John Merrow digs deeper into the D.C. cheating scandal.
A series of shoddy investigations have left many unanswered questions.
What did Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson know? What did they do about the evidence of cheating?
Will the facts ever come out?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Merrow is a great reporter.
Perhaps….but where has he been over the last FIVE years??
He’s been all over the country doing stories. Some you’ll agree with, some you won’t.
http://learningmatters.tv/
Joe,
Do you believe that setting exceptionally lofty goals and attaching exceptionally harsh penalties for failing to meet them might create an environment conducive to the evolution of perverse outcomes such as cheating?
Merrow notes: “We already know that hundreds of classrooms in about half of the schools had WTR erasures that were four, five and six standard deviations away from the norm. That suggests but does not prove hanky-panky.”
Not true.
From a probability standpoint, these standard deviations (SDs) certainly do “prove hanky panky.” 3 SDs from the mean is already into fractions of a single percent. The likelihood of having an outcome 4 SDs above or below the mean is .000032%. 5SDs: .0000002867% and 6SDs: .0000000010%.
Let’s turn this around. What is the probability that some nonrandom change was made in the erasure of these students’ original answers?
4SDs: 99.999968%
5SDs: 99.9999997133%
6SDs: 99.999999999%
So, yes, these SDs definitely show score tampering.
Note: The standard normal curve never touches the x-axis (the line under it), so an exact 100% is not possible. Nor is it needed to prove certainty. When the likelihood of an outcome is so far into the decimal places, chance can be ruled out with solid confidence.
Thank you for both your responses. I read the same sentences and thought, “um, yes, that many standard deviations proves hanky panky pretty darn well…something happened to those scores.” I recall the Atlanta paper (before the blue ribbon/whitewash commission I believe, and certainly before the real investigation) referring to the statistical probability of those score changes happening on their own as likely as a snowstorm’s chance in July here in the South. It helped people to understand that THERE WAS SOMETHING THEY HAD TO STAY AFTER. Hope Merrow will be heard in the DC case.
M. Schneider: how come genuine numbers/stats folks can appear on this blog but extremely rarely breach the thoughtwall around the corporate media?
Who does show up to declaim and proclaim? It seems that only the studiously uninformed who think Mark Twain was giving them positive advice when he declared that “facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.”
First example, former VPOTUS Richard Cheney, who has famously declared that even the remote possibility of Saddam Hussein having WMD justified the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Second example, Michelle Rhee and her collaborators & supporters who couldn’t/can’t seem to understand [admit?] the improbability sliding into impossibility of so many WTR answers on the DCPS high-stakes standardized tests.
KrazyMathLady: thank you again for using your powers for good.
🙂
KrazyTA, the corporate media does not want the truth. It’s that simple.
We convict people of murder based upon DNA tests that rest on probabilities in the millions. The probability of a result falling by chance 6SDs from the mean: One in one billion.
The cheating is a certainty.
I would gladly explain this to the media should they ever decide that they want to hear it.
Are you trying to say the “Empress” has no clothes??
She and her partners in crime are shedding garments as I write.
…though they are trying mighty hard to “fabricate”….
(heh heh heh…)
This story has to be pursued. Michelle Rhee is an impostor who is spreading her lies all around the nation and uneducated, uninformed people are believing this stuff. In California, she’s raising money from privateers like Gates, Bloomberg on the basis of her ability to turn educational systems around. Maybe its good that she’s hookwinking them since they are doing the same to the public. We will not drink this kool aid of school deform, let’s uncover her for what she truly is, a cheat and self promoter.
In the memo, Sanford says, “I can have this draft letter to you by Monday.” Where is that letter, and why isn’t anybody asking to see it?
In Watergate, we never would have known the facts if it hadn’t been for a whistleblower, two persistent journalists and some ethical politicians and jurists in high places. In this case we have the whistleblowers and the journalists but not the government people who can insist on a thorough investigation. So I have a question for the lawyers out there:
Is there anything we (i.e. ordinary citizens) can do to insist on an Atlanta-type investigation of cheating in D.C. schools? Thank you.
The best tactic is to prove to Ms. Rhee’s backers that she is proving to be a major liability to THEIR credibility.
