year, particularly if the student is years below grade level.
Standardized tests were never designed to be used to measure teacher effectiveness and that is one of my biggest problems with NCLB. We are pretending that the test is telling us something critical about the teacher. No, it's telling us that the child is not able to do grade level work.
My other big issue with NCLB is that it doesn't mandate specialized services, paid for by the federal gov thank you, to remediate learning issues. Instead, it's punish, punish, punish.
— nikki1231 - A snitching teach in Camden gets a 6 year unpaid vacation
http://articles.philly.com/2012-05-28/news/31868974_1_district-officials-school-board-bus
Research your own archives, Inky scribes.— albrock - No arrests in Philly because our kids in public schools probably couldn't pass the tests even if given the answers. That would imply some level of reading skill. Let's face the facts, the teachers union goons certainly don't want to be measured against anything because they would have to show some type of improvement or progress. Given the quality of the union members in Philly, that simply isn't going to happen.— TonyMarino
- If Republicans ran public schools like the Democrats and their union buddies, they'd be accused of racism all day long. But our youth is successfully being indoctrinated in liberalism, so our "watchdog" media looks the other way. Yay Democrats!— teardownthisfishwrap
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