Posted on 06/10/2010 1:12:32 PM PDT by reaganaut1
The staff of Normandy Crossing Elementary School outside Houston eagerly awaited the results of state achievement tests this spring. For the principal and assistant principal, high scores could buoy their careers at a time when success is increasingly measured by such tests. For fifth-grade math and science teachers, the rewards were more tangible: a bonus of $2,850.
But when the results came back, some seemed too good to be true. Indeed, after an investigation by the Galena Park Independent School District, the principal, assistant principal and three teachers resigned May 24 in a scandal over test tampering.
The district said the educators had distributed a detailed study guide after stealing a look at the state science test by “tubing” it — squeezing a test booklet, without breaking its paper seal, to form an open tube so that questions inside could be seen and used in the guide. The district invalidated students’ scores.
Of all the forms of academic cheating, none may be as startling as when educators tamper with children’s standardized tests. But investigations in Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, Virginia and elsewhere this year have pointed to cheating by educators. Experts say the phenomenon is increasing as the stakes over standardized testing ratchet higher — including, most recently, taking student progress on tests into consideration in teachers’ performance reviews.
Colorado passed a sweeping law last month making teachers’ tenure dependent on test results, and nearly a dozen other states have introduced plans to evaluate teachers partly on scores. Many school districts already link teachers’ bonuses to student improvement on state assessments. Houston decided this year to use the data to identify experienced teachers for dismissal, and New York City will use it to make tenure decisions on novice teachers.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Conservatives will rightly assert that teachers unions cause schools to be more expensive than they need to be, but I wonder how much they hurt academic achievement. I live in an affluent suburb of Boston where the MCAS scores are very good -- and the MCAS is one of the toughest state NCLB tests. Our schools are unionized, but they work OK for a population that is mostly affluent and white or Asian.
Principals should have to verify under threat of prosecution the vailidity of their student’s test scores, much like the CEO now needs to sign off on his company’s financial’s. If we charge CPAs with accuracy obligations and hodl them legally accountable, we should also hold teachers to the same.
I was initially opposed, but I think it's been a force for good.
if Rats are cheatin, they ain’t tryin...
“2,000 grades raised at Chicago Public Schools’ Hyde Park Academy”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2468036/posts
“Educators feel that their schools’ reputation, their livelihoods, their psychic meaning in life is at stake,” said Robert Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest, a nonprofit group critical of standardized testing. “That ends up pushing more and more of them over the line.”
TRANSLATION: It’s just unfair to demand that teachers actually PERFORM!!! Why, the poor, distraught educators are simply FORCED into criminal behavior...you know, by BUSH!!!!
Why do elementary school teachers need or deserve tenure, anyway?
Our urban areas are rotting at the core and spreading like a cancer.
This article repeats again and again that these teachers and principals were "under pressure" to improve grades.
One senses that the Times wishes to partially exonerate the wrongdoers for what they did, implicitly suggesting its partly the fault of programs like NCLB.
As a society we need to get back to the consensus that people are expected to be responsible for their own actions. All the more so if they wish to hold positions of responsibility.
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