The Atlanta cheating scandal has caused some reflection on the system that incentivizes unethical behavior.
It is important to say again and again that cheating is wrong. Those who cheat should be punished.
But who will correct the system that cheats children of education?
This reflection by TeacherKen on a column by Eugene Robinson raises important questions about the misdirection of education by the unrelenting demand for ever higher scores.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“It is important to say again and again that cheating is wrong.”
I dunno, maybe my moral relativism is showing, but I’m not sure that’s completely true. If my child, for instance, were in a class where the teacher’s salary/job security were dependent on students’ test scores, I guess I’d say go ahead and cheat on the damn test and spend class time participating in meaningful learning rather than wasting class time drilling skills and knowledge specifically to teach to the test. I care far less about the test than I do about my child developing a love of (or at least an interest in) learning.
Maybe that’s just me.
Believing that cheaters should be punished is the simplistic thinking that I would expect from educational reformers. I am a bit disappointed to keep reading this on this blog. I do appreciate the testing but the lack of compassion shown for the teachers is appalling! They are people as much as the children are. It is the same attitude toward teachers that reformers have. That they should work themselves to death and be altruistic to the point of self sacrifice. Now, I have never been involved in a teaching scandal, but I know a couple teachers who decided not to cheat in Atlanta and a couple who did (and it is far more than those indicted). Many of those indicted actually showed integrity in the process by admitting wrongdoing (as opposed to those cleared, many of whom were involved and continue to lie).
Let’s not continue to demonize these PEOPLE with families and needs, viewing myopically viewing them as just teachers. Several people were motivated by greed, but some were just trying to survive. Many are single mothers taking care of aging parents among others. It is much more complex than people TRY to understand. Most of these teachers were one check from the poorhouse.
http://homegrown-education.blogspot.com/2013/04/atlanta-superintendent-indicted-for.html
Had a couple typos. I appreciate the content of the blog, not the testing. And take out one of the viewings in the second paragraph.
Sorry, LO distracted me.
I agree with you. If we’re going to tie teacher’s salaries/job security to tests, the only two choices are massive test prep/teaching to the test (which is still no guarantee of higher scores) or cheating. When people’s livelihoods depend on high test scores, which they have no direct control over, they’re going to do what it takes because they have to survive. And as I said in my post above, if the choice is between cheating vs. a sole focus on test prep, I’m not sure that the former option is immoral or indefensible.
I agree. Those who made the repressive policies should be jailed, not the teachers. This is like starving someone and putting food to eat just out of their reach, then blaming them for not eating the food.
Is there any other comparable system where we allow people to explain away their academic cheating simply because they have “families and needs…[and are] just trying to survive”?
High-stakes standardized testing is a fundamental and unavoidable part of almost every student’s academic and professional career. From the ACT/SAT/ASVAB/etc. to the GRE/LSAT/MCAT/etc. to the Boards/Bar Exam/etc., each one of these tests has a direct impact on a student’s future. They are stressful. They are challenging. They are designed to differentiate candidates by ability.
Yet we would never say that tying a student’s test scores to college admissions or into a professional field excuses a student if he/she is caught cheating. Instead, the cheaters are punished, often with permanent flags on their academic records ensuring a huge obstacle for that student in his/her future academic endeavors.
Before we start excusing teachers for cheating on high-stakes tests, we need to ask what message this sends to students — many of whom will be encountering their own high-stakes tests as they enter professional fields. Being a “single mother taking care of aging parents” does not make cheating ok. It may elicit our sympathy, but it shouldn’t be an acceptable model of behavior for our students.
I think one big difference is that for tests like SAT/GRE/MCAT/etc is that the student’s fate is largely under their own control. If they’re not satisfied with their score, they can retake the test and the prior score disappears.
I’m not justifying the cheating. However, while in the comfort of my own home, I can say that I would NEVER do what those teachers did, I can’t know what I would do if my livelihood depended on some test scores, especially if the test is not a “good” test.
