Jeffrey Weiss and Matthew Haag report in the Dallas Morning News about a cheating scandal at one of Dallas’s top-rated schools:
“Umphrey Lee Elementary was recognized as one of the best schools in Dallas, based primarily on the students’ STAAR results. But Dallas ISD officials concluded that was a sham, a distinction propped up by teachers feeding students answers on most of the 2012-13 state assessment tests.
Five teachers and an instructional coach resigned while under investigation last October. And by the end of the school 2013-14 school year, the students’ STAAR results had plummeted, dropping the school from the state’s top rating to as low as they go.”
Campbell’s Law strikes again. When test scores are made the measure and the goal, they distort the very thing being measured and incentivize unethical behavior.
When will we ever learn?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As much as I oppose high stakes testing and all it brings, and we should do all we can to take it down, cheating by educators has to be addressed as what it is: a violation of academic integrity. Without that, academics are a fraud. So the pressure does not provide mitigating circumstances. Forgive the person, not the deed.
That being said, we need to demand that culpability extend to as high levels necessary. Beverly Hall is as culpable as any teacher in Atlanta. Michelle Rhee should not be getting a free pass.
The good news (stretching that term) is the scandals cast real doubt on a large swath of happy results from many claims of success. We now have no idea what test results can be trusted. So we just doubled down on worthless.
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I do believe academic integrity is now called a career limiting move.
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For sure Math. Definitely true for the financial industry.
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Yes. I’ve read what banks and finance companies do to whistle blowers. They make Snowden’s ordeal look like a vacation in Russia. All the more reason EVERY job in America should have basic due process. Before 2008 happens again. I hate to see teaching come to that. Teachers can protect kids, but silenced teachers cannot.
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“Without that, academics are a fraud.”
Much of what we do-grades, sorting and separating students, testing, GPAs, etc. . . in “academics” is fraudulent from an epistemological and ontological view*. Wilson has shown that the errors in those educational malpractices render them “COMPLETELY INVALID”, i.e., fraudulent. To understand why see his “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
*combining those two categories of inquiry to determine the validity of our practices yields the best results for an accurate representation of the world and our actions.
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It is only a matter of time until top elementary schools throughout Texas are exposed for a similar pattern of cheating, after all, we’ve had this high stakes testing obsession for over three decades now. I’ve worked as a literacy specialist in several highly rated elementary schools in Houston, Dallas, and Austin, since my husband’s work moves him frequently. One where I worked in Austin was presented with a national award by Arne Duncan himself. That school’s administration took cheating to new heights and made it a sophisticated art form that is “covertly” modeled all over the state. For most Texas school administrators, ethics went out the window long ago, and now Texas has a culture of win win at any costs…..something like the Dallas Cowboys mentality.
This problem is not going to get fixed until we get rid of the Railroad Commissioner who is pretending to be our Commissioner of Education, the village idiot who is pretending to be our governor, the Pearson lobbyist who is pretending to be the President of the Texas Business Assoc, and the governor wannabe charter school queen who is pretending to be Attorney General. I think there was a time a few years ago when the motto of “Don’t Mess with Texas” became “Don’t Mess with Texas Testing”!
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If you’ve got some Texas evidence you can pass along, I’m at jweiss@dallasnews.com. (And thanks for the shout-out, Diane!)
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This was predicted by Demming:
This is the central problem (tragedy) with treating education as a production/manufacturing industry instead of a coping organization (what organizational theorists call education). The goal of a production industry is to reduce variation in processes in order to manufacture a product that customers are certain will perform according to expectations/specifications. In a coping organization you are confronted with uncertain inputs, uncertain processes, and uncertain outcomes. Added to the inability to control inputs, processes, and outcomes, what parents are looking for in schools are instructional programs that increase variation in outcomes—further develop the unique abilities, talents, and interests of their children. For this reason, as Deming attempted to point out, but which our school leadership and political class still don’t understand, is that managing a production industry and managing a school require entirely different set of intellectual and organizational tools. Not understanding the fundamental differences between manufacturing and educating is the reason that all the intellectual and organizational tools—merit base, standards, standardized testing, curriculum alignment—that the Duncan’s, Rhee’s, are implementing will fail, and in fact will result in the dysfunctional outcomes Deming describes in his books—cheating, drop outs, early exiting of teachers, etc.
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What you have pointed out is absolute truth and reality! But… how do we get this to sink into the delusional corporate brains who have now taken over the education system?
