The New York Times has an extended story on the indictments of educators for their alleged participation in cheating on tests.
Ex-superintendent Beverly Hall was one of 35 Atlanta educators indicted in the biggest cheating scandal in public school history.
A third-grade teacher agreed to wear a wire for the investigators:
She “admitted to Mr. Hyde [the investigator] that she was one of seven teachers — nicknamed “the chosen” — who sat in a locked windowless room every afternoon during the week of state testing, raising students’ scores by erasing wrong answers and making them right. She then agreed to wear a hidden electronic wire to school, and for weeks she secretly recorded the conversations of her fellow teachers for Mr. Hyde.”
The scandal reached all the way into the superintendent’s office:
“Dr. Hall, who retired in 2011, was charged with racketeering, theft, influencing witnesses, conspiracy and making false statements. Prosecutors recommended a $7.5 million bond for her; she could face up to 45 years in prison.”
Many lessons here. Cheating is wrong. It should be punished. It cheats children. Lying is wrong. It should be punished. A system that incentivizes cheating and rewards cheating is wrong and should be changed.
The odds are that the cheaters will be punished, as they should be, but the system that encouraged the cheating will remain unchanged.
Another lesson from Georgia: Cheating scandals should be thoroughly investigated by professional investigators.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yet Rhee (the queen of cheating scandals) is the guru of education reform. Go figure.
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
I am not sure why these districts had reached the point of feeling they needed to cheat, esp before this AYP nonsense. In my district, in Ohio, none of us had access to tests prior to the day of administering them. They were shrink-wrapped and inaccessible, locked in the principal’s office. She didn’t look at them either. No one knew what the questions were and we were told not to look at them as we went around the room while kids were taking them. We weren’t even allowed to have anything on the walls that might have been helpful. We weren’t allowed to let students talk during the breaktimes. We could only allow them to go to the restroom one at a time and had to hold their closed test booklet/answer sheet in our had as they went to the restroom. We couldn’t even discuss any general skills or reminders on the day of the tests, even though we didn’t have the tests in our rooms at that time. All I told my kids was that they should do their best, be the best they could be for themselves, that I loved them as did their parents. And I wished them good luck. I had already told them that we weren’t allowed to discuss the questions after the test in case someone was absent in the school that day. So when they were done, we did a silent cheer. Thankful that it was OVER. The end of the school year was then filled with more learning fun, although or superintendent wouldn’t allow too much fun. They still had to have their leveled reading groups designed for differentiation to the last day of school. For the last 5 years we achieved Excellent with Distinction. I wonder what we will “earn” when we get into the computerized tests, given the fact that technology keeps changing and needing upgrades and that some kids are terrible with computers or tests or any evaluation. But, all I can say is … I retired. I had to get away from something I don’t believe in. It isn’t the tests or the standards or even the core curriculum that I don’t believe in. It is the application of them for the wrong reasons. It is the stress of having to deal with everyone being “measured” on things that were ever-changing and unknown. Even the scanners that were used to grade the tests were of questionable value. They didn’t inform us until this past year that the reason students weren’t allowed to write outside of the box was because the scanner was set to a specific size for the boxes on each page. It couldn’t even see what they wrote outside the boxes! What a lot of garbage this entire experience has been. I hope it all collapses prior to the takeover of public education by people who are wanting to make a profit selling testing materials or in setting up private schools to syphon off the public dollars to teach students to memorize and never think, to never question, to never analyze, and to never point out that they might have an insight that is more worthwhile than that which we were trying to convey as teachers. I am sad. I hope sometimes that I don’t have grandchildren who will be victimized by this horrific approach to “learning”.
All teachers should adhere to the following: As a teacher I refuse to give any test that I have not vetted myself.