They don’t care how she appears as a person to the public nearly as much as they care about how she makes them look.
Mr. Gates, Mr. Murdoch, Mr. Klein, Mr. Duncan, and the whole other long list of yet unslayed vampires need to understand how their very own Michelle-Rhee-Jonathan-Harker is taking care of them. When they are forced to accept this by the persistence of the media and a real investigation, only then will kick open their coffins, rush to her presence, bare their fangs, and collectively go for her jugular . . . .
Let the feasts begin.
Thank goodness for John Merrow and his continued diligent investigative journalism!
Is anyone here familiar with Cantania in DC who can shed some light on why he might be aiming to prevent a real investigation?
Yes, Cosmic Tinker, Merrow is now asking some hard questions, and pointing fingers where they should be pointed. But what took him so long??
True, Democracy, I wondered that, too, but I’ve been around a long time and I used to think the very same thing about Diane. Now I am just extremely grateful for the important work she is doing today, which I believe warrants letting sleeping dogs lie –and I think that could be said for John as well.
I really love to read the comments by Krazy TA, Di Carly and Schneider and a few others as they look at facts through time in a scientific rational way. This is the only way to deal with any problem. Yesterday a friend watched me solve a complicated electrical problem on a car I do not know with the internet and my past knowledge. In all problem solving there is a procedure to follow to get to the real truth not the truth you wished it would be. It is a unified theory which works. The same in the “Art of War.” The question is correct “Why doesn’t the major media want to talk to knowlegable people on important subjects such as staticians as Schneider and Krazy Crawfish?” In the end there is only one answer and that is “I don’t care as that is now what I want in the end and if I did that all my plans will go into the trashcan with my free money.”
So why would those who ruined a school system with the highest revenue/student at $29,145/student with the worst student performance want to have a real investigation? We just listed, at UCLA, to a D.C. councilman who ruined the D.C. public schools to convert 40% to charters brag about it. D.C. pockets about $13,000/student by forming a charter school as D.C. receives $29,145 and charters receive about $16,000. 40% of 52,000 students = 20,800 students in charter schools in D.C. 20,800 X 13,000 = $270,400,000. Always look at how they handle the money. No Money, No Programme, is what I say. That is why I do school financial fraud and games. At LAUSD we deal with the highest level of this as a result of the MONEY. How many of you would want a 1/4 billion plus for free? There it is. There are more than enough watchers of Diane Ravich’s blog who know what they are doing to do the 10 year analysis and prove the fraud on all of us going on. I know those people. You cannot do anything big by yourself. We recently stopped a sales tax until 2069 for $90 billion, $300 billion with interest in less than 3 weeks and with less than $25,000 by joining communities from all over L.A. together for a common interest. It can be done, especially if it has been done before as it is then no longer fantasy but reality. And that is what they are talking about.
This whole story is common sense. If you were sitting on a jury listening to the evidence common sense would tell you that Rhee and Henderson knew cheating was occuring. Did they want to investigate? No. Why? They were looking out for their best interest and futures in the ed. business. The large numbers of wrong to right answers is common sense proof of cheating. Rhee has proven that she is a liar on her own resume. She is a dishonest person who had no business running a school district. The fact that the informant shakes in fear highlights how nasty and vile the people from the reform movement are. Is this the model of schooling in a democratic society? Using a culture of fear and intimidation is common in the reform movement. DC schools are now worse than ever. Was this her goal afterall?
“DC schools are now worse than ever. Was this her goal after all?”
The destabilization of the public schools and redirecting public funds to private charter corporations – “Transformational Change” and “Disruptive Innovation” are the euphemisms of choice- have always been the goal of Rhee and her patrons.
And in her perverse way, she was successful: over forty percent of DC schoolchildren now attend charters, and the public schools are in disarray.
When you look at the wreckage left behind by these people, and the nastiness that accompanies so much of it, you have to ask: where does the incompetence end and the malice begin?
I propose an online trial for Rhee. Let us present–in a forum such as this–the arguments of a prosecutor (clearly someone from the social-context reform camp) and a defense representative (if there is anyone left in corporate reform who will speak for her), and let us lay out the arguments and the evidence. Then, leave the verdict in the hands of all those who read the forum. In the absence of real justice, let us at least have a facsimile of the same.