@Steven Could you afford not to work if you were sole provider for your family? People were nonrenewed for to cheating in APS. It’s like the kiss of death. Check out the link. There are shortened versions of some teachers’ stories. (These are people that I personally know.) It was a hard go if you didn’t go along in APS. A conspiracy so pervasive would be hard to break or even stand firm against. I don’t try to excuse their behavior. I am just saying that there was a statewide investigation and there were more classes flagged in APS than in the rest of the state and only 35 were implicated.
See if you can find the report. It is out there, and I read it. You will find that most of the implicated teachers chose to confess (at least the ones I know did). I think that that shows character and integrity even if it is a day late and a dollar short. And telling the truth and taking responsibility is a good model for our children. The complete lack of compassion shown for the teachers is almost as bad as Tennessee’s Test High or Starve legislation. Furthermore, that lack of compassion is not a good model for our children. Academics at the expense of everything else is not a good model for our kids. Treating people the way that these teachers were treated, even prior to the investigation, is not a good example.
What is more, as a teacher, I know that I don’t just work with children, I work with families. What is going on at home impacts what happens at school. If you don’t care about the teachers because they have passed the threshold into adulthood, what about their children? I have seen “great” teachers’ children often neglected. When are we going to realize that these people are teachers, social workers, therapists, jailers, parents, etc. to their students and it often still isn’t enough while they can barely play parent to their own children.
I guess my real issue is that teachers have been dehumanized into something that should be perfect or die a slow painful death. I’m just saying, people did an awesome job tolerating bad decisions on Wall Street, and how many kids did that affect? (They live in the foreclosed homes, too. Their parents are not working now, too. The economy is hard on the kids, too.). Are we so simple and unsympathetic toward adults that we don’t realize that children have been caught in the mix on both sides of the equation?
Let’s be for real. It is the system, unrealistic and unbending, that failed these kids, their parents, and their teachers. And the system needs to pay. Reformers and politicians need to be held responsible for their failed policies. Yes, the teachers are fired, but does that solve the problem? No. A teacher at my school was caught trying to cheat the following year, and as long as conditions aren’t proper for learning, but results are demanded, and shortcuts that include cheating will continue.
I challenge anyone judging these teachers to try to walk a mile in their shoes. It is not easy teaching kids who are hungry, who are sleepy, whose parents cannot read, who may be homeless, who are language learners, who had three or four siblings arrested the night before, who don’t have heat and coats in the winter, whose parents work almost all day and night so a sibling in fourth grade takes care of the first grader, whose parents are in school and cannot pay attention to them, who have asthma and no healthcare because mama got a job or got fired, and so many other issues that I faced in an adjacent district. According to Maslow, who last I checked is still widely accepted, there are so many other needs that must be met before someone will try to learn. Teachers are not equipped to provide these needs, society doesn’t want to care, and these teachers are supposed to just force kids to overcome these needs. Yeah right!
Why is high-stakes testing “unavoidable”? Don’t you think it’s possible that enlightenment might eventually prevail and we might do away with standardized testing, with the possible exception of no stakes diagnostic testing? Alfie Kohn for one has certainly been trying hard to get the word out.
Furthermore, as pointed out, there is a difference when the high stakes affect the student directly vs. when they affect the teacher who has little or no control over the outcome. I don’t favor either, but the latter is far worse.
Allow me to correct your misstatement: “They are designed to differentiate candidates by STANDARDIZED TEST TAKING ability AND NOT BY OTHER THING”.
Any and all standardized tests are subject to the 13 sources of logical errors that render them completely INVALID. If they are invalid then any conclusions drawn from said invalidities are, as Wilson states, “vain and illusory”. I invite you to read Noel Wilson’s ““Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 to understand just why the tests to which you refer are invalid and cause harm to those who take them (especially those who are mandated and cannot opt out).
For a simpler read see Wilson’s destruction of the testing Bible, “A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review, Noel Wilson
American Educational Research Association; American Psychological Association; National Council on Measurement in
Education. (2002). “Standards for educational and psychological
testing.” Washington, DC: American Educational Research
Association. ISBN 0-935302-25-5
Is it correct that Teacher Ken worked for years at a school that required students to have high test scores in order to graduate? I think that’s true although I’m not certain.
