THIS is what Bush/Spellings/Obama/Duncan/Bloomberg/Klein hath wrought. Hardly a surprise, and it’s most likely going on all over the country, including NYC. Just a question of scale and who gets caught. In El Paso’s case, the lack of action by the Texas Education Agency — which actually cleared Superintendent Garcia for lack of evidence (!!!) — was little short of child abuse.
This type of fraud and educational neglect is never going to stop until NCLB, RTTP, and their ilk are abandoned and we let schools go back to being schools rather than testing factories.
Steve Koss
El Paso Schools Confront Scandal of Students Who ‘Disappeared’ at Test Time
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Published: October 13, 2012
EL PASO — It sounded at first like a familiar story: school administrators, seeking to meet state and federal standards, fraudulently raised students’ scores on crucial exams.
Enlarge This Image
Juan Carlos Llorca/Associated Press
Roger Avalos, a former El Paso student, with his mother, Grisel. He says his principal urged him to drop out and suspects an effort to improve test scores.
Ruben R Ramirez/EL PASO TIMES, via Associated Press
Lorenzo Garcia, the ex-superintendent.
But in the cheating scandal that has shaken the 64,000-student school district in this border city, administrators manipulated more than numbers. They are accused of keeping low-performing students out of classrooms altogether by improperly holding some back, accelerating others and preventing many from showing up for the tests or enrolling in school at all.
It led to a dramatic moment at the federal courthouse this month, when a former schools superintendent, Lorenzo Garcia, was sentenced to prison for his role in orchestrating the testing scandal. But for students and parents, the case did not end there. A federal investigation continues, with the likelihood of more arrests of administrators who helped Mr. Garcia.
Federal prosecutors charged Mr. Garcia, 57, with devising an elaborate program to inflate test scores to improve the performance of struggling schools under the federal No Child Left Behind Act and to allow him to collect annual bonuses for meeting district goals.
The scheme, elements of which were carried out for most of Mr. Garcia’s nearly six-year tenure, centered on a state-mandated test taken by sophomores. Known as the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, it measures performance in reading, mathematics and other subjects. The scheme’s objective was to keep low-performing students out of the classroom so they would not take the test and drag scores down, according to prosecutors, former principals and school advocates.
Students identified as low-performing were transferred to charter schools, discouraged from enrolling in school or were visited at home by truant officers and told not to go to school on the test day. For some, credits were deleted from transcripts or grades were changed from passing to failing or from failing to passing so they could be reclassified as freshmen or juniors.
Others intentionally held back were allowed to catch up before graduation with “turbo-mesters,” in which students earned a semester’s worth of credit for a few hours of computer work. A former high school principal said in an interview and in court that one student earned two semester credits in three hours on the last day of school. Still other students who transferred to the district from Mexico were automatically put in the ninth grade, even if they had earned credits for the 10th grade, to keep them from taking the test.
“He essentially treated these students as pawns in a scheme to make it look as though he was achieving the thresholds he needed for his bonuses,” said Robert Pitman, the United States attorney for the Western District of Texas, whose office prosecuted Mr. Garcia.
Another former principal, Lionel Rubio, said he knew of six students who had been pushed out of high school and had not pursued an education since. In 2008, Linda Hernandez-Romero’s daughter repeated her freshman year at Bowie High School after administrators told her she was not allowed to return as a sophomore. Ms. Hernandez-Romero said administrators told her that her daughter was not doing well academically and was not likely to perform well on the test.
Ms. Hernandez-Romero protested the decision, but she said her daughter never followed through with her education, never received a diploma or a G.E.D. and now, at age 21, has three children, is jobless and survives on welfare.
“Her decisions have been very negative after this,” her mother said. “She always tells me: ‘Mom, I got kicked out of school because I wasn’t smart. I guess I’m not, Mom, look at me.’ There’s not a way of expressing how bad it feels, because it’s so bad. Seeing one of your children fail and knowing that it was not all her doing is worse.”
The program was known as “the Bowie model,” and Mr. Garcia had boasted of his success in raising test scores, particularly in 2008, when all of the district’s eligible campuses earned a rating of “academically acceptable” or better from the state. But parents and students had another name for what was happening: “los desaparecidos,” or the disappeared.
State education data showed that 381 students were enrolled as freshmen at Bowie in the fall of 2007. The following fall, the sophomore class was 170 students. Dozens of the missing students had “disappeared” through Mr. Garcia’s program, said Eliot Shapleigh, a lawyer and former state senator who began his own investigation into testing misconduct and was credited with bringing the case to light. Mr. Shapleigh said he believed that hundreds of students were affected and that district leaders had failed to do enough to locate and help them.