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To be fair, this is a reprint from old post written by someone else who’s name escapes me. I can’t take any credit, it is a pitch perfect point that needs to be read by all Kool-Aid drinkers and education pundits as well.
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I agree with you that cheating is unacceptable, but in the teachers’ defense, it’s possible that when they gave out the answers was the only opportunity they had that year to actually teach. People forget that teaching IS giving out answers, telling students information that they need to know. Ideally, you test students to make sure that they’re studying and that they have absorbed material already taught, and cheating shouldn’t happen then. But before I finally pulled my kids out of the public schools, I noticed that there was so much bureaucracy and nonsense that the teachers seemed to have very little time to convey any useful information. For these teachers, the blessing of cheating may have been that they finally got to actually tell the students something!
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For sure. Think of all the Atlanta kids, the schools, the teachers who did get the help they needed (and the funds they may have missed out on) because they test scores looked just fine.
Think of the quality control guy at GM who checks off that the brakes are just fine. Because his unit needed to look good.
Consequences.
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If I may add to one sentence: “The goal of a production industry is to reduce variation in processes in order to manufacture a product that customers are certain will perform according to expectations/specifications [in order to provide maximum return on dollars invested].
Not that there is inherently anything wrong with that.
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“Not understanding the fundamental differences between manufacturing and educating is the reason that all the intellectual and organizational tools—merit base, standards, standardized testing, curriculum alignment—that the Duncan’s, Rhee’s, are implementing will fail, and in fact will result in the dysfunctional outcomes Deming describes in his books—cheating, drop outs, early exiting of teachers, etc.”
EXACTO, NY teacher!!
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What disturbs me is that they promoted the principal under whom this occurred to *train* other principals. Parents were never notified about their children’s true scores.
Dallas isd hid this from the press.
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That also happened in Austin. The structural engineer turned “principal” who designed a punitive social engineered system of “test indoctrination” like that used for training zoo animals was celebrated and allowed to train all the other principals in AISD after he won some awards.
Texas administrators have no integrity or empathy for children, or they would not be promoting the STAAR agenda!
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It is only a matter of time until top elementary schools throughout Texas are exposed for a similar pattern of cheating, after all, we’ve had this high stakes testing obsession for over three decades now. I’ve worked as a literacy specialist in several highly rated elementary schools in Houston, Dallas, and Austin, since my husband’s work moves him frequently. One where I worked in Austin was presented with a national award by Arne Duncan himself. That school’s administration took cheating to new heights and made it a sophisticated art form that is “covertly” modeled all over the state. For most Texas school administrators, ethics went out the window long ago, and now Texas has a culture of win win at any costs…..something like the Dallas Cowboys mentality.
This problem is not going to get fixed until we get rid of the Railroad Commissioner who is pretending to be our Commissioner of Education, the village idiot who is pretending to be our governor, the Pearson lobbyist who is pretending to be the President of the Texas Business Assoc, and the governor wannabe charter school queen who is pretending to be Attorney General. I think there was a time a few years ago when the motto of “Don’t Mess with Texas” became “Don’t Mess with Texas Testing”!
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Thanks for repeating that disclosure! I’m posting it again on the TCA site.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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Shocked – SHOCKED! – well, no, not shocked at all.
Read the article from last month on the Atlanta cheating scandal and despair. Because it’s a safe bet that that same culture pervades most places where high-stakes testing pressure has combined with just the sorts of administrators who understand what is expected of them and that the only sin is getting caught to create the most corrupt atmosphere in US public education of all time. But that was the goal of high-stakes testing in the first place. And while I don’t know that the Broad Academy openly teaches its graduates how to cheat in the districts they will run, it’s hard to imagine that there isn’t an implicit philosophy that only results matter, not methods.
Letting politicians and corporatists and those who own them decide national, state, and local education policy makes cheating scandals inevitable. The goal is to so undermine our trust in public schools, administrators, and – of course! – teachers, that we will happily see privatization. And once that has occurred at a sufficient level, you can bet that you’ll never hear the words “accountability,” “transparency,” etc., spoken by those in charge.
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Odd that you should mention Atlanta PS? The Austin Superintendent made a hurried exit and resigned with a year still left on her contract in order to avoid a cheating scandal there, only to end up in Atlanta to replace another queen of testing scandals. There is no end to this insanity. School superintendents are being paid the equivalent of CEO’s and recruited for their ability to deliver test scores……regardless of how they get it done.