So you are saying, Duane, that teachers should see the questions ahead of time? How could that present an unbiased testing situation? Some districts might see the questions and others wouldn’t. So, there are no norms. I don’t disagree with the premise that kids shouldn’t be tested on information for which they aren’t prepared. The current tests ATTEMPT to determine whether a student has achieved the ability to use their schema and context clues to find answers to questions about reading passages to which they have never been exposed. We were only permitted to teach from parallel examples and officially “released” questions from previoius tests. I agree that it is unfair. However, when there are rules, the district and teachers should follow them, not independently do whatever they please to assure that their students pass. In my district, if any of us had attempted to do anything unseemly, we’d have been fired on the spot. I am sure that the local REA/OEA/NEA would not have defended us for that kind of behavior.
Debbie,
Yes they should see the tests ahead of time. If it is not appropriate for their class they should refuse to give it.
By the way, there are no “unbiased testing situations” ever. That’s an educational myth that needs to be disposed of.
Duane
There will always be a bias even if unintended. However, it is possible to test for basic proficiency in the basic subjects. You either can solve the problems and have knowledge of the basic, not trick as they used to do to us, subject matter. Anyone who does not think so has been taking some real good delusional material. Twisting things to your own end is the problem. When someone has worked on the plane you are flying in do you want them to have basic reading competency? If they do not you die. I have read the final reasons for almost every major crash for over 50 years in Aviation Week and my dad was one of the best flight test engineers since 1937 with Kelly Johnson and I have worked at the highest level in the industry also. It is a fact in aerospace and isn’t it amazing that that industry is the one which realizes the dramatic importance of the arts in education. I will name specifically three organizations: Boeing, Northrup-Grumman and JPL. They have even put their money up for arts in grants. Here is what they say: “Without the arts to create minds which can “think outside of the box” we will have trouble in the future. We are talking about our shop people also as they help us progress to do more with less more efficiently.” The Boeing representative on arts even stated that it is important from birth. We agree at CORE-CA. We were there. CORE-CA believes in our children and community. The founding family, the L.A. King Family, has over 114 years of continuous civil rights work.
Ditto, Debbie. I just retired from being a middle school principal this past year because of some of the same reasons you mentioned, along with many other reasons. I was just like you in that I followed all the rules about testing and became a distinguished school 6 years consecutively. There was absolutely no cheating at my school.
What did we get for it? We got a sign and no monetary reward.
And, yes I have 3 grandchildren being subjected to all of this. It’s ridiculous!
I can just imagine the other reasons you didn’t list, too. I probably would concur. I just had to get out of this misguided application of the testing. It is one thing to test the students for diagnostic reasons as a formative assessment. And it is good to have a summative assessment over the same material. When people become great basketball or football (etc) players, no one objects to having them practice the skills they need to play the game … in the exact manner that they will need to use them … guided by a coach and team captain. But, for some reason, TPTB have decided the in education, we should differentiate to teach all students at all levels, tirelessly and joyfully plan for every individual student in order that they are in a least restrictive environment (even if their needs restrict other students’ environments) and to meet their particular learning styles … beyond the linguistic and mathematical modes. However, the tests that are given tend to test only those two learning styles. And, our walls and “crutches” are swept away, our mouths are shut, the students are often intimidated beyond words as they take the tests. It is ridiculous. I had kids ask me if the test scores could get me fired if they messed up. I told them that the tests were to determine how much they could figure out/analyze things and that I truly in my heart didn’t worry about getting fired if they messed up. It alleviated so much of their frustration, since 9 and 10 year olds aren’t particularly wanting to get their teachers fired. The whole testing situation is a misuse of power, a misuse of tax dollars, a misuse of the education that teachers received themselves. That is why I am out of it, but I am not disinterested in the larger picture.
If high stakes testing is the trigger that leads to the cheating, and if the administrations at the highest levels of the Atlanta and DC school systems are implicated, and if teachers generally have gone along with that system, one possible implication is that the public school systems are now so corrupt and degraded that they are beyond reform or redemption and that the best that voters can do is gradually eliminate them and let public funded education be provided by charters, vouchers, and online schools.
Is the “culture” of traditional public school systems truly that corrupt? And if so, what caused it?
If you think privatizing education would make it better, you are a bigger fool than I have pegged you.