If you and teacher Ken are opposed to high stakes tests, wouldn’t it be logical to oppose “public” schools that require students to have high test scores in order to be admitted?
you are once again wrong, Joe.
1/3 of our students were ADMITTED to our Science and Technology program largely by competitive exam.
Those students took a heavy dose of AP courses, but were NOT required to sit for the AP exams in any of them.
Maryland had four required exams for high school graduation for while, but there was a floor below passing for each exam and if a student was above the floor in all four and the total score of the four exams added up to the total of the four passing grades, s/he graduated. And if still not there,s/he could do supervised projects to get sufficient points to graduate.
And again, only 1/3 of our students were in the science and technology program. The rest did not get admitted based on test scores.
My apologies to Ken for 2 incorrect words in the post above. I meant to use the words “some” and “admitted”. the sentence should have read, I thought Ken taught at a a school that required SOME students to have high test scores in order to be ADMITTED? I should have read the post carefully before posting. My apologies.
Imagine how many of you would have responded to news about a charter that admitted 1/3 of its students on the basis of test scores.
You would have been outraged. I would too.
Public schools, whether district or charter should be open to all kinds of students with no admissions tests.
I also appreciate what Ken wrote elsewhere about the ability of public schools to help youngsters. He wrote, in part,
“I also became a teacher because of what other teachers had done for me. Those wonderful human beings provided the support a troubled young man from an exceedingly dysfunctional family needed to help him sort through the difficulties of living. ”
http://whyiteach.learningmatters.tv/?p=106
I don’t see how we can stop this nonsense until we abandon two foolish notions: (1) that a society can be run like a profitable business; and (2) that a profitable business can be run according to “scientific” principles.
The first notion has been a central feature of American culture since the late 19th Century. As our industrial economy, and especially the railroads, grew, business leaders took a larger role in politics and in defining our culture generally. The original work ethic of the New England Puritans became part of the cultural ethos, to an almost neurotic degree. As the century closed, more and more publications touted the application of “management” and “business methods” to running almost every aspect of society. Businessmen and financiers pushed this view hard, claiming that they had a right to impose their views since they created the nation’s wealth.
The second notion was added to the first with the introduction of “scientific management” by Frederick Taylor and Frank and Lilian Gilbreath (remember the book Cheaper by the Dozen and movie with Myrna Loy and Clifton Webb?). Scientific management claimed to enable managers theories and techniques to get the greatest profit from any job by “scientifically” maximizing worker efficiency. The popularity of this work grew into a movement known as “Taylorism”, and, as documented so well by Raymond Callahan in his book Education and the Cult of Efficiency, the movement swept into the public schools, leading the creation of the modern school administrator.
The coupling of a business-oriented culture with scientific management of course led to the creation, use, and abuse of all sorts of mathematical and statistical measurements, rankings, and what-not. Not only were most of these methods useless, even fraudulent in some cases, but they created abusive working conditions and corroded the relationships between management and workers.
The application of these ideas was applied far and wide to education, with, as Callahan notes, little to no organized resistance from the teachers. The results have been devastating as we all know. The desire for numerical “data” that can be used to rate and compare students, teachers, schools has provided little of any use and much that has been destructive. But the ignorance of most business leaders about the real nature of science and the proper use of statistics, which are never taught seriously to economists and business students, has kept us from moving to a more rational application of numerical indicators and the appreciation that so much of education is an art.
I fear that we will only break free of this nightmare when we have such a complete collapse of the “management order” that the public will finally listen to voices of reason and not arrogant braying.
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
Not only “unrelenting demand for even higher scores”, but unforgiving demand as well-making it unapologetically plain as day that careers and schools are on the line at the crappy test craps table (where “the house” always wins).
In addition, there’s the non-existent pot of gold at the end of the testing rainbow. Despite all the “college and career” rhetoric, there has been absolutely no discussion about WHAT careers will await at the end of the test-U4-data gauntlet, or HOW more and more disadvantaged students will be able to afford college, or pay back student loans on ambiguous career promises.
