The emails unearthed by Tom LoBianco of the Associated Press show that Tony Bennett was desperately trying to rig the system to raise the grade of one charter school from a C to an A.
That charter happened to be the charter held by a major donor to GOP campaigns, including Bennett’s, which received $130,000 from her.
As a side benefit of the new formula, the grades of all charters were raised. As this morning’s editorial in the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette shows, “The scramble to inflate Christel House’s grade also was successful in pushing more than half of the state’s charter schools to a letter grade of C or better, a claim Bennett couldn’t make before the formula was massaged.”
The editorial notes with alarm that Bennett’s rigged formula is still in place. Schools across the state will get phony grades. Will the state board of education allow Glenda Ritz to impose some integrity to this deeply flawed system?
To quote the editorial:
“The disclosure settles the question why educators well-versed in test scores and evaluation systems couldn’t make sense of it.
“(I)t is not criterion based, it does not statistically make sense, it does not account for standard measure of error, it is unexplainable and difficult to understand, and it fails to comply with current law and administrative code,” Superintendent Chris Himsel of Northwest Allen County Schools told legislators in a letter last November.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Melissa Harris Perry skewers Bennett:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26315908/vp/52627210#52627210
Charter Schools were too big to fail. Sounds familiar…
Bennett pressured his subordinates to disseminate fake rating results for the financial benefit of charters and corporate reformers. At the same time, he deceived taxpayers, educators and parents. What’s the penalty for state officials who misuse their office?
In Indiana, state officials who misuse their office get appointed by their appointees to University Leadership positions, lucrative boards of public/private entities, etc. A rats nest. mitch selected bennett because he knew bennett would follow whatever he was told as long as he got touted for his leadership and promoted into high political circles. tony hired in much of mitch’s campaign and spokespeople staff as well as people from the ed reform corporations. They shut out any input that did not fit their apriori assumptions and beliefs. They had the Indy Star publish opeds mitch’s ed reformers wrote and had their own man as the star ed reporter. The Ft. Wayne newspaper always did a better, accurate, honest job of reporting on ed matters. When the original accountability system under PL 221 and then modified to fit NCLB was created, it was transparent, any group that wanted it were provided data and analysis to examine what if scenarios, adjustments were made–some on all sides were not happy–too harsh, not harsh enough (the chamber, fronting for ed reformers whom mitch later appointed as state board of ed members when he was elected in 2004) and we had actual public meetings attended by state board, doe staff and the state superintendent (Dr. Reed). tony usually did not attend the limited public meetings, scheduled during the day so that most people could not attend, and input was ignored. Many of mitch’s ed reform people are still in place–they are now taking the state board of ed private, away from the doe, so that they can minimize any inspection, criticism, etc of their actions. The legislators, all republicants, want to take away the super’s duties of oversight of rulemaking, accountability, testing and most other things that could shed light on their rats nest of corruption. Keep digging–shady deals for fake contracts to provide money to board members groups and universities, board member private companies and the college board-ed reform groups etc and positions for family members (tony’s wife was set up with a lucrative position through above mentioned state board member university to work with, of all things, charter schools)and of course contracts with consultants who seem not to have provided any documentation of their work product (probably just an oral presentation concerning charters–“charters good, teacher unions bad”). Follow the money.
The penalty for so-called reformers caught lying and manipulating? Apparently it’s career advancement and increased wealth.
Why is this scandal not a major news story?
This is why:
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/got-dough-how-billionaires-rule-our-schools
If you have bought off all the media outlets to push your corporate takeover of public schools, that media is not going to investigate you and your agenda.
If you investigate this story and how it is being presented in publications in Indiana, Florida and elsewhere I encourage you to also take a look at the blog of Vic Smith for October 5, 2012 titled “Fiasco” outlining concerns of many regarding the school grades. I was able to access this by googling NEIFPE and a link came up then scroll to the archives for the month. We had not yet had election that would take away HIS control in this state ( it was first Tues in NOV). Unfortunately his replacement is left with the mess and the others she must work with who favored Bennett are uncooperative. Smith gives eyewitness reports of much of the episodes in his blog at the North East Indiana Friends of Public Education. Even though Bennett is gone his FIASCO continues.
(repost)
While looking at the E’s you’ll see that many Charters did not have a 12th grade(including Christel House ). What they did was change and manipulate a separate formula just for schools that did not have 12th grade. Then the dept. of Ed worried about Charters not adding 12th grade so that they could stay with this “easy A” formula!
I had read in one of the articles that Jon Gubera (the stats guy) had resigned but none of the other articles confirmed this.
“The disclosure settles the question why educators well-versed in test scores and evaluation systems couldn’t make sense of it.
(I)t is not criterion based, it does not statistically make sense, it does not account for standard measure of error, it is unexplainable and difficult to understand, and it fails to comply with current law and administrative code,” Superintendent Chris Himsel of Northwest Allen County Schools told legislators in a letter last November.”
NSS! What is the fundamental problem involved with these school grades? All the inherent errors and obfuscations as shown by Noel Wilson in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 render any conclusions “vain and illusory”, in other words meaningless. So much mental masturbation about nothingness purporting to be truths.
So, in my “Quixotic Quest” © to rid the educational world of the educational malpractices that are educational standards, standardized testing and the “grading” of students (and by extension teachers, schools and districts) I re-post the following:
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms shit in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
No mystery to the grading system just crony capitalism at its best. It is sickening. I just wonder when the people will rise up and say, “No more!” Duncan and his crew are cut from the same cloth.