The cheating is as a direct result of the “reforms” you so love.
http://purereform.blogspot.com/2011/07/atlanta-cheating-scandal-broad.html
Uh, so you would give the schools LESS OVERSIGHT, just let them run amok and do whatever they wanted?
Allowing students and parents to choose a school can be a substitute for state regulation. I don’t think that any one here would claim that Phillips Exeter or Sidwell Friends “run amok” because they are not subject to the same political controls as a traditional zoned school.
the St Grottlexes schools like Andover? Parents can apply, but the school chooses whom to take
There is an excess demand for seats at these schools, but that does not address the issue at hand. Do these schools “run amok” because they are subject to less regulatory supervision than traditional zoned public schools?
oh there is plenty of evidence of their running amok and covering up, as we are now finding out about the long history of sexual abuse at Horace Mann, that now, only decades after it happened, is the school properly facing up to.
These problems do not exist in traditional public schools?
your remark is off point. I was responding to a challenge that implied that there was no need for external accountability at elite private schools such as that imposed upon public schools because parents got to choose – which is not really true, since the elite schools decide whom to admit. I pointed out that elite schools had their own share of scandals. By the reasoning being offered, they therefore need external accountability.
Oh, and by the way, the actions in public schools towards students and staff have traditionally been covered by due process, while neither is necessarily guaranteed in schools not under government authority.
I certainly did not mean to say there was NO NEED for regulation, rather that there is LESS NEED.
you haven’t demonstrated that there is, merely offered several weak assertions
Alright, let us think seriously about it. In a situation where individuals have choices the government should regulate the aspects of organizations the individuals have to choose from if 1) it is difficult for the individual to distinguish between bad versions of these aspects or good versions, 2) a bad aspect of the version imposes some significant harm on the individual and 3) there is general agreement on what constitutes bad. For example it makes perfect sense to regulate restaurants to ensure that the food is safely prepared, but little sense to have a regulation that require restaurants to only make tasty food.
In the case of education, it is perfectly reasonable to require background checks on school staff, but not set a maximum class size or require a particular approach (Montessori, Waldorf, or progressive, for example) be followed or disallowed. The former passes all three tests, while the latter certainly fails at least the first and last.
The situation in a traditional public school is more complicated because individuals are told they are to attend a particular public school based on geographic location and the system (along with the $610 plus billion dollars we spend annually on the system) is under the control of the political system. Because students are assigned to a school somewhat capriciously, the system has to decide what approach to education is the best for the largest number of a diverse group of students and this decision must be implemented as a set of regulations.
We also need a set of regulations to control the political decision makers, least they use the power over school budgets and employment to their own political ends, corrupting the political process. I take this to be part of the reason that teachers in the public system must be licensed and cannot be easily dismissed from their positions. This type of regulation is not nearly the concern in private schools where headmasters control the employment of perhaps a few hundred at most while public school districts employ many thousands (Chicago Public, for example, employs 41,498 according to this site: http://www.cps.edu/about_cps/at-a-glance/pages/stats_and_facts.aspx)
I don’t know about other places but it was caused by cronyism in Atlanta. Principals were given jobs based on who they knew instead of what they knew or even because they were lousy teachers complained about by other teachers and parents.
Of course the other part is when a teacher is doing all that is humanly possible to teach her children and her best is never good enough because the measuring stick is crooked (standardized tests) and/or the principal is incompetent, if she wants to keep her job she might be tempted to do what is necessary. Get rid of standardized testing and hire only principals that have excellent track records for both achievement and being quality administrators with great people skills and the tide will change.
T1C,
If I may correct your statement: “Get rid of standardized testing and hire only principals that have excellent track records for both UNDERSTANDING THE COMPLEXITY THAT IS THE TEACHING AND LEARNING PROCESS and being quality administrators with great people skills and the tide will change.”
Using the term “achievement” plays into the hands of the edudeformers/rheephormers. I couldn’t care less about my students’ achievement. I care about them learning and, metacognitively speaking, learning about their own learning and how to improve their own ways of learning.
