Posted on 03/25/2012 5:58:33 AM PDT by Scoutmaster
Suspicious test scores in roughly 200 school districts resemble those that entangled Atlanta in the biggest cheating scandal in American history, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.
The newspaper analyzed test results for 69,000 public schools and found high concentrations of suspect math or reading scores in school systems from coast to coast. The findings represent an unprecedented examination of the integrity of school testing.
The analysis doesn’t prove cheating. But it reveals that test scores in hundreds of cities followed a pattern that, in Atlanta, indicated cheating in multiple schools.
A tainted and largely unpoliced universe of untrustworthy test results underlies bold changes in education policy, the findings show. The tougher teacher evaluations many states are rolling out, for instance, place more weight than ever on tests.
Perhaps more important, the analysis suggests a broad betrayal of schoolchildren across the nation. As Atlanta learned after cheating was uncovered in half its elementary and middle schools last year, falsified test results deny struggling students access to extra help to which they are entitled, and erode confidence in a vital public institution.
“These findings are concerning,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an emailed statement after being briefed on the AJC’s analysis.
[Article continues]
(Excerpt) Read more at ajc.com ...
You should first note that the articles were not exculpatory for either Atlanta or Georgia. As the AJC noted, "[a]mong the nation’s largest school districts, [Georgia's] level of sustained questionable scores was unmatched."
Before reading the articles, you should perhaps first read the AJC's explanation of its methodology: Cheating our children: The AJC’s methodology behind suspicious school test score. Remember that the using a minimum probability that a positive change in testing scores could have happened by chance only 1 out of 20 times is a minimum. In the case of the Atlanta schools, some schools had a large percentage of classrooms experiencing wrong-to-right erasures at up to 50 standard deviations from the norm, when seven standard deviations were likely to occur randomly fewer than one out of 350 billion times. Flagging an event at likely to occur randomly no more likely than one out of 20 times tells us where the line was drawn; it doesn't tell us how far over the probability line the event actually went.
Other stories from the investigation:
Cheating our children: List of cities that show high probability of cheating in schools
Map of suspicious test scores nationwide
Cheating our children: Find your school district's test-score shifts
Cheating our children: The story behind the story
That's not all of the articles, but it's enough to get you started and the rest are linked from most of those articles. I'm just beginning to digest it myself, but wanted to share it now.
It appears that a substantial number of public school teachers and administrators nationwide were willing to change test scores under the pressure of threatened funding cuts.
The “public school” is BY FAR, the largest, most expensive, most subversive, and most destructive entitlement program in the country.
The “public school” is better understood as the “government school collective”.
It is silly to imagine that you can fix the public schools, because the very concept itself is communist.
Any child that comes out of the government school collective with their moral compass and common sense intact does so in spite of the government school indoctrination, not because of it.
If you want to win the culture war, have lots of children (see my tagline) and homeschool them or form your own school cooperative with your church or synagogue and like-minded friends and relatives.
Nobody loves your children more than you do.
Nobody can teach your children like you can.
Your children would love nothing better than to be taught by you, if you start doing so before they are corrupted by the government school collective.
It is hypocritical for you to submit your children to an authority with whom you fundamentally disagree. And your children will know it.
If you have children, make whatever sacrifices you must to get them out of the public schools.
DO NOT FEED THE BEAST!
Especially not with your own children.
What else would anyone expect when contempt for truth becomes a cultural foundation? The fundamental evil that is the Left—the embodiment of decadence—is mendacity. It has pervaded our nation, our world, our civilization. Its corrupting effects are devastating.
I haven't draw any conclusion about them. You'll find them across the U.S.
Obama claims he wants hope and change. My hope is that someday minorities will come to understand what hypocritical liberals are doing to them. For three generations they herd them into dysfunctional urban public schools keeping them ignorant, docile and easily manipulated. They are denied vouchers and choice which would of course empower them. Meanwhile the hypocritical liberals like Obama and Rahm Emmanuel “choose” to send their kids to good private schools. The liberals fund planned parenthood clinics in minority neighborhoods and actually kill them to keep their numbers down. They hire frontmen like Sharpton and Jackson to keep them in line. If 20 to 30% finally realize what the hypocritical liberals are doing , then there will be real change.
If you can not or do not homeschool, you can still educate your children. In some ways, with parental coaching if they survive the public school corrosion intact and clear-thinking, they will be resilient to fighting the liberal societal scum throughout their lives.
Great article. I notice many districts and states have their heads in the sand and try and explain away impossible results or ignore them.
There needs to be mass firings,removal of benefits. Everything on the table. This is after all theft. They are not doing their job but being paid for it. Stealing from the tax payers.
Iffen you don’t like the temperature, you just change the thermometer.
It started on a national level with clinton—remember the redifinition of the word “spin”?
We’ve gone downhhill as a nation from there.
WAAAAY DOWN. Faster, too.
The writers of the article aren’t upset at the cheating, they’re mad that students are tested.