I mean no disrespect to John Merrow because he is now digging deep into Michelle Rhee’s cheating scandal. And he is now pointing the finger of blame at the culprits who helped to cover up the widespread cheating. And it WAS widespread, and almost certainly directed from the top down …and the trail leads back to Michelle Rhee.
But what has taken Merrow so long to see the light, so to speak? The USA Today investigation pointed out that more than half of all D.C. schools had irregular erasure answer patterns on tests, and “the odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance.”
Moreover, for a school to be “flagged” for possible cheating a “classroom had to have so many wrong-to-right erasures that the average for each student was 4 standard deviations higher than the average for all D.C. students in that grade on that test, meaning that “a classroom corrected its answers so much more often than the rest of the district that it could have occurred roughly one in 30,000 times by chance.” D.C. classrooms corrected answers much more often.
In other words, statistically, it’s virtually a sure thing that rampant cheating took place.
Some of us have been saying this on the comment pages of The Post for years.
Why was Merrow asleep for so long?
And yes, I’m thankful that he’s finally awakened.
Simple reply:
Merrow’s been asleep because the mainstream media has done a very excellent and expensive job of convincing everyone that the current paradigm of education is largely in trouble and in need of innovators like Rhee to fix it.
Most of the public on ALL levels bought it. The rhetoric was shiny, spiffy, came gift wrapped, was glamorous looking, had velvet ribbons and bows, and smelled deliciously of a beautiful perfume.
WIth such packaging, who, even without knowing what was truly inside, would not one to get their free gift?
“Some of us have been saying this on the comment pages of The Post for years.” is true of many many people around the country in many other papers. Saying something, even having evidence does nothing until enough research and information are compiled to find the source and dig for the truth. John Merrow, unlike others tenaciously held on to try and find that Truth and provide an argument and rationale for the travesty of Rhee and others foisted on our education system and most importantly our children.
The revelations keep coming but not without thirty, forty, or as much as fifty years of articles, research papers, letters and finding confidential materials that can make the case. All of this
has to be done in scrupulously and astute investigation. All of it takes
time, patience, and amazing amount of reading both on the line and between the lines.This story is huge and dangerous. A good investigative Reporter has to believe in the story enough to live with it for years. Mr. Merrow has been and is doing that and he woke up to this travesty and deceitful manipulation of society long before most of the readers of this blog. Respect should be given where it is earned and that his and others good work can and hopefully accomplish a better and healthier redirection for the sake of the children.
We can all be grateful to John Merrow, not only for continuing to try to get to the bottom of the Rhee story, but for his willingness to change his mind. As Merrow wrote, when he asked “who created Rhee?” He played a supersize role. He featured heron PBS 12 topi se, showing her a heroic figure battling lazy teachers and their union. Fighting for the children. But he changed his mind. That is remarkable, as I can attest. Now I hope the day comes when he takes another look at New Orleans and stops lionizing the failed experiment in privatization. He has demonstrated that he is willing to learn. There is always hope.
It is a superior choice to regale those who live and learn rather than criticize them for not getting it right the first time. . . .
I thank Mr. Merrow a thousand times and ask him to not stop!
Yes! There is always hope.
Having to reread the hand writing on the wall works of many over many years makes
clear that where we are now has taken an amazing plan and implimentation of deception. The brightest and best of our education world have been and some still are pulled into this mess and refuse to do what Merrow has done.
In 1989 when How To Break The Yoke of Special Education was released it shook some advocates for the disabled to the core. The Illusion of Full Inclusion was another eye opener and the light began to show the way the possible destruction of the education system could be accomplished by using the disabled and challenged learners as the tools, along with the tests, as the instruments of that destruction or reshaping. It has come full circle and revisiting the file cabinet has shed a high beam on the reason for many to rethink and explore what has happened so aggressively over the last twenty five years.
Many well meaninged brilliant educators were setup without knowing how
they were being mind manipulated through devious sources more interested in finance, wealth and power, then what is best for the children and their future. This was and for
many is an elite race to the top against other countries and filling the coffers of others.
The individual child is being herded no differently then an animal on a farm into a coral
which best fits the needs of the owner for use and expediency. It makes my heart sick!