Authorities are closing in on educators who cheated on tests in Philadelphia. But columnists Will Bunch predicts they will never touch the real culprits, the people who designed the system of high-stakes testing. He favors punishing those who cheated, and he agrees tat cheating should never be tolerated.
But the true malefactors of test cheating will walk away scot-free:
“Let’s be clear: While their higher-ups placed these teachers and principal between a rock and hard place — commanded to improve test scores in schools that are starved of resources, in poverty-stricken neighborhoods where kids cope with hunger and crime just to make it to class — the appropriate response was not cheating…it never is. Some punishment should be meted out, although from what’s happened to so-called justice in America it’s pretty safe to assume the punishment — certainly the proposed punishment, anyway — will greatly exceed the actual crimes.
“What’s worse, it’s guaranteed that the real moral offenders will get off scot-free, since the biggest crime here is the system, the whole rotten-to-core standardized testing racket in this country. I’m talking about the pompous education commissioners (and the governors who appoint them) who think it’s a great idea to replace days and days that could be dedicated to actual learning with the mindless rote memorization of “teaching to the test,” the politicians who refuse to acknowledge a connection between well-prepared urban students and the anti-poverty programs they are decimating, the charlatans making millions of dollars off the testing racket, and the school administrators who pressured teachers to cheat and who then touted the results knowing full well that many of them were bogus.
“Jail for them? Are you kidding? Their punishment will be high-priced consulting gigs and foundation posts. Is this a great country or what?”
If you created a jail for the test pushers, you would have to open cells for some of the biggest names in Congress, as well as high-level officials in the Bush and Obama administrations.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/Theyll-never-catch-the-real-culprits.html#SMumx0jGyE2YcC6i.99
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t know if people have read the actual investigatory report on the Atlanta cheating scandal, but it is absolutely worth a read. The focus was on the headlines and the perp walks and all that, but the report itself is very critical of the “data-driven” organizational culture that led to what was really an ethical collapse. It’s quite sympathetic to the teachers.
Too, the part that is rarely mentioned is the involvement of the business community in Atlanta in both creating that culture and then covering up the cheating. They felt Atlanta had developed a “brand” with the (inflated) scores and they wanted to protect that brand.
“APS became such a data-driven system with unreasonable and excessive pressure to meet targets that Dr. Hall and her senior cabinet lost sight of conducting tests with integrity”.
This is the 3rd section of the report, an overview of how this really sick and twisted organizational culture was created and how it sucked in more and more people.
Click to access vol3.pdf
Not sure if this is related, but the Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper remains as rabidly pro-Common Core and evaluating teachers by test scores as any media source I’ve read.
The system of rewards and punishment in effect virtually guaranteed criminal conduct. This is true not only in Philadelphia but in most of the rest of the country. The cheating uncovered so far is probably only the tip of the iceberg.
It wouldn’t have been easy to create a structure more conducive to corruption than that established by NCLB. In addition the professed goals of NCLB were fantastically utopian.
It’s utterly amazing how much idiocy comes out of our political system.
That’s what was missing in all the denunciations of the Atlanta leaders and teachers.
The report concludes with an indictment of not just the individuals who worked in APS, but with an indictment of the whole sick culture that was created around testing.
It’s actually harsher on the test-obsession than it is on individual actors. Investigators wrote that “virtually every” witness repeated the phrase “data-driven” over and over when talking about their work. The schools were just consumed by the tests. Eaten alive.
The high-level officials in the Bush and Obama administrations do not act on their own. They act on behalf of the president. We vilify Arne Duncan, with good reason, but Obama obviously has no problem with anything he does. He kept him on in his second term.
Agreed. Not only that, he replaced many of the first term people, but he chose to retain Duncan.
Obviously, Duncan’s agenda is Obama’s agenda.
Some of the stuff is just cringe-worthy. For example:
“U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Monday that parents have a right to know if their children’s teachers are effective, endorsing the public release of information about how well individual teachers fare at raising their students’ test scores.
“What’s there to hide?” Duncan said in an interview one day after The Times published an analysis of teacher effectiveness in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest school system. “In education, we’ve been scared to talk about success.”
Oh, my. What if it turns out it’s invalid?
You know, their “value-added” measure for medical providers is coming into question too, now, but Sebelius was wise enough not to publicly crow about it and berate physicians before she knew if it had any value.
Pompous charlatans. Good choice of words. Wish this combination of rage and knowledge of the facts was more widely present in news about eduction, local state, national, and with OECD meddling, internationally as we’ll.
The legal system in America favors white-collar criminals but not the victims. Remember the film, The Wolf of Wall Street. When the real Wolf was sent to a country club prison for a few months where they had tennis courts. And when he got out, he was paid to teach other want-to-be crooks how to milk the system and make it big.
The secret is never steal from the wealthy or other white-collar criminals. Just rob from the poor and make yourself rich. The legal system doesn’t serve the poor–it just locks them up.