“Desaparecidos is by far the worst education scandal in the country,” Mr. Shapleigh said. “In Atlanta, the students were helped on tests by teachers. The next day, the students were in class. Here, the students were disappeared right out of the classroom.”
Court documents list six unindicted co-conspirators who assisted Mr. Garcia, but they have not been publicly identified. Parents and educators believe that several of those involved in the scandal continue to work in the system or have taken jobs at nearby districts. The El Paso district, meanwhile, has had trouble maintaining its leadership, with the board of trustees appointing three interim superintendents since Mr. Garcia’s arrest last year.
Mr. Garcia’s program led to an inquiry involving three federal entities: the F.B.I., Mr. Pitman’s office and the Education Department’s inspector general. The state’s education agency penalized the district in August by lowering its accreditation status, assigning a monitor and requiring it to hire outside companies to oversee testing and identify the structural defects that allowed the scheme to go unchecked.
On Wednesday, the newly appointed commissioner of the Texas Education Agency, Michael L. Williams, came to El Paso to speak with parents and administrators, telling them he had the power to take other steps, including installing a new board of trustees.
“I’m outraged by what happened,” Mr. Williams said after the meeting. “We’re going to give the district an opportunity to right the ship. And if that doesn’t happen, then obviously there are several options available to the commissioner of education, and I’ll look very, very carefully at those options.”
Former El Paso educators have criticized state officials and the local board as failing to hold Mr. Garcia accountable. In 2010, the Texas Education Agency issued letters clearing Mr. Garcia of wrongdoing, finding insufficient evide
Arne and Obama should set aside some RTTT money for a special prison…there is cheating happening everywhere and the schemers are their specially appointed masters.
Maybe Rupert, Joel and Billy can come up with some cutting edge prison apps…wireless imprisoned generation.
You did it again! I laughed out loud sitting on runway after six hour delay. Thank you!
Diane
Safe travels…I wish you were home relaxing in your jammies.
I just learned some interesting info from a friend that took a job at KIPP. I didn’t know how else to relay it to you so I just replied to one of ur comments
She is a 3rd grade KIPP teacher with 29 students. She says all that KIPP puts out there is a lie. She has no support for behavior when kids are turning pencils into weapons, run around te room, and talk back. She tried sending a difficult student to another teacher so maybe she could teach omething and was told she couldn’t do that. Report cards have to have written comments by the teacher and the “chosen ones” review them and give them back to redo if they don’t like hem or say something negative that pin points a behavior or academic concern.
It is made very clear they want nothing that is negative or makes them look like what they are doing isn’t working. Can we say smoke screen eerybody!
The “chosen ones” listen outside teachers’ doors to make sure they are using the “KIPP” language. Guided reading was a concern so a KIPP person wasbrought in to supposably train but just changed their guided reading time to 4PM. Which is when they are the most unruley. Remember these studentshave ben in school since 7:15 AM….they are done I’m sure. What a great idea way to fix guided reading just chang the tome. What morons.
Also, the team leads and the chosen ones all have less than 2 years experience. And suprise suprise the school is crawling with Teach for America woohaas that know nothing, but they are the ones critiquing others teaching abilities.
The class size being so large is because KIPP gets money for every student enrolled, so the bigger the classes the more money they get. I asked who they get the money from and she didn’t know.. I bet u know Diane.
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
I read a NYTimes article about this and another NY Times article about the parents of students opting out of the exams in NY and wrote a blog post: The Disappeared and the Disappearing:http://waynegersen.com/2012/10/14/the-disappeared-and-the-disappearing/. After reading both articles in succession, my conclusion is that public education as we know it is disappearing before our eyes.
And maybe that is the true purpose of the Gates Foundation and the billionaire interest.
About three years ago I wrote to all the major newspapers telling them that there was rampant cheating going on all across the country, but no one even responded to me. I was especially annoyed with the Los Angeles Times because I knew that the teachers they outed as “the worst” could have been the most honest while the teachers with the highest scores could have drilled the kids on the exact items on the test.
Strangely, most people familiar with the schools seemed to know what was going on. When I complained to a state senator that “everyone is just cheating on these tests,” she replied without missing a beat – “Oh, we know that!”
I’m curious as to why newspaper resporters did not pick up on this. Does anyone have ideas about this?
