Mark Naison reflects on the cheating scandal in Atlanta and the shaming tactics at Success Academy charters and sees them as two sides of the same coin. When test scores become the measure of education, adults will go to extremes to reach the goal, even when it means cheating or child abuse. What it is not is good education.

Categories Atlanta, Charter Schools, Cheating, Harlem Success Academy

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Gordon Wilder says:

April 7, 2015 at 2:10 pm

Again: Tony Bennett, the Indiana Supt. of Education when he messed with grades he became the supt. of education in Florida but was allowed to resign after it all came out. Some different than the possible 20 year sentences imposed on these teachers. Thom Hartmann on his show yesterday made some other very interesting comparisons and the real source of the problem,;not the teachers involved here, although not condoning what was done, but the commensurate policies of politicians in fomenting such a thing happening.
How often before this whole thing began, the NCLB plus did one EVER hear of such a thing happening as teachers and/or administrators cheating on tests?

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Dienne says:

April 7, 2015 at 2:23 pm

The thing is, we don’t know that SA doesn’t cheat. They score their own tests. So maybe they have cheating *and* child abuse. They score that high on state tests, yet none of their students get into selective enrollment schools? Something is wrong there.

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- Tim says:
  
  April 7, 2015 at 5:04 pm
  
  A little bit too much is being made of the fact that a Success student hasn’t scored into an SHSAT school (I’m still waiting to see a report saying that no child made it in this year). We can start with some context—there are more than a few entire NYC DOE districts with thousands of eighth graders that will fail to place a kid in Stuy or Bronx Science.
  
  A large number of qualifying children attend so-called “feeder” middle schools, which are either competitive exam/selective schools or honors programs within schools. These have extremely low proportions of ELL and special ed students (if any at all), and because of the abilities of the kids, they are able to teach an accelerated curriculum: http://www.wsj.com/articles/well-worn-path-from-top-nyc-middle-schools-to-coveted-high-schools-1419824326. Success schools may have overall proficiency rates that compare favorably to these schools, but the average scores and scores on the high end do not.
  
  Another common trait of children who qualify for SHSAT schools is having parents who are willing to commit time and money to private test prep. This can start as early as fourth or fifth grade, three or four years before the test is administered. If there are any cram schools in Harlem, I’m not aware of them.
  
  We also don’t know which SHSAT schools the Success students ranked on their applications. Stuy and Bronx Science are semi-convenient to Harlem, but they also require the highest scores—every year hundreds and hundreds of precious snowflakes from wealthy families in District 2, District 3, and District 15 don’t make it, either. The two SHSAT schools with the lowest cut-offs (by far) are in Brooklyn, a fairly ugly commute from upper Manhattan. It isn’t inconceivable that a Success child may have scored high enough for one of these schools, but simply didn’t list it.
  
  Perhaps as Success grows they’ll eventually have the scale to operate separately tracked and screened schools like the DOE, and those kids will have better luck with the SHSAT?
  
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- Michael Fiorillo says:
  
  April 8, 2015 at 12:23 pm
  
  In addition to doing their own scoring, we also know that SA receives proprietary test prep materials from Pearson – reported on this blog by a former SA teacher – giving them yet another advantage over the neighborhood public schools they feed off of like lampreys.
  
  And, as you rightly point out – despite Tim’s predictable defense of them, as seen below – these test prep workhouses for the poor could not get a single one of their students to pass the exam for the specialized high schools.
  
  Either Moskowitz is pursuing an extremely limited, non-transportable type of training – namely, hyper-concentration on prep for a small number of exams, in PR service to her empire building – that will be of limited use to her students in the future, or they’re cheating. Or both.
  
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  - Tim says:
    
    April 8, 2015 at 12:40 pm
    
    Traditional NYC DOE schools purchase millions of dollars’ worth of test prep materials from Pearson every year. This isn’t a smoking gun.
Akademos says:

April 7, 2015 at 2:31 pm

And, by the way, the cheating and abuse skews VAM even further and gives rise to even more desperation and tendencies to further invalidate results.

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Upstate NY teacher says:

April 7, 2015 at 2:44 pm

It was amazing to read the NY TIMES article. It kept saying this is abusive in a way and then follow it up with, but the test scores are higher. As if the end justified the means.

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- Chiara says:
  
  April 7, 2015 at 3:18 pm
  
  I think it;s inevitable, though. People love stats and numbers and rankings are much easier to use as a description than more complex measures. There’s even a saying for it: “numbers don’t lie!” except sometimes they do.
  