There was a study a few years back. Kids from involved, Evangelical, church-going families who went to public or private school stopped practicing their faith in college at a rate of something over 85%.
Homeschooled kids from the same families? Kept their faith, something like 95% of them.
Maybe those other kids will come back after college. I know some do. But those odds are just terrible. Even if I didn’t think I could educate my daughter better than some ed school grads, or that the government schools are a cesspool, or that I love her quirky little three-year-old personality and the idea of her going and being conformed to everyone else around her didn’t sicken me, those odds mean she’ll enter an institutional school over my dead body. My husband’s dead body. The dead bodies of both our sets of parents and a very large number of aunts and uncles.
Make the sacrifices. It’s worth it. My parents did and I’m more appreciative every day.
> If you can not or do not homeschool
Then get them into a private school, church school, synagogue school, an existing school coop, or start a school coop of your own with like-minded relatives, friends and neighbors.
> There was a study a few years back. Kids from involved,
> Evangelical, church-going families who went to public or
> private school stopped practicing their faith in college at
> a rate of something over 85%.
>
> Homeschooled kids from the same families? Kept their faith,
> something like 95% of them.
If this is true, then alternative schools other than homeschooling don’t have much to offer to the Faithful.
If this is the case, only homeschooling will do.
Remember ...
Nobody can love your children like you.
Nobody knows your children better than you.
Nobody can reach your children like you.
Nobody can teach your children better than you.
But first and foremost, get your children *OUT* of the government school collective!
The “Lake Wobegon” phenomenon: all the children are above average.
It will not be surprising if standardized-test cheating is extremely widespread. The Federal regime requires the schools to show improving results, and yet they are unable to actually produce improved student performance. “What choice do they have” but to cheat?
A substantial proportion of the students simply can’t read and do arithmetic, and once they get past about 4th grade, it’s never fixed. Why can’t they read and do arithmetic? One can offer a lot of sociological theses, but a major reason is that they are simply not taught. But don’t “bash” the teachers: they’re heroes for spending all day with the children the parents would rather die than be around.
It’s like Lake Wobegon Greater School District, where all the children are above average.
The amount of **afterschooling** done by the parents is **never** measured in any government school in this nation! Therefore...ALL testing to determine the effectiveness of the school is BOGUS!!
Conclusion: ALL testing to determine the effectiveness of any government school is completely INVALID without measuring how much learning is due to the school and how much is entirely acquired **IN THE HOME** due to the hard work of the parents and child, and private tutoring!
I've been hammered here on Free Republic for using the word, “all”, so if any poster can prove me wrong, I would welcome the correction. Please provide links.
I conclude, after working with the youth of our church for 30 years, that if an institutionally schooled child can read and do basic arithmetic it is because the parents are doing **tons** of **afterschooling***!!! The parents and child are working just as hard IN THE HOME as my kids did homeschooling. I have never met an exception.
Yes. There are certainly bad teachers out there, but I put most of the blame on the students and their families. The Buffalo teachers' union [I'm no fan] is fighting the state now to exclude chronically truant students from teacher evaluations. It only seems right, but the state won't have any of it.
The teachers are being made to take the fall for the bureaucracy's unwillingness to confront the social issues of race and chaotic families.
*shrug*
Everyone has an opinion. However, it is a fact, not an opinion, that a large percentage of schools do not teach phonics and do not teach and require mastery of arithmetic skills. This results in myriads of students who can't read or do basic, much less advanced, math.
Classroom teachers really can't be blamed for this - the curriculum comes from a much higher level (and this is part of the problem, of course), where people like Bill Ayers are "educational theorists."
Please read my post #15.
It could be that government schools teach very little. It could be that 99% of what a child can and will learn is due to the **afterschooling** done by the parents. Sadly, this "afterschooling" has never been measured. It could be that we are spending up to a quarter of million dollars for a child to go to 13 or more years of government schooling and the **real** learning is due to the work done by the parents and child **in the home***!!!
But don’t “bash” the teachers: they’re heroes for spending all day with the children the parents would rather die than be around.
In medicine would it be appropriate to bash well-meaning and hard working quacks? Yes, I think it would.
Teachers are supposed to be "professionals" yet no even one of them can prove that what they do in the classroom is effective. The reason for this is that **afterschooling** and its major contribution to a child's learning has **never** been measured! Yes, these teacher may be working very hard and may be very well-meaning and sincere, but their "treatment" might be completely ineffective and utterly bogus.
Unless afterschoooling and the hard work done by parents and the child **in the home** is measured and taken into account it is impossible to know if any government school is effective at teaching anything at all.
Classroom teachers really can’t be blamed for this -
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Well....Teachers claim to be professionals, then they should act like professionals.
For example, if a hospital demanded that anesthesiologists use defective equipment pr techniques that was known to injure or kill patients, the anesthesiologists would flat out refuse to administer anesthesia and all surgery would come to complete halt.
If teachers know ( or should know) that certain math and reading programs hurt or injure children, if they were professionals, they would flat out **refuse** to use those methods.
That, in and of itself, is a scandal.
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