Count on G.F. Brandenburg to read the fine print, have a long memory, and share what he has learned with his readers.
The excerpts from the Atlanta indictments may remind you of the PBS Frontline special about Michelle Rhee. Remember how she interviewed each principal and asked, “How many points will your scores go up?” “What can you promise?”
Maybe it is time to look at that episode again.
Here is a link to the episode, the PBS ombudsman comments, and the controversy that followed.
According to the story in the New York Times, the schools in Atlanta where the scores soared lost federal aid for struggling learners. One school where cheating is alleged lost $750,000 that could have been used for reduced class size and to provide enrichment classes and tutoring. And that was only one school among many.
The rise in scores gained Beverly Hall a bonus of $500,000.
That must be one of the strategies that the Atlanta school board learned when they received training by the Broad Foundation about reaching targets and using incentives to succeed.
Remember the stories about the “New York City miracle”? That’s when the passing rates went up so fast and so high that very few children were eligible for extra tutoring. When the state revealed in 2010 that the state scoring was defective, the “miracle” disappeared. But the children never got the extra help that they needed as officials crowed about “their” accomplishments. NYC even won the Broad prize in 2007 for its vastly inflated test scores. The prize was announced just a few weeks before NAEP reported that NYC had made no gains at all.
Erich Martel of D.C. posted the documents from the Atlanta investigation.
“These are the four Atlanta Public School (APS) Investigation Report documents:
There are some unexpected surprises. Supt. Hall hired two “experts” to do a review of a few schools in response to concerns. One is a well-known consultant, author of “Unpacking the Standards.” His report was very approving (he visited 8 schools in one day, during his 3-day stay). Supt Hall posted it on the APS website. The other, critical report she “lost,” claiming that she never received it. Go to p. 311 of the “Exhibits to Report.”
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/us/Volume-1.pdf
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/us/Volume-2.pdf
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/us/Volume-3.pdf
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/us/Exhibits-to-Report.pdf
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.
A report in the New York Times says that Dr. Beverly L. Hall was indicted by a grand jury for her role in the Atlanta cheating scandal.
The story says, in part:
“Investigators laid blame for the biggest standardized-test cheating scandal in the country’s history on the superintendent, Dr. Hall, who led the 50,000-student school system from 1999 until her resignation in 2011. Dr. Hall, who was hailed as National Superintendent of the Year in 2009 for her role in making Atlanta’s once-failing urban school district a model of improvement, had “emphasized test results and public praise to the exclusion of integrity and ethics,” the report said.
“The report asserted that Dr. Hall, while not tied directly to cheating or the direct target of a subpoena, tried to contain damaging information and did not do enough to investigate allegations, especially after 2005 when “clear and significant” warnings were raised. As superintendent, she received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses tied to bogus improvements in test scores.”
As Anthony Cody explains, the Georgia state constitution is clear:
“No money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly, or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect, cult, or religious denomination or of any sectarian institution.”
What part of that is ambiguous. Even the phase “directly or indirectly” says NO.
Yet Georgia has enacted a tax credit plan to divert money from the public treasury to send children to sectarian, religious schools.
It is a back-door voucher.
Where are the lawyers?
Does the state constitution mean nothing?
When did a Georgia conservatives adopt the idea that the constitution means whatever you want it to mean?
This is one of the best newspaper articles I have read about the damaging impact of vouchers and tax credits on small-town and rural America.
The big question is why so many conservatives want to destroy one of our nation’s most enduring and central institutions: our public schools. There is little or no evidence that “school choice” produces better academic results. It does, however, privatize education.
Since when do conservatives go around blowing up traditional institutions?
The tax credit program in Georgia isn’t supposed to help “poor kids in failing schools.” It is designed to provide money for any child in the state to go to private school. In short, it’s a voucher.
The article’s writer, Leon Galis, says:
“Meanwhile, there’s panic in the one- and no-stoplight towns below the gnat line. In Harry Crews country, small, isolated school districts serving only a few hundred students each, with so few teachers that it’s common for one teacher to cover several grades, face the prospect of somehow having to get along with even fewer teachers.
Superintendents in these districts don’t know how they’ll go from absolute bare bones to less than absolute bare bones and still offer anything remotely resembling education.
