The official report of cheating in the Atlanta Public Schools is bound to prompt a debate whether or not the scandal is just an extreme version of the corruption prompted by NCLB and data-driven accountability. The report shows that some of Atlanta's behavior was qualitatively worse than the legal, but dubious practices that have become common in urban districts.
Much of the behavior prompted by their "culture of fear," however, is indistinguishable from the abuses lauded elsewhere as a "culture of accountability." Atlanta Superintendent Beverly Hall was not alone in proclaiming a culture of "No exceptions. No excuses," and "data-driven instruction."
In order to motivate principals, Hall employed multi-colored charts displaying data gains that she should have known were questionable. Given the extreme turnover of principals across the nation, and the press glorifying superintendents who fire school leaders, Hall's record of replacing 90% of principals over two decades was exceptional only in degree.
The humiliation and scapegoating of educators is pervasive today, but the way it was ritualized in Atlanta seems unique. Every year at a convocation at the Georgia Dome, faculty of schools that met their targets were given seats of honor "on the floor," while teachers from low-performing schools were relegated to the back of the dome. A principal forced a teacher who did not raise scores enough to crawl under a table.
The extent of Atlanta's cover-up also seems extreme. Other districts, like Washington D.C., on the other hand, have sought to contain their cheating scandals by looking the other way. Atlanta may be unique, then, only because the story had legs, and was forced to keep up its culture of denial over a much longer period of time.
The main findings of the state investigation sound eerily familiar to educators who were forced to meet unobtainable NCLB targets that called for 100% proficiency by 2014. A primary factor that led to cheating, the report concluded, was unreasonable growth targets. As with NCLB, goals became more impossible because of their cumulative effect over the years. And as with NCLB, schools faced the task of comparing "apples with oranges" by mandating growth by one class based on scores for other groups of students.
Atlanta should be a warning to the Duncan Administration, which has pressured systems to use test score growth for the evaluation of educators. In Atlanta, 25% of the principals' evaluations were based on test score growth, and they also were allowed only three years to raise scores. In other words, Atlanta reaped the harvest of the "reforms" in New York City and Washington D.C., which give principals three years or less to meet targets or be fired. Now, both cities face the decision of whether to honestly investigate the extent of their dishonesty.
The investigation described the same dynamic that Susan Headden, of the Education Sector, explained as a problem with the D.C. IMPACT evaluation system. The Atlanta investigation notes that the cumulative effect of cheating made it more difficult for honest educators to meet their growth targets. Similarly, Headden wrote,
Cheating, (in D.C.) of course, distorts the playing field; the teacher who fudges the numbers on students' tests is judged against the teacher who doesn't ... The teacher who gets the same students the following year is also hurt; because she is starting from an inflated baseline.Perhaps the best example of corruption was "question number seven," because it is similar to the abuses that are common because they are not as clear-cut as pointing out the right answer or erasing wrong answers. Teachers were given a "tip" sheet that warned that question seven, an essay about a rule that the students considered to be unfair, was similar to a question that would appear on the test. Sure enough, students were required to write about a law that they thought was unfair. In one sense, the "question number seven" abuse was worse than practices that are openly promoted in most districts, because it required a person to improperly peek at a test booklet. On the other hand, many systems are like D.C. and announce an annual, spring test prep season. Was Atlanta's "tip" more unethical than the common practice of drilling students on recently released test items before the exam? D.C., for instance, proudly takes advantage of "granular detail available to teachers" to prep for test questions. Fundamentally, the Atlanta scandal is the logical and predictable result of data-driven reform. As explained by Campbell's Law, when accountability regimes are unfair and impose unreasonable requirements, that is an invitation for corruption. Atlanta is a legacy of the fiction that rising test scores reflect real increases in learning. Above all, it is a result of the situational ethics of today's accountability hawks. The end, of helping poor children, is used to justify disgusting means -- the intimidation of adults to the point where some break under the pressure. When data-driven accountability is used to intimidate adults, the poison flows down on the kids. This week's report on cheating will not be the last we hear of the unintended effects of the nation's bubble-in test craze.
Follow John Thompson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/drjohnthompson
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There are plenty of data driven instruction schools that don't cheat and get awesome results. http://www.uncommonschools.org/usi/ourResults/
Don't blame it on the system.