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Read more about the scandal here: http://www.disdblog.com
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I’m sure Weiss’ hands are tied by his corporate overlords, but the real question is why the Superintendent’s actions in the wake of this scandal are not being addressed.
Why isn’t the Dallas Morning News (Weiss writes for the DMN) investigating the superintendent’s failure to notify parents, to fire the teachers, to remediate the kids, to fire the principal and to fire the Executive Director?
What is going to be done for the kids who were promoted without skills?
Parents should sue.
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Cupcake…guess who owns The Dallas Morning NewS?
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Who?
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Cupcake, I live in Dallas and follow this all closely as well. We both know that the BOT, and the commission for home rule, plus Rawlings, have effectively silenced and emasculated the press.
Plus most of the public does not care what happens to poor children. It is all about taking care of your own, in Dallas…
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Sigh. No corporate overlord involved here, folks. As the story says, DISD admits it screwed the pooch by not doing notifications. Teachers resigned. Principal was eventually fired. All that is in the story. Including the timing of it all. Whether the Super of a district the size of Dallas ISD should be directly involved in each of these decisions is an interesting question. Buck does stop there, to be sure. But stand down on the conspiracy theories.
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Jeffrey, no conspiracy theory. Google Campbell’s Law.
When the stakes are so high, bad things happen. See Atlanta, El Paso.
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Bad things do happen when the pressure is great. There is no doubt that the high stakes involved here should not be. Hat needs to be dealt with.
But pressure does not provide mitigating circumstances. If the cheating can be substantiated, those responsible should be held accountable.
Think of the supposed cheating and academic fraud in big time college football. See the story about Notre Dame in the last few days. Would any of us buy that people should skate because of the pressure?
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Jeffrey Weiss, it is not a conspiracy theory, and please do not cause us to think you are this naive. Cheating is the modus operandi of most school administrators in Texas, especially in the higher socio economic areas. It has become so covert some of us think the training came from the CIA? Or maybe it is just a carry over from the corporate world? Superintendents encourage it by turning a blind eye since they are only interested in getting the results they want, which are high test scores. Principals groom their assistant principals and a few select “trusted” teachers very well for a reason. The model of cheating in Atlanta is very similar to what currently goes on all over Texas, only the Texas administrators and teachers use white erasers for their covert operations. Also, they focus more on filling in the answers that the students did not complete, and therefore avoiding excessive erasures. Why would they not cheat?
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U2, that’s pretty serious stuff and serious accusations. Do you have the evidence to make a case? If so, have you taken it anywhere?
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So is it fair to say that this entire school was judged solely on test scores?
It was a “success” because it had high test scores, although since a lot of the adults were cheating it probably wasn’t a great place to work OR go to school?
We measure schools 100% on test scores. Insisting that we don’t is a lie.
Maybe we could start this “debate” there and admit that’s where we are, and we did that deliberately over more than a decade.
Is that the whole of what we value in schools? No? Then why are we in this place?
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I think Jerry Brown honestly believes that we should use other measures, so we at least have a discussion about this. But I notice that even people who think the tests are idiotic tend to fall back on test scores… Because they’re easy?
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Has anyone ever studied if students at highly competitive schools cheat more than students at less competitive school?
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It’s all a fraud. The whole educational process is a fraud. No one ever asks the students what they want. What will make learning more enjoyable for them? The Dept of Ed circumvents parents and ignores students. There’s nothing new or innovating going on in schools because the way we teach is the same as it’s been since dirt. The only thing new is business has figured out how to make education profitable. Cheating is the least of our worries.
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Cheating is how people adapt to an unjust or dysfunctional system…..they learn to play the game…. Only they don’t think of it as cheating, but as “survival”. It is like children in dysfunctional families learn to lie and be deceptive in order to survive in fear and insecurity….Well, teachers in dysfunctional school systems learn to lie and be deceptive in order to survive with fear and insecurity. The cheating is just a symptom of a bigger problem. The bigger problem is that we have an abusive system that is unjust and cruel. It is abusive to children and abusive to teachers. As long as this insanity is allowed, children and teachers will be forced to survive as best they can, which includes “beating the system”……cheating!
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The only way to win is to cheat. Your scores have to be better than they were before or you lose money. The system is so messed up that educators who care about kids will cheat so they can buy books and supplies. They don’t want to see their school closed and shuttered and their students bused to new neighborhoods every year.. We all know the testing was brought in to promote privatization and is designed to label schools and fail children. It’s not cheating,to subvert and evil system. it’s survival.
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