A reader commented on an earlier blog about the way the system demands a high success rate and will not tolerate honest marking. If a student fails, it will be considered the teacher’s fault, so it is best to inflate the scores. If a teacher is honest–especially in a “turnaround” school–the teacher will be fired. As Secretary Arne Duncan used to say, “We are lying to the kids.” Now we are lying to the kids and to ourselves.
The fraud continues. Teachers will inflate the scores. Administrators will pressure them to do so, because the administrators will lose their job if the scores and pass marks don’t go up every year.
Someone tweeted me the other day to ask who should be blamed when there is cheating: the teachers or the system. The answer is obvious when teachers and administrators work in a system that gives them this choice: Produce higher scores or be fired. Few people want to be fired. Most people put a high priority on feeding their family and paying the mortgage.
Who caused the collapse of the auto industry: the “bad” workers on the assembly line or the people who made decisions about what to produce?
This came from an administrator:
| I don’t usually reply to what I read, but am up early today, thinking about the school year before I get dressed to go to graduation. I am a supervisor of a social studies department in a NYC public high school. I am thinking about how many extra pull-out programs, after school review sessions, etc., it took this spring to get the same number of students to pass our two Regents exams as we had last year. Why is that? Because too many students listed as level 2 readers could barely read and write when they came to us, too many students came to us thinking all they had to do was show up in class most of the time to pass and too many students never got the preparation they needed to become high school students. This lament is not a condemnation of elementary and junior high school teachers. We know the kind of pressure they have been put through to pass 80% or so of their students. However, high school is the end product. Many of the students we have in our school today have little or no hope of graduating on time. If high schools aren’t vigilant about failing those who do not successfuly complete their work, too many students will be paying for remedial courses in college. The pressure is on. The smoke and mirrors continues. And the emperors (choose the appropriate names) aren’t wearing any clothes. |
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In Finland, 40% of students get special education services, most beginning in elementary school. In too many cases we do not even check vision and hearing in our younger students. That’s one contributor to the problem.
Another is this – we still insist on a cohort based method of learning. that requires students to move through the material at the same pace. In the case of our slower students, that gives us a choice between “failing” them or moving them ahead when they are not ready for the next level of work. Neither is fair to them. Each child should be entitled to instruction to meet her needs.
We also rob many of our more able students by not challenging them either in depth or breadth of what we instruct.
We ignore that in the current approaches to educational policy, which again is not fully funding IDEA and has cut funds for programs for gifted education.
hmm.
high school is not the end product. no?
I thought people were.
self-directed.. life-long learners..
Our entire school structure is a compliance-based model, where time is constant and learning is the variable. It is based on handing out penalties to students when they are out of compliance and don’t perform at the same level as their chronological peers. More than anything in the history of American education, NCLB has served to further advance a concept of “do this or we will punish you,” by not only labeling students as failures for not adhering to the compliance model and keeping up with their classmates, but doing the same to teachers and schools. Public education has become a barbaric system of mental whips and chains. Why wouldn’t people be compelled to cheat to get higher scores and inflate to “produce” higher grades when the entire system is based on “do this or we will punish you.”
Instead of focusing on reform efforts that eliminate the outdated structures in K-12 education, including the mountains of useless federal and state regulations that perpetuate a dead system, we’re too focused on taking people to the dungeon and torturing them into improvement or else. “What, you failed 5th grade? On the rack with you! The pain will continue until you start learning!”
We are truly a sick people.
Well, the DOE reform efforts are dysfunctional in many respects one of which is certainly the pressure on teachers to pass an “unofficial” quota of students in their classes (about 70% in my “failing” school where average daily attendance is 75%). If your percentage falls below this quota and does not improve by the next marking period, you may be asked to sign a 3 page single spaced plan (placed in your file) outlining all the steps you are to take with each failing student, which includes contacting parents by phone and letter scheduling meetings with them and counselors and writing follow up reports for each student. While such action sound perfectly appropriate in principle, where a teacher has 160 students of whom 50 or more may be failing, it is easy to see that this effort has just added another 10-15 hours of work for the teacher each week. In high schools five years ago, teachers might possibly have done this during allowed daily “administration” periods, but in the last 2 years, these periods have been taken over by the administration for mandatory teacher meetings which require additionally assigned project work completions, again outside normal school hours. Thus, faced with an overwhelming task for which there is no time, most teachers get the point and begin to pass the required quota of students. The errant honest teacher who continues to fail too many students will then face further administrative and disciplinary action with subtle hints of an unsatisfactory year end rating. Naturally, faced with all this and the prospect of their school being closed as a whole, younger and less “expensive” teachers begin to actively search for transfers out of the school as soon as possible.
The truly ironic part of being a teacher in this environment of ” students must pass or the teacher fails” is that administration insists our courses be rigorous!
I teach Math in a turnaround school. I was hauled into the VP office and questioned about my failing rates. One was incorrectly calculated as 77% failing, when it should have been 66%. I was being blamed and was told I didn’t reflect on my teaching. haha Anyway, before this meeting I asked this wonderful VP if I should bring anything with me. His answer was no. When I was being chastised for these failure rates and lack of reflection, I went back to my classroom and printed out all the Standardized Test scores of that class from last year. One student in the class had a passing test score. The rest had failing test scores. I nicely highlighted it and wrote a lovely letter back to the VP pretty much saying, “My failure rate is lower than the number of kids that failed the Standardized Test. There’s your reflection.” Well, it wasn’t exactly those words, but pretty close to it. It just had a bit more tact, but said the same thing.