When is cheating not cheating? When it happens in a charter school whose owner is politically powerful. When it threatens the very foundations of test-based accountability, the foundation of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.
The story begins:
“The odds that 11th-graders at Strawberry Mansion High School would have randomly erased so many wrong answers on the math portion of their 2009 state standardized test and then filled in so many right ones were long. Very, very long. To be precise, they were less than one in a duodecillion, according to an erasure analysis performed for the state Department of Education.
“In short, there appeared to be cheating — and it didn’t come as a total surprise. In 2006, student members of Youth United for Change protested being forced out of class for test-preparation sessions and won concessions from the district. In 2010, principal Lois Powell-Mondesire left Strawberry Mansion; after her departure, test scores dropped sharply.
“But despite the erasure analysis and those suspicious circumstances, neither Powell-Mondesire nor any other teacher or administrator at Strawberry Mansion was ever disciplined. On the contrary, Powell-Mondesire was promoted — to a job at school-district headquarters, earning more than $145,000 as a “turnaround principal” charged with helping other administrators boost student achievement. (Powell-Mondesire, who retired July 1, could not be reached for comment. Neither the District nor the state would say whether her exit was related to the cheating investigation.)…
“After all, politically, the state would have a great deal to lose by prosecuting cheaters. Some of the most damning evidence of cheating has come from Philadelphia, a district run by the state since 2002, and from charters, including a Chester school run by a prominent leader in Pennsylvania’s self-described school-reform movement who is a backer of Gov. Tom Corbett. But more than that, bubble tests have become the high-stakes centerpiece of American public education; when the scores are tainted, it could throw an entire way of running schools into question.
“Given the scope of the issue and the lack of action since, it appears Pennsylvania is covering up one of the country’s largest cheating scandals — and doing so in plain sight.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
corruption and deceit; it is time for a new secretary of education; it is also time for the legality of waivers to be presented before the courts
The amazing thing about these “cheating” scandals is that the administrators and teachers are using the most obvious way of cheating on so-called “standardized” machine scored tests. Before the “Accountability” surge and the days of routine cheating, Chicago’s public schools had an actual Department of Research and Evaluation, and a good one. (Except for the softball team, which Substance was part of, but that’s another story). “R & E”, as it was called, routinely scanned and reported the scores on all the tests, and would even provide teachers, during the off season, with the Stanford Diagnostic Tests to get a clearer idea of their kids.
Back then, the tests (the ITBS for elementary schools; the TAP for high schools) were not high stakes, but there were some stakes. Principals might notice one particular spread on scores and smile at a teacher — or frown. And so R & E had a process for identifying shifts that looked fishy and auditing the tests. Audits were conducted by going into the classroom with a different “form” for the test (back in those days, a test like the Iowa had a couple of forms, supposedly for each grade, which were validated and reliable). The principal would be notified at the last minutes, and the teacher would get a break while the R & E staff administered the re-test to the class. Classes that were picked for auditing were selected in two ways: computer flags that noted unusual gains; or tips from whistle blowers (if a principal was obsessed, even in 1985, with test scores, you didn’t want to teach the sixth grade with the kids who had shown “miracle” gains when in fifth grade with a cheating teacher…
Audits could also track individual kids’ scores, so if there were something unusual a second look was available. Once, when I was teaching Advanced Placement English (literature) all of my kids showed significant score gains from one year to the next on the TAP test in “language arts.” So we were audited. We “passed” the audit (unlike what actually happened in Los Angeles when Jaime Escalante got caught, but that’s another story for another time).
When the scores held up, a superintendent asked me what I’d done. Simple, I told her. It had two parts. First, the kids who were taking AP English from me in junior year had to meet with me in June and do a four-book reading list over the summer. We stayed in communication about it. Second, the first four weeks of the regular school year were a “Boot Camp” on intense reading of serious fiction (the books included Benito Cereno and Heart of Darkness).
The result was that by November, when the kids took the TAP in those days, they had had an intense experience in reading carefully and closely.
I also noted that such “gains” were only possible once — and for kids who had not had as much challenging English literature instruction in previous years. Even in those days, we had some claiming that their kids had gained “three years” in each year (that was the Marva Collins hoax, which I exposed in 1984; by the time some of her kids were in seventh grade they were reading at the 17th grade level — if you believed the press reports, which included “60 Minutes” until we exposed the hoax).
Integrity is always facing challenges. And it’s always better to audit than to believe in miracles.
Fantastic account. Excellent.
I’m actually very interested in your Escalante side point.