Twinkie, Please read my book, “Yes, We Are Stupid in America!”. It is about politics in education, including the good-ole-boy system where people get hired for who they know and not for being highly qualified or competent. It is available on Amazon.com or B&N .com.
It is also discusses our pitiful teacher preparation programs in some cases and alternative routes to teaching, which highly irritates me.
I’m not sure what reason we have to believe that charters and privates would be immune to this problem. It’s not like a wholly different group of people would be working there, or that they would be less focused on getting the numbers up.
There have been plenty of charter cheating scandals. They can cheat and rip-off tax dollars at the same time.
Meanwhile, back in Minneapolis sits an MPS school board member with a seat bought by TFA connections who was a TFA instructor in Atlanta. He professed the typical TFA “miracles” of raising test scoresof his students in an Atlanta school over the time the cheating scandal occurred. According to Josh Reimnitz’ campaign website, “A classroom teacher: After graduation, Josh was accepted by Teach for America and chose to teach 4th grade in the Atlanta Public Schools. From 2008-2010, he taught science and reading to low-income students, most of whom were academically far behind their grade level. Watching his students beat the odds and make significant gains was deeply rewarding for him.” (http://www.joshformpsboard.com/bio.htm)
Typical lies and propaganda
Washington D.C. under Rhee. My guess, Obama/Duncan will not permit it.
Now how about the financial crimes and the breaking of the child abuse laws mostly by administrators?
I am almost surprised there was an indictment. Must not have been the right mix of certain fraternity and sorority members on the grand jury. Some years back, an APS principal was charged with raping a teacher he was interviewing for a job. He was a known lech and had been moved around more than a pedophile priest because of some, sometimes bizarre, complaints. The grand jury included members of his fraternity. In spite of enough evidence to cause an indictment, there was none. I asked a co-worker if there were any members of the fraternity on the grand jury. “Sure was” said the co-worker. The principal retired.
The testing culture will implode. This is just one leg of it.
The South has enough problems with being stereotyped as alligator hunters and duck shooters who live in swamps without this disgrace happening in its premier city as good and successful as any of the big ones up north and without all the horrible weather and annoying accents. Believe me people, Atlanta is a great place. Once the school system cleans house it will be even better. And believe me, Georgia does not toy with crooks forever. A mayor of Atlanta got sent to prison. A state superintendent did too. And their last Democratic governor was made a one termer by the teachers because he abused us and Newt Gingrich could no longer be elected dogcatcher in his home state.
Good for you folks for cleaning house! I wish we could do that where I’m at. I think a few of our politicians could be caught red-handed and still be re-elected. That is, if there is an R next to their names.
You are absolutely right. Take it from a Gerogia girl. I live in SE rural Georgia swampland and don’t know anyone who hunts alligators, although I do know a couple of duck shooters, lol. I wouldn’t live anywhere else! Let’s clean house and go on about our business of student’s learning.
In these excerpts, one can see how corporate reform works:
“In Atlanta, [Hall] built a reputation as a person who got results, understood the needs of poor children and had a strong relationship with the business elite.”
“What made Dr. Hall just about untouchable was her strong ties to local business leaders. ”
“And so when Mr. Perdue challenged the test results that underpinned everything — even though he was a conservative Republican businessman — he met strong resistance from the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.”
“‘I was dumbfounded that the business community would not want the truth,’ [Governor Perdue] said…. ‘Business was insisting on accountability, but they didn’t want real accountability.'”
Corporate reform is profit-driven, and those making the profits will form a fortress around those enabling them to do so.
Just like this cheating on the tests by some administrators and teachers, these investigations can be manipulated for a political agenda. Who can forget Pa. Secretary of Education Tomalis trying last fall to use different criteria for test results to rate charters and public schools to make charters appear better than they are?
The basic premise that high-stakes testing, which evaluates only one aspect of learning, should be used to rate teachers and schools needs to be questioned. Tests should be used to diagnose learning problems in order to fix them, not as punitive bludgeons to vilify teachers for social conditions over which they have no control.