Another thing I don’t understand is why self-styled conservatives have so little interest in conserving anything. For many of these map-dot communities, the schools and the churches are the center of community life, the glue that holds these hardscrabble places together.
As Beverly Grant, a retired Quitman County teacher, told the Journal-Constitution, the school system is “the foundation of the community. Basically, it’s the only thing the community really has … .”
Anybody who’s ever been to Quitman County will know exactly what she’s talking about. Starve the schools and you fast-track these towns toward extinction. Why don’t conservatives get that?
And why don’t they get this?: If strewing vouchers around to give people more school choices makes any sense at all, it makes sense only in urban and suburban areas, like Cobb County where Ehrhart is from. In places like that, you can throw a rock in any direction and hit a school.
But in the sparsely populated areas of the state where schools are too far apart even to consolidate, the urban and suburban fascination with “school choice” is a cruel joke. For a voucher to be worth anything, people have to have options, which the residents of the “sparsity” grant districts don’t, unless you count moving away.
To a more jaundiced eye, though, maybe this situation isn’t a case of the right hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Maybe the right hand knows exactly what it’s doing. Because enough people in the “sparsity” districts are reliable Republican voters, the Republicans under the Gold Dome know they can jerk those constituencies around with impunity. And for exactly the same reason, Democrats ignore them. Both parties fish where the votes are. And they’re not in Harry Crews country.
This is all starting to make sense to me now.
Here is a great article about Georgia’s “tax credit scholarship” program by Myra Blackmon of the Athens Banner-Herald.
Blackmon writes:
“I’m just sick about all this. My beloved Georgia has gone from being a shining beacon of educational innovation in the 1990s to a “me and my kid first” basis for decision-making and funding. We are resegregating our schools by race and class, making the quality of a child’s education dependent on his ZIP code or his parent’s income.
“Don’t talk to me about choice. That’s a euphemism for “just us.” Don’t talk to me about failing schools; talk to me about a failing legislature and corporate “reformers” who understand everything about education except teaching and learning. Don’t talk to me about “bloated budgets.” Since 2008, Georgia’s public schools have gained 37,000 students and lost 5,000 teachers.”
Michael Moore, a literacy professor in Georgia, thinks that the state has more tests than it needs already. Where will it get the money for the new Common Core assessments. Moore quotes Peter DeWitt on this blog to make his point. He writes:
“Peter Dewitt, an elementary principal writing in Diane Ravitch’s blog, notes that “we lack the infrastructure to be testing factories, and that shouldn’t be our job in the first place.” Lawmakers, though, face increased lobbying from the same old test makers, Pearson, ETS and, the maker of Georgia’s tests, McGraw Hill. These companies stand to make fortunes on the assessments.”
The word is spreading. The public’s dollars should be spent on instruction, on reducing class size, on hiring guidance counselors and teachers of the arts. Not on more and more testing.
In this article, which appeared on Huffington Post, Alan Singer of Hofstra University in New York, nails the empty promises and misleading claims in President Obama’s State of the Union address. He calls it “Obama’s Mis-Education Agenda.”
Alan Singer writes:
I am a lifetime teacher, first in public schools and then in a university-based teacher education program. I think I do an honest job and that students benefit from being in my classes. I was hoping to hear something positive about the future of public education in President Obama’s State of the Union speech, I confess I was so disturbed by what Obama was saying about education that I had to turn him off. In the morning I read the text of his speech online, hoping I was wrong about what I thought I had hear. But I wasn’t. There was nothing there but shallow celebration of wrong-headed policies and empty promises.
For me, the test question on any education proposal always is, “Is this the kind of education I want for my children and grandchildren?” Obama, whose children attend an elite and expensive private school in Washington DC, badly failed the test.
Basically Obama is looking to improve education in the United States on the cheap. He bragged that his signature education program, Race to the Top, was “a competition that convinced almost every state to develop smarter curricula and higher standards, for about 1 percent of what we spend on education each year.” I am not sure why Obama felt entitled to brag. Race to the Top has been in place for four years now and its major impact seems to be the constant testing of students, high profits for testing companies such as Pearson, and questionable reevaluations of teachers. It is unclear to me what positive changes Race to the Top has actually achieved.