It worries me that there will be no erasure marks to scrutinize on the new computerized tests. Perhaps we need each testing session to be video-recorded. Or an Office of SBAC/PARCC Fraud that uses algorithms to sniff out suspicious activity like the credit card companies do.
Ponderosa: nailed it.
Covering up one’s tracks by computerized finagling? It’s a “been there done that” piece of SOP in the standardized testing biz.
I urge viewers of this blog to buy and read and reread Todd Farley, MAKING THE GRADES: MY MISADVENTURES IN THE STANDARDIZED TESTING INDUSTRY (2009).
Thank you for pointing out this crucial point.
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“Computerized Cheating”
Do electrons leave erasure marks
To show there has been cheating
On online tests like Pearson’s PARCC?
Or is the evidence fleeting?
Nice one!
There’s actually a whole new industry focused on just this. Looking for links…
Click to access EndofErasures.pdf
Lots of money for entrepreneurs!
And:
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2014/10/cheating_computerized_tests.html
Interesting reports here. But they don’t seem to cover the possibility of meddling at the state level. What’s to prevent an ethically-challenged Commissioner of Education lowering scores of public schools and elevating those of his pet schools? Without a paper trail, it seems impossible to prove malfeasance. It’s the same problem we have with electronic voting. As the Bard asks, “Do electrons leave erasure marks…?” If the tests weren’t high stakes, this wouldn’t be such a big deal. But when careers will be riding on these results, it’s alarming that so much depends on an inscrutable “black box”.
Responding to Ponderosa, I’ve seen reports of related situations in both New York and Louisiana regarding this year’s cut scores to paint the picture that the policymakers want to have promoted. Nothing as stark as what you’re suggesting (though I thought a former Indiana superintendent did exactly what you were saying…which cost him his job in Florida), but important for the influence on public opinion. The constant in education policy in my career is that the policymakers always declare victory. It’s hard to tell what “victory” means, however, to current Reformers.
Great read. I urge all viewers of this blog to access the article provided by the link in the posting.
In case you haven’t seen the word “duodecillion” before, I found this definition online: “a cardinal number represented in the U.S. by 1 followed by 39 zeros, and in Great Britain by 1 followed by 72 zeros.”
Link: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/duodecillion
But, but, but isn’t this a damning data driven data point?
“Men lie and women lie but numbers don’t.” [“Dr.” Steve Perry, “America’s Most Trusted Educator,” channeling rapper Jay-Z]
No, not Rheeally, when it doesn’t make ₵ent¢.
The formulae are simple if you’re a leader of the self-styled “education reform” movement.
Tortured numbers and stats that yield $tudent $uccess = accurate/trustworthy/precise.
Genuine numbers and stats that hurt ROI/MC [Return On Investment/Monetizing Children] = that shrill and strident Ravitch woman and her exasperating blog.
As a charter [yes, pun intended] member of the innumerati, I hope I have cleared that up.
😎
P.S. Dr. Raj Chetty: how’d I do? I avoided the all-too-human tendency to focus on outliers and using only large data sets I have created the ‘Michael Jordan’ of all outliars. Got a spot open on your next excursion into Rheephorm GrantLand?
😏
P.P.S. George N. Schmidt: you knocked it out of the park. Thank you for your contribution to this thread.
No, Krazy, you have lost it. You did not check the agenda, the rheephorm express only serves the first class reformers, it can not intersect with reality that disagrees, the improbability drive would shut down if you suggest that rheephorm won’t work and have numbers to back it.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
If you are going to cheat on test scores, do it in private sector, for profit, corporate run Charter schools where the cheating will be ignored. But don’t do it in a public school because the fake education reformers supported by those same corporations are watching and they have their corporate paid spies everywhere and reporters ready to write the story and publish in the corporate owned media.
Unless it’s on Michelle Rhee’s watch:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-03-28-1Aschooltesting28_CV_N.htm
You certainly wouldn’t want to do it in a place like Atlanta, they might have real investigators look into things. Dr. Hall= wrong place, wrong time.
This case of fraud in testing is just one example of the perverse incentives built into policies of several federal regimes on the theory that enhanced interrogation of students on tests, and enhanced surveillance of teachers to monitor their compliance with rules, are the best way to improve schools–unless the school is a charter and sponsor has the right connections.
I do not use the phrases “enhanced interrogation” and “enhanced surveillance” lightly.
Tests have become instruments for intimidating students and teachers, coercing them into compliance with policies that have no merit and no justifications worthy of respect. The proliferation of high stakes tests, and the use of those scores to rate the worth of a teacher or school is totally, totally out of proportion, illegitimate as a plan for improving education, and filled with perils for this generation.