“The basic premise that high-stakes testing, which evaluates only one aspect of learning, should be used to rate teachers and schools needs to be questioned.”
It already has been questioned and thoroughly destroyed in Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 . He identifies 13 sources of error, any one of which renders the process invalid, in the making of, giving of, and disseminating the results of educational standards, standardized testing and the “grading” of students.
This work should be required reading for all who work in the public school realm. I challenge all the readers here to read and understand what Wilson has to say and then do something about the idiocies that are educational standards, standardized testing and the “grading” of students.
I can’t help but wonder what sort of blowback the whistleblower who wore the wire has had to deal with.
One key part of the story often missed in news coverage is seen in this paragraph:
While Beverly Hall got half a million in bonuses, that one school lost 1.5 times that much in money intended to help the children with their academic deficiencies. Those children were cheated multiple ways – they were denied the support to which they were legally entitled, and their education was narrowed to preparing for tests on which the results of their efforts were NOT used to help them improve.
When will we ever learn . . . .
. . . . Probably about the same time we learn what Pete Seeger had to say about our affinity for war:
WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE
words and music by Pete Seeger
performed by Pete Seeger and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Girls have picked them every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young girls gone?
Taken husbands every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the young men gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young men gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers every one
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1tqtvxG8O4
Diane,
I’m waiting for the national editorials, leading policy makers and major foundations to speak out honestly about the lessons learned from the Atlanta cheating scandal. I’m waiting for them to change course. But, I am not holding my breath. From Enron to Arthur Anderson to the sub-prime lending debacle we have unambiguous evidence of a lethal combination. Unquestioned hierarchy, the arrogance of power and a singular focus on short-term metrics yield no integrity and subsequent cheating. When fear and financial rewards are combined honesty is lost. Cheating, especially of the erasure kind, is not new and was certainly known to Beverly Hall. Back in the 1990’s, when she was rising through the ranks, I worked as a District Science Coordinator in New York City. One day during the annual spring testing period we were summoned to the District Office and sent out to proctor testing in the classrooms of teachers who had been identified by the Central Board’s testing division as having an unusually high percentage of erasure marks on previous tests. The pressure was high then even without the threat of job loss or the promise of bonuses. Even then, there was no “speaking truth to power.” I was struck in the reporting this morning that Beverly Hall’s reign in Atlanta was characterized by fear. In the end, it is the absence of democracy, the primacy of bureaucracies over learning organizational learning cultures that allows and encourages cheating. To paraphrase Isaac Asimov from one of his Foundation Trilogy novels, “Despotism is the last refuge of the incompetent.” I think some people rise to power for many reasons and at a certain point realize they really don’t have answers, but do not have the courage to admit it either to themselves or others. That’s when the cover up and self-righteousness take over.
Arthur
Reliance on testing and testing results result in cheating. This cheating was over the top but what about districts who know how to cheat? Perhaps if we are highlighting Atlanta, DC and other cities should be too. Cheating is widespread since the advent of so many tests with improvement incentives tied to them.
I didn’t go to Harvard, but I’m starting to wonder about the Harvard Superintendents Program for Urban Teaching. Beverly Hill chairs the advisory panel, and there’s a few other names that will look very familiar on their website. I always was in awe of this great institution, but honestly, my opinion has changed, as I’ve watched Harvard graduates silently allow education to be destroyed in America. Time for Harvard alumni who value education to speak up!
…just the tip of the iceberg. State mandated testing, as a tool for teacher evaluation and funding, has become the main obstacle in multifaceted student progress. Teaching to the test is the order of the day.
As many concerned folks are following this conversation, I thought you might be interested in a recent piece by former Michigan Commissioner of Ed Tom Watson. In the piece for which there is a link below, Watson urges that we learn from China’s investment in education and infrastructure. He points out that we can lose out to China without losing a war, by failing to invest in our young people, schools, and other infra-structure.
http://www.chinausfocus.com/peace-security/the-art-of-war-in-the-21st-century/
Oh, brother, Duane. Test security calls for teachers not being allowed to see a test lest they should reveal the answers