In the State of the Union Address, Obama made three proposals, one for pre-school, one for high school, and one for college.
Obama on Pre-Schools: “Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road. But today, fewer than 3 in 10 four year-olds are enrolled in a high-quality preschool program . . . I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every child in America . . . In states that make it a priority to educate our youngest children, like Georgia or Oklahoma, studies show students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job, and form more stable families of their own.”
I am a big supporter of universal pre-kindergarten and I like the promise, but Georgia and Oklahoma are not models for educational excellence. Both states have offered universal pre-k for more than a decade and in both states students continue to score poorly on national achievement tests. Part of the problem is that both Georgia and Oklahoma are anti-union low wage Right-to-Work states. In Oklahoma City, the average salary for a preschool teacher is $25,000 and assistant teachers make about $18,000, enough to keep the school personnel living in poverty. Average Preschool Teacher salaries for job postings in Oklahoma City, are 17% lower than average Preschool Teacher salaries for job postings nationwide. The situation is not much better in Georgia. In Savannah, Average Preschool Teacher salaries for job postings are 12% lower than average Preschool Teacher salaries for job postings nationwide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Preschool-Teacher-l-Oklahoma-City,-OK.html
http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=Preschool+Teacher&l1=savannah+georgia
Obama on Secondary Schools: “Let’s also make sure that a high school diploma puts our kids on a path to a good job. Right now, countries like Germany focus on graduating their high school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges, so that they’re ready for a job. At schools like P-Tech in Brooklyn, a collaboration between New York Public Schools, the City University of New York, and IBM, students will graduate with a high school diploma and an associate degree in computers or engineering . . . I’m announcing a new challenge to redesign America’s high schools so they better equip graduates for the demands of a high-tech economy. We’ll reward schools that develop new partnerships with colleges and employers, and create classes that focus on science, technology, engineering, and math – the skills today’s employers are looking for to fill jobs right now and in the future.”
Unfortunately, P-Tech in Brooklyn, the Pathways in Technology Early College High School, is not yet, and may never be, a model for anything. It claims to be “the first school in the nation that connects high school, college, and the world of work through deep, meaningful partnerships, we are pioneering a new vision for college and career readiness and success.” Students will study for six years and receive both high school diplomas and college associate degrees. But the school is only in its second year of operation, has only 230 students, and no graduates or working alumni.
http://www.ptechnyc.org/site/default.aspx?PageID=1
According to a New York Times report which included an interviews with an IBM official, “The objective is to prepare students for entry-level technology jobs paying around $40,000 a year, like software specialists who answer questions from I.B.M.’s business customers or ‘deskside support’ workers who answer calls from PC users, with opportunities for advancement.”
The thing is, as anyone who has called computer support knows, those jobs are already being done at a much cheaper rate by outsourced technies in third world countries. It does not really seem like an avenue to the American middle class. The IBM official also made clear, “ that while no positions at I.B.M. could be guaranteed six years in the future, the company would give P-Tech students preference for openings.”
Obama on the cost of a College Education: “[S]kyrocketing costs price way too many young people out of a higher education, or saddle them with unsustainable debt . . . But taxpayers cannot continue to subsidize the soaring cost of higher education . . . My Administration will release a new “College Scorecard” that parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criteria: where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.”
As a parent and grandparent I agree with President Obama that the cost of college is too high for many families, but that is what a real education costs. If the United States is going to have the high-tech 21st century workforce the President wants, the only solution is massive federal support for education. There is a way to save some money however I did not hear any discussion of it in the President’s speech. Private for-profit businesses masquerading as colleges have been sucking in federal dollars and leaving poor and poorly qualified students with debts they can never repay. These programs should to be shut down, but in the State of the Union Address President Obama ignored the problem.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/higher-education-for-the-_b_1642764.html
The New York documented the way the for-profit edu-companies, including the massive Pearson publishing concern, go unregulated by federal education officials. These companies operate online charter schools and colleges that offer substandard education to desperate families at public expense.
President Obama, celebrating mediocrity and shallow promises are not enough. You would never accept these “solutions” for Malia and Sasha. American students and families need a genuine federal investment in education.