It is a neatly packaged education reform PR campaign. Responsibility and demands both misdirected, rational and socially proactive solutions avoided at all costs because they require priorities other than profit and political domination.
Massachusetts reformed testing so that the score of the test is not the end all be all. Rather, the impetus is to see how much growth a child had within the year or over the course of a few years. New Jersey is following suit, and the demonized tests is not so evil when used in the context of Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs), which measure how much a student has learned from one year to the next compared to peers with similar academic history from across the state and against the student’s baseline test score from previous years. http://www.state.nj.us/education/AchieveNJ/intro/RegOverview.pdf
This is not perfect either. PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), one of two multi-state consortia funded by the U.S. Department of Education to develop the next generation of student assessments. These are the tests that will not address student growth but be geared towards the Common Core. All new assessments are focused on “thinking” not memorizing facts or being very well drilled. Teachers are saying that they don’t know what it is that they should be teaching, and others are saying that the tests will still not be able to reflect their work.
In New Jersey, where the oldest teacher tenure laws were removed (yes, teachers can now be fired), the PARCC assessments will be used to evaluate teacher efficacy. “Evaluations should always be based on multiple measures that include both learning outcomes and effective practice. No teacher or principal should ever be assessed based on test scores alone, much less a single test. Therefore, AchieveNJ includes a combination of student growth on objective measures and observations of a teacher’s classroom practices and a principal’s leadership practices conducted by appropriately trained observers.” http://www.state.nj.us/education/AchieveNJ/intro/guide.pdf
So what happens now? We don’t know. The Common Core and the new PARCC assessments will arrive in 2014-2015 academic year. Some high profile superintendants and scholars in New Jersey have some thoughts.
It is all a hoax. If standardized testing was so wonderful, why are none of the elite private schools using it? How can we know how good the Common Core is without field trials? Why isn’t it voluntary? If CC is good, everyone will want to do it.
“If standardized testing was so wonderful, why are none of the elite private schools using it?”
They use it, but just at the front end. You can’t get into one of the elite private schools without taking one of the national standardized tests and doing very well on it. Thousands and thousands of 4- and 5-year olds take these each year in NYC. They prep for months, many using tutors. The ones that don’t do extremely well, they don’t get in. This isn’t an unfortunate necessity. The parents who send their kids to these schools won’t pay $40,000-$50,000 a year if they aren’t confident that the hoi polloi won’t be weeded out.
After that, yes, standardized testing is for public schools. Same with national standards. Same with the Common Core. They were initially designed to target the “low achieving” and low-income students: the “Johnny” in “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” Now they’re for all the masses, and the masses are waking up to the insanity. But to most parents at the elite private schools, it’s just a story, like poverty or war in a faraway place.
Diane,
Yes it is a hoax.
The SGPs in NJ, and elsewhere do not consider class size, poverty or any other demographics! Imagine a teacher in PRINCETON, with a class of 16, being compared to a teacher in CAMDEN with a class of 36!
Does not matter though, Eli BROAD has full control of the NJDOE and Governor Christie loathes teachers, so, on we go.
Lookout Louisiana and Tennessee, NJ is reforming our way to the bottom!
flerper is wrong – there are many elite schools that do not use standardized entrance exams, at least, not with cut scores. And increasingly some of the more elite colleges have dropped the requirement for either SATs or ACTs. For the latter, one can visit this page at Fair Test where among the colleges listed will a number of highly selective liberal arts college. OThers, while they require SATs to be submitted, have no cut scores, and are more likely to admit a student with moderate SATs and a strong academic record than the reverse. That is true of my alma mater, the highly selective Haverford, for which I do admissions volunteering.
We have a track record that admissions tests are not necessary. It was called the Eight Year Study. Look it up. The experiment was cut short by World War II.