The education of this generation is happening because teachers are more competent and inspired that those who make policy. The education of this generation is happening in spite of well-coordinated efforts to sabotage that work under a scheme for accountability that no bookkeeper or business would accept–only the column for outcomes, none for resources, no “balancing of the books” needed.
It would be wonderful to see this cheater held to accounts, but the conduct is a direct result of making performance on tests a zero-sum matter.
Ah, a peak at how the corporate run world works at its worst, where liars and cheaters are rewarded for their loyalty to profits.
All anyone has to do is check how much U.S. presidents earn from speaking fees after they leave the White House to discover just how much these rewards are worth.
G.W. Bush gets $150,000 for each speech, and he’s made millions since leaving the White House. Bill Clinton has earned more than $100 million.
When cheating is permitted at this level, the children are cheated out of learning and have a bad example to follow. There was a time when cheating was not permitted under any circumstances. Cheating is always cheating.
I don’t know. I don’t think it’s the cheating that cheats kids out of learning, it’s the testing. I’m not a teacher, but I’ve often thought about what I would do if I were. Of course I can’t answer that question, but from a strictly hypothetical point of view I’ve always thought that cheating in some respects is the more defensible option. If my job and my school’s continued survival depends on my kids’ test scores, I can either get those test scores by drilling the hell out of the kids and focusing on nothing other than the test, or I can cheat. If cheating allows me to actually teach my kids worthwhile lessons and let them explore and learn to love learning and forget about the test, my cheating might actually be a gift to them. It would be the test prep option that would be the bigger cheat.
And, yes, I know that’s easy for me to say, since I’m not a teacher.
I’m sure a lot of you have read the state report on the Atlanta cheating, but if you haven’t you may be surprised at how sympathetic it is to teachers (the 3rd part is the analysis).
They go into detail about the “culture of fear” that just permeated everything, how people were belittled and humiliated and how that twisted people into knots. It’s really quite different and more nuanced than a lot of the commentary. They tried to understand why this happened – what led up to it.
“almost without exception, principals and teachers said data was the driver, data controls everything…. we heard this mantra system-wide from nearly every witness”
And:
“data can also be used as an abusive and cruel weapon to punish teachers and principals and as a pretext to termination”
It sounds like a horrible place to work, but it also sounds like a horrible environment for kids in a school. The whole organizational structure and culture was fear-soaked.
Click to access vol3.pdf
Mere lip service. So they acknowledge a “culture of fear” in the report. Will things change in the school district as a result?
Probably not, because the people who did the investigation don’t have any authority over the schools going forward, and the whole discussion around the report has been “bad cheaters! prosecute them!”
That attitude, however, did NOT come from the what the investigator wrote. The investigator recognized that this had an origin and these teachers did not turn into delusional, cheating liars overnight.
Part of it is “no excuses”. The people who worked there got a very clear message that any issue they raised about the test ‘n punish culture was presumed to be “an excuse” so they simply stopped objecting to anything. It’s probably a pretty effective way to silence people, portraying any dissent as self-interested whining or “excuses”.
I assign a lot more essay writing than most middle school teachers I know. I have 190 students. I cannot write voluminous comments on each essay, so I sometimes type up a list of common problems I see and staple it to each essay, give a mini-lesson on the problems and ask kids to highlight the problems that seem to pertain to their essays. A parent objected to this, and when I explained to him that I was already offering a fairly deluxe service by assigning a lot of essays, reading and grading them, and that writing extensive comments would literally destroy every weekend through the year, he contemptuously retorted that I was “making excuses”. Apparently the truly worthy worker realizes it’s wrong to make excuses. Ever.
What you describe comes close to how I taught. It’s a lot of work.
In a comment to an earlier post Los Angeles: Miraculous Increase in Graduation Rate! on October 4, 2014, rrhake had a link to Dukenfield’s Law that addresses cheating.
Dukenfield’s Law of Incentive Management, by Mark Kleiman.
One could formulate this as a general principle: any incentive to create a result also creates an incentive to simulate the same result. The corollary is obvious: the greater the incentive, the greater the temptation. Or, as W. C. Fields put it in You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, “If a thing is worth winning, it’s worth cheating for.” Borrowing Fields’s real name, I propose to call this generalization Dukenfield’s Law of Incentive Management. Designers of control systems ignore Dukenfield’s Law at their peril, and ours.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/dukenfields-law-of-incentive-management/61415/