CSotD: Telling them what they want to hear
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One of the challenges I face in teaching kids to write like journalists is to break them out of the mindset they learn in school: That there is a "right" answer, which is to say, the answer you are expected to come up with, and so the trick to getting good grades is to find, and parrot, the answer that the teacher wants to hear.
Apparently, it's hard to break school administrators of that same mindset, and Clay Bennett here riffs on an award-winning school superintendent who found the right answers by simply changing the wrong ones.
Bennett provided a link to an article in Education News that begins with this lede:
The test cheating scandal at the Atlantic Public School System has hit a peak with the arrest and indictment of Beverly L. Hall who was the district superintendent at the time of alleged infractions and who retired in 2011. Along with 35 other Atlanta educators and administrators, she is being charged with racketeering, theft, influencing witnesses, conspiracy and making false statements.
It also features a photo of Hall, cheerfully holding out the medal referenced above, which marks her being named "Superintendent of the Year" by the American Association of School Administrators.
She got that honor, plus various bonuses, in 2009, by coming up with the answers that the givers of bonuses and awards wanted to hear. But, in 2011, just prior to her decision to retire, she faced some additional questions.
In July of that year, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal announced the results of a report on Atlanta's wonderfully improved test scores. Here's a snippet of that:
- We found cheating in 44 of the 56 schools we examined (78.6%). There
were 38 principals of those 56 schools (67.9%) found to be responsible
for, or directly involved in, cheating.
- We determined that 178 teachers and principals in the Atlanta Public
Schools System cheated. Of the 178, 82 confessed to this misconduct.
Six principals refused to answer our questions, and pled the Fifth
Amendment, which, under civil law is an implied admission of wrongdoing.
These principals, and 32 more, either were involved with, or should
have known that, there was test cheating in their schools.
You may want to click on that one-page summary; it's quite readable and seems to cover most of the bases.
And the wagons, predictably, were circled as soon as the first questions were raised. Beverly Hall is being targeted because she was a demanding boss, and you can indict a ham sandwich, and all the other defenses of the indefensible were pulled from the bag.
After all, the True Believers in this game are damned powerful on a number of levels: They created the whole "No Kids Left Behind" legislation, they put one of their own in charge of the Department of Education, they even funded a semi-sorta-documentary based on their dogma and got it widespread media coverage.
They weren't going to abandon one of their top students.
Let me repeat what I have been saying since the first glimmerings of NCLB: I don't know any teachers who are against valid, meaningful standards. But did you notice the words I slipped in there?
I've seen a stunning level of bogosity at work in all this "reform," and a depressing lack of anything more than lip service addressing it.
I was sitting next to the assistant principal of a high school at one of my first school board meetings in Maine when the board began talking about SAT scores and year-to-year progress.
I leaned over to him and whispered, "Are they using SATs as an assessment tool?" He whispered back, "Yeah," in a way that suggested he too was well-aware that measuring student improvement by SAT scores is like grading the year-to-year progress of the basketball team by calculating their average height.
But, in his words, "yeah." In the State of Maine, SAT scores may be used to measure school improvement.
This is actually kind of funny, but they keep changing the name of the test because they keep changing what they think it's good for. Most colleges don't take it very seriously anymore, but, boy, it sure takes itself seriously. From Wikipedia (and from Carl Rose):
The name originally stood for "Scholastic Aptitude Test". But in 1990, because of uncertainty about the SAT's ability to function as an intelligence test, the name was changed to Scholastic Assessment Test. In 1993 the name was changed to SAT I: Reasoning Test (with the letters not standing for anything) to distinguish it from the SAT II: Subject Tests. In 2004, the roman numerals on both tests were dropped, and the SAT I was renamed the SAT Reasoning Test.
They also began screwing around with the scoring about then, in order to make it more accurate in measuring, well, whateverthehell it was purported to measure.
And last summer, I ran into an excellent social studies teacher in New York, now retired but a department head back when I was working with schools in his area. He told me he took retirement rather than deal with the changes in education, among which the testing fiasco is a critical element.
He said that he used to take on some of the low-performing classes that, at a lot of schools, are shoveled off on the new teachers who lack the seniority to refuse the assignment but who, as greenhorns, also lack the teaching chops to deal with those classes.
He said he did it in part because he had the experience to face the challenge but also because he liked the kids and wanted to try to get at least some of them back on the beam.
But, he told me, you can't do that anymore, because it will tank your performance reviews. And a large part of that is because the scores are analyzed on absolute levels, so that having a large number of poor kids, or intellectually challenged kids, or EDs or LDs or foreign-language or otherwise not-average kids makes no difference.
Nor does it matter how the same group of kids did the year before. One class that happens to have an unusually high number of "challenged" kids can totally screw a school, because nobody wants to know how the Class of '16 does this year compared to how they did last year. They want to know how the Class of '16 does this year compared to how the Class of '15 did last year.
How do you cope? How do you achieve?
You cheat.
How could it be otherwise? The system was set up based on "The Texas Miracle," which turned out to be based on cheating.
Let me repeat: I know of no teachers who wouldn't welcome meaningful standards, accurate assessments and valid testing.
But the situation couldn't be more simple: If you are required to match Lance Armstrong's level of excellence, you'd better not be squeamish about needles.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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