I was referring to NYC’s elite private K-12 schools, Ken, which are basically “elite private schools” on steroids. The only NYC school I saw on your link that fits in that category is Juilliard, which is a very different kind of school and has its own unique, murderous selection process. I don’t know what percentage of elite private K-12 schools outside of NYC require standardized tests as part of their admissions process, although I would think it would be substantial.
Oh, and of course Julliard isn’t K-12.
flerper – what gets you into an elite private school is money and connections. Do you think for a minute that Sasha and Malia would have been denied entrance to Sidwell Friends even if their scores were in the bottom 25 percentile?
At my university we have found that students scoring below 21 on the math ACT (530 on the SAT) have significantly more trouble making it to a second year of study compared to those that score above 28 (640 on the SAT). The scores seem to reflect something about college readiness.
Actually, there are plenty of students at Julliard who are not among the “elite.” They are the ones who pay full tuition and help support the scholarships of those who would make a name for themselves by surviving the “murderous” selection process. We don’t hear much about the majority of Julliard’s slightly above-average student population, yet they help pay the bills.
It really doesn’t matter whether the tests measure knowledge at some fixed point or knowledge gain over time. The point is that teachers have no control over either. No matter how good a teacher is, students still may not learn for a variety of reasons (issues related to poverty being the majority of them; and even middle and upper class kids are starting to see what a joke the tests are, so why should they bother to do them well, even if they can?).
Fleper,
Good one. The bit about private schools using standardized tests on the front end. Ha, ha.
My high school administration had us analyze the high school test and figure percentage of questions asked based on content, then teach to the majority of the content sacrificing the least amount of content asked. This was district wide. This was years ago.
I am left almost speechless by all of this. But–I’m not. So I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: these “standardized” tests are NOT standardized–they are neither valid nor reliable. Scoring of said tests is juked (so WHO’S cheating now?)–by testing companies AND by state regulating people. If you haven’t read Todd Farley’s 2009 book, Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry, and you want to have any say about the ethics of teachers cheating on these so-called “standardized” tests, then you MUST read i–otherwise, please keep your uninformed, pro-testing, teacher-blaming comments to yourselves.. Nothing has changed since 2009, either–read “Interview with Todd Farley” ON THIS BLOG–December 27, 2012.
Pineapple Hare questions. Loaded questions. Questions with no correct answer. Questions with TWO correct answers. Computerized “standardized” tests for kindergarteners, some who do not have the fine motor control &/or visual organization OR lack BOTH. Just yesterday, Jimmy Kimmel–in his opening monologue–talked about–and SHOWED–a teenager’s test where he just wrote “YO-LO,” on it. Of course, he was punished–suspended or some such. Jimmy Kimmel said,”Come ON, people! He’s a TEENAGER!” (Of course, I quite agree.) So–this has all become fodder for a late-night talk show! Lesson: many teenagers KNOW that this test is of no consequence to THEM. Therefore, to many, it’s a joke, & so they’d write “YO LO,”
or fill in anything, or connect all the dots after they’d filled in the Scantron bubbles any which way (this is not conjecture–these test-takers attended the middle schools I taught at!). To the point–do NOT compare these “standardized” tests to ACTs and SATs–students KNOW that these tests ARE of consequence to them, and they WILL try to do their best, even to the point of extra tutoring and studying.
As usual, I’ve become long-winded, when all I really wanted to say was my usual:
Parents, OPT your kids OUT. And–a wing & a prayer–superintendents–tell the Feds
that NO, your state, your district, districts all over America are NOT going to waste
STUDENTS’ money on Pear$on!
End of discussion.
retiredbutmissthekids: people who view this blog and its posts/comments who have not read the items you have mentioned do not realize how powerful they are. Please excuse me, but repetition and addition is in order.