More importantly, the ever narrowing focus of curriculum and the entire philosophy behind testing is tantamount to the "banking" system of pedagogy which has the sole purpose of perpetuating exploitation and exacerbating class related issues in a society that already has some of the starkest class contours in the world.
If the education system isn’t designed to consistently produce the results that it is producing then we wouldn’t be getting the results we are getting! Yet again and again the focus of the reformer is on the teacher, not the system itself
http://www.forprogressnotgrowth.com/2011/03/11/the-worker-is-not-the-problem/
http://www.forprogressnotgrowth.com/2010/12/18/the-accountability-problem/
http://www.forprogressnotgrowth.com/2010/11/30/a-matter-of-results/
http://www.forprogressnotgrowth.com/2011/03/07/want-to-improve-quality-listen-up/
I'd dig ditches again in this 110 degree heat before I'd teach to the test.
If that's the case, then everything that's happening now makes sense -- unless of course, you actually care about children.
What is more immoral cheating on standardized tests or setting unrealistic goals and punishing people that don’t reach those goals? What I find immoral is high 6 figure salaries going to people with little or no experience as an educator running a school, a district or a department of education. What I find immoral are politicians like the mayors in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles basing their education philosophy on the dictates of the Billionaire Boys club and not the needs of their constituents. What I find immoral is undermining democratic processes involved with schools by ending local control. The cheaters in Atlanta will not win a profile in courage merit badge, but operating in the environment of the immorality of the ruling elite in this country they are more victims than scoundrels.
Instead, we see more of the same and louder than ever.
If all children came to school on a level playing field, then accountability testing would make perfect sense. The sad reality is that there are huge differences in the level of academic performance between high poverty inner-city schools and suburban schools in affluent neighborhoods.
NCLB does not take into account the problems with teaching at inner-city schools where the average student is several years academically deficient. Since NCLB measures grade level performance rather than looking at incremental improvement, students who are severely below grade level can negatively impact test scores.
Although what the teachers in Atlanta did was reprehensible, the system to some extent drove them to do this. When you have students with severe academic shortcomings and when the annual standardized test focuses on passing a grade level test instead of looking at how much a given student has improved over a given year, and when teacher jobs are on the line for failure to meet AYP, desperate circumstances can result in desperate actions.
DDI when implemented properly does work in the inner-city. There are many 90/90/90 schools where 90% of students are minorities. 90% are free lunch. 90% met city or state academic standards.
http://wwwÂ.uncommonsÂchools.orgÂ/usi/ourReÂsults/
I am a special education teacher. I do not cheat, but my students don't make AYP, either. In another state, I could be dismissed.
I also read research which has determined that teacher quality is responsible for 13-17% of achievement. The remainder (85%) is determined by powerful outside factors.
I know from experience and from reading research that our students arrive in Kindergarten with as much as a 5 year achievement gap between the highest and the lowest. I also know that the factors that created it perpetuate, that teachers can teach as hard as they can for the relatively few hours per year they have students and barely dent this gap. Teachers can teach to a test, however.
When you create high stakes testing based upon the illusion of research and demand that teachers produce results that are not possible, and in some cases attach the retaining of their jobs that support their families to a fraudulent premise, you create a desperate situation.
I understand why this happens and it will continue to happen because what we are doing to our teachers and students is wrong and probably immoral. I don'treserve a place in Hell for teachers who cheat under circumstances that are desperate.
Under a tyrant like Hitler (an exaggeration, I know), would you cheat to keep your Jewish friends and neighbors alive? I would.
Not an exaggeration, DeweyJ. That is a wonderfully apropos comparison!
Fanned & faved!
Do the impossibleÂ. If you don't, we will fire you - both teachers and administraÂtors. No excuses. We KNOW that it can be done and if you can't do it, we will find somebody who says they can.
So they cheat. If they didn't cheat, they would be fired immediatelÂy for not meeting objectivesÂ. If they cheat, they may be fired for cheating, but that could be many years from now.
When you hold an organizatiÂon to impossible objectives and rigorously punish for failure, you destroy the organizatiÂon.
Failure. Epic Failure - from on high.
And they are still trying to blame the grunts who were told to do the impossible.
Bingo!
Fanned and faved.