  If Atlanta teaches anyone anything, it should be that they can’t measure the value of schools without spending a lot of time in them.
  
  Hall won all kinds of national awards, and if one reads the investigator’s reports, those schools were not healthy environments- not for employees and not for children. It was miserable.They were absolutely frantic to get the scores up, partly because they had worked so hard and were making progress. They knew the kids were learning. They just weren’t making ENOUGH progress.
  
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- Chiara says:
  
  April 7, 2015 at 3:23 pm
  
  I think there’s a kind of false certainty that relying solely on numbers gives. It blinds people. They had to know that Hall’s gains were outlandish but she had this “objective” measure so they stopped thinking and bought the whole thing.
  
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Paula says:

April 7, 2015 at 2:54 pm

Spot on, two sides of the same coin. With education as a business, the end justifies the means and no profit seeking charter has to worry about abuse, they have the complicit consent of ill informed parents who think test scores equal achievement. Sad.

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- Ellen Lubic says:
  
  April 7, 2015 at 3:15 pm
  
  This is pretty much the essence of the Free Market system, Paula. Read both Heilbronner and Stiglitz on the history of economics.
  
  Mark, thanks for putting forth this apt analogy. In the historical growth of economics, all societies from earliest recorded times, have had to develop cooperative tribal systems in order to survive and possibly even to prosper. It was only in the later centuries when interest was developed as a profit incentive, that society began to see a downgrading of tribal unity.
  
  Now Mark shows us once again how various forms of cooperative cheating which are built into current charter school (and adjuct education industries) growth for profit of some, gleaned off the work of others (taxpayers), plus CC imposition, and grading of their interminable testing, leads to new application of laws such as RICO, labelling some (teachers and other educators) as racketeers, while the actual perps are those like David Coleman, Obama, Duncan, and the billionaire Rheeformers, who squeeze the life force out of teachers and students to gain their huge economic advantage.
  
  This deck is so stacked against those of us who believe in universal free education for all, that it seems be insurmountable.
  
  Where is our friend Bob Shepherd lately? He generally offers so much insight and good judgement on all of this.
  
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concerned mom says:

April 7, 2015 at 3:21 pm

I don’t know, There are plenty of school that are not cheating. Cheating is a choice.

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- Tim says:
  
  April 7, 2015 at 5:07 pm
  
  Indeed. As a very wise person once said, “The bottom line: don’t cheat and don’t permit students to cheat. Period.
  
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teacherbatman says:

April 7, 2015 at 3:32 pm

This is a major theme we learn in the study of human psychology and history. People have a tendency to cheat when they feel cheated. Teachers do it, people do it, and so it is with students: http://teacherbatman.org/students-cheated/

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Chiara says:

April 7, 2015 at 5:05 pm

Isn’t this a bit of an indictment of ed reformers as advocates?

“But now there’s new evidence that poor schools are getting increasingly short-changed by the states and localities that fund them. The richest 25 percent of school districts receive 15.6 percent more funds from state and local governments per student than the poorest 25 percent of school districts, the federal Department of Education pointed out last month (March, 2015). That’s a national funding gap of $1,500 per student, on average, according to the most recent data, from 2011-12. The gap has grown 44 percent since 2001-02, when a student in a rich district had only a 10.8 percent resource advantage over a student in a poor district.”

If your whole job was equity wouldn’t this make you question how effective you are? I mean, one of the justifications for testing was resources would go to the children who need them, right? Why is it going in the wrong direction?

http://hechingerreport.org/the-gap-between-rich-and-poor-schools-grew-44-percent-over-a-decade/

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- KrazyTA says:
  
  April 7, 2015 at 6:01 pm
  
  Chiara: as so often, good catch.
  
  Riffing off your comments, let me give one example of what you provoked me to think about: by falsely claiming progress in Atlanta during the cheating scandal, funds that might have been tapped to help students that were behind couldn’t be obtained because the reality of need was masked by the rheephorm appearance of success.
  
  But just where did some of that ‘achievement’ money go? Oh, that’s right: bonuses and such to the cheat leaders. So the kids were robbed and the cheaters were rewarded.
  
  Or if speaking and thinking in Rheephormish [thank you, Bob Shepherd!], a few adults received their equitable share of resources desperately needed to help students.
  
  Because, after all, it makes so much ₵ent¢ that the leaders and heavyweights of the “new civil rights movement of our time” garner as much $tudent $ucce$$ as possible given all the time and effort and money they invest in creatively disrupting public education.
  
  Rheeally!
  
  But not really.
  
  Thank you again for your comments.
  
  😎
  
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