As a former teacher in EPISD (2003-2006; I missed Garcia’s reign by the skin of my teeth), I’d like to point out that this district of 94 campi, 9,000 employees, and 64,000 students doesn’t deserve to bear the national shame of one man’s wrongdoing (well, one man plus one mistress plus six unnnamed co-conspirators). There are many faculty, staff, and students accomplishing many wonderful things in EPISD, as there have been for decades. This is a lesson not only in the evil “outcomes” of NCLB, but also in the outrage of holding teachers accountable by their throats while executive-level educrats apparently remain overprivileged and underscrutinized. Thanks for listening.
The cheating epidemic is the moral equivalent of jury nullification.
I dunno, if I were a teacher (I’m not) and my job depended on my student’s test scores, I think I could make a good argument for cheating vs. spending the year teaching to the test. The tests are a bunch of baloney anyway. If I cheat, then I can spend the year actually teaching worthwhile material that might engage the students to actually learn, and maybe even enjoy learning.
This happened in Houston ISD under Rod Paige. It happens all over the state and likely other states. Using student-level data from TEA, its pretty easy to see when schools engage in these practices. Given that TEA has far better data than I have, it should have been fairly easy to discern a pattern of disappearance in El Paso schools. By the way, this is how YES prep charters in Houston can claim 100% graduation rate and such high scores–the lower-performing students disappear into other schools.
Welcome to merit pay, 50k bonus is incentive to cheat. Nothing more degrading than the suggestion that I need a carrot to encourage me to work hard. Many more stories like this to come.
Superintendents bonus info:
Another way to look at differential pay is as a way to keep good teachers in the classroom rather than leaving teaching for more lucrative jobs.
Baloney. For the millionth time, teachers aren’t in it for the money. The only reason teachers leave over money is that salaries have been slashed so low that many teachers can’t afford to support their families.
Your post itself suggests that teachers are in it for at least some money.
Why do you want teachers with high demand skills to have to choose between a better life for their family and the teaching job they love?
I don’t. I think all teachers should be paid like professionals. You’re the one who seems to think that teachers should only be able to support their families if they jump through all the proper hoops and kiss all the proper behinds.
And, duh, everyone is “in it for at least some money”. The only people who can afford to “volunteer” their whole lives are those who are already rich, usually wives of rich men who need to fill endless hours of otherwise meaningless time.
Now I am a little confused. I said nothing even remotely like
“teachers should only be able to support their families if they jump through all the proper hoops and kiss all the proper behinds.”
Could you please point to statements I made of that sort?
What I did say is that I don’t want a teacher to have to choose between a much higher salary in a job outside of teaching (and the benefits it will bring the teacher’s family) and teaching our children.
Re: Teaching Economist
The person is speaking from experience with what so-called “merit pay” systems mean in practice. If you had the relevant experience you would know that.
I was not speaking of any particular system of awarding pay, just the idea that good teachers are likely to have skills that are useful to other employers and the public school system needs to compete for these teacher’s services.
Like almost everyone I know, any pay increases I get are always at least partially based on merit as determined by my peers and verified by my supervisors.
In a posting above that person said they are not a teacher, so I do not know what experience they have in which profession.
Maybe the person has family and friends behind the chalk curtain …
Anyone who wants to design a differential reward system that makes sense to the professionals who best understand the nature of their practice need only ask said professionals what makes sense and what doesn’t.
Funny how none of the reformers thinks to do that …
I thought perhaps you knew the poster because you said the person “….is speaking from experience….”.
I certainly agree that differential pay is a powerful motivator and drives behavior. Get it wrong and undesirable things can take place.
Re: Teaching Economist
I wrote “reward”, not “pay”. It’s a difference that people with 1-dimensional value systems never seem to grasp.
Do you wish to discuss non-peculiarly benefits from work? The value of autonomy? What it means to lead a good life? We can do that as well. After all, economists are the worldly philosophers.
Spiel-chucker don’t like pecuniary, I guess …
Economists and corporate raiders are two different species, however much the latter may camouflage themselves in the verbiage of the former.
Anytime anyone wants to climb off the astro-turf wagon and start having a real discussion about education, he or she will find that there has been a real discussion and real research in progress for a couple thousand years just that anyone can remember. But that is not what the corporate raiders of the public education system are about. Theirs is another game empirely.
pecuniary, not peculiarly.
I wonder. Sadly it is not DC with that half—-hearted investigation of theirs. Fraud and cheating are rewarded here. The money awarded at Noyes I believe was never returned. (Cheaters do prosper.) In the end, the kids are cheated out of valuable class time due to testing and test-prep, the teachers are cheated out of teaching, the community wastes money, and parents are given bogus results. What a waste indeed.