Todd Farley, MAKING THE GRADES: MY MISADVENTURES IN THE STANDARDIZED TESTING INDUSTRY (2009). *You will never look at the scores that result from high-stakes standardized testing the same way after reading this book.*
Daniel Koretz, MEASURING UP: WHAT EDUCATIONAL TESTING REALLY TELLS US (2008). *A stats/testing guy demystifies how tests are made, what they do and don’t tell us, and spells out in detail why we all need to be very cautious and informed when viewing the scores of high-stakes standardized tests. A very useful exposé of the Church of Accountabullity’s most sacred bludgeon, er, tenet.*
Phillip Harris, Bruce M. Smith, and Joan Harris, THE MYTHS OF STANDARDIZED TESTING: WHY THEY DON’T TELL YOU WHAT YOU THINK THEY DO (2011). *Read before Koretz; the subtitle is spot on, the chapters are short, and the authors assume you need to have everything explained in jargon-free straightforward terms.*
Google “pineapple, hare, Daniel Pinkwater” and you will get a lot of hits. See, for example, this one from the WSJ: http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2012/04/20/daniel-pinkwater-on-pineapple-exam-nonsense-on-top-of-nonsense/ in which he describes what was a widely used standardized testing item as “Nonsense on top of nonsense”—and he should know…He was the AUTHOR of the nonsense!*
retiredbutmissthekids: you were not longwinded. Sometimes it just takes more than a word or two to say something meaningful.
Thank you for your comment.
🙂
Ditto – thanks for both of your comments.
KrazyTA,
You left out the most important of all from 1997 that completely destroys educational standards and standardized testing, that being Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 .
Duane
Late, again (much to do here in Illinois, what with trying to save special ed. & teachers’ health insurance & pensions!!), but I want to thank you for your clarification! (&–you’re welcome.)
Excellent post, thank you both (RBMTK and KTA!)
On Tuesday, I was sitting in my doctor’s waiting room when I caught a glimpse of Ashley Banfield on CNN reading a report about the Atlanta cheating scandal where she emphasized that “educators” were responsible for these atrocities as if to imply that educators (read, teachers) are frightfully engaging in horrific behavior and must be stopped. Those pesky “educators” are at it again, eh, Ashley?
Does “educators” ONLY mean teachers? Of course not. Who was in charge of the district? Not the teachers.
Of course you know that, and I know that from our positions in and around schools. However, members of the general public often equate schools with teachers, ignorant of the administrative hierarchy of the decision-making process within our systems.
Only a fool would have missed the implication of Ms. Banfield and CNN that “educators” refers only to teachers. Although, mentions of administrative staff were made in other parts of report, the focus was on “those bad teachers.” The use of the word “educators” amounts to carefully chosen rhetoric.
LG–NBC (National BROADcasting) was more to the point–as I’d commented in an earlier post, the word “teachers” was used repeatedly, and the “teachers’ were blamed for stealing children’s educations, and the “teachers” should all go to jail. As in another comment somewhere else in this blog, a run-on sentence on purpose, in order to emphasize what goes on and on and on (ad nauseum) these days.
Ugh. This is why sometimes, I wish I lived on an island.
Reblogged this on 70jamsession and commented:
Thank you Diane Ravitch and TeacherKen for your relentless energy and efforts with not only action steps but perhaps more importantly with the rhetoric and narrative surrounding Public Education and the teaching profession.
I knew at a pretty young age that I wanted to be a teacher like my Dad. It’s not that I thought grading papers would be fun or that I would always be tapping into my creative abilities with lesson plans — and I had no idea, thankfully, about the paycheck. What I remember motivating and energizing this passion within me is the rhetoric — the conversations I listened to and absorbed with my Dad and his students. The narratives were seemingly always embraced by the truth, encouragement, options, respect, and fairness. I was in awe! I wanted to be that source of inspiration, too!
Thus, I am encouraged by the increasing number and volume of the voices speaking in support of my beloved profession and my passion for equality in learning and growing. More and more there seems to be a slow awakening to the damaging and destructive rhetoric of failure that has monopolized conversations of Public Education for decades.
Students and teachers and communities are successful and supportive — and everyone really CAN learn. There will come a day when we are no longer asking the questions about what we are to do with failing schools and limited resources. Instead, we will be asking questions of students, teachers, and parents about the levels of support and the love of learning and the plans for the future that is oh so bright.
LET’S JAM!