Disadvantaged Children Take Another Educational Hit

[kangofu]

Ex-Schools Chief in Atlanta Is Indicted in Testing Scandal
Source - NYTimes
By MICHAEL WINERIP, Kim Severson and Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta.
Published: March 29, 2013During his 35 years as a Georgia state investigator, Richard Hyde has persuaded all sorts of criminals - corrupt judges, drug dealers, money launderers, racketeers

Comments

[xo_bumblebee]

It is not just an Atlanta problem. Cheating has grown at school districts around the country as standardized testing has become a primary means of evaluating teachers, principals and schools. In El Paso, a superintendent went to prison recently after removing low-performing children from classes to improve the district’s test scores. In Ohio, state officials are investigating whether several urban districts intentionally listed low-performing students as having withdrawn even though they were still in school.

As a teacher myself, the problem I see is that testing is so high stakes, that these people felt they had no other choice. That does NOT make it right or OK, but if merit pay is going to be based on test scores, then there's going to be corrupt teachers who cheat for the extra paycheck.

[thesilverymoon]

Agreed. This teaching to the test/rewards based testing puts everyone at a disadvantage. Standardized testing in general is stupid, but to put such high stakes on it is straight up awful.

[xo_bumblebee]

It's an unfair system because like it or not, suburban schools almost always perform better than urban ones. Where I grew up (a suburb of Cleveland), most of my peers had parents who earned at least 6 figures and held college degrees. Therefore, 99% of my graduating went on to college and graduated. This is because we all came from families who valued education, so my peers and I performed well because it was expected of us. In many (not all) cases, students in urban schools come from low socio-economic status families--and while families may try to raise their kids to value education, the system works against them. Not only that, if merit pay became a standard, then it would be hard to attract good teachers to urban areas or to fields like special ed simply because it would be that much harder to earn bonuses (unless they cheat...ugh). I'm currently a special ed teacher in a rural district, and even without the pressure the Atlanta people faced, I'm leaving the field next year to switch to regular (non-special ed) teaching just

[littlelauren86]

I agree. and I wish you luck! Your job sounds intense.

[romp]

The system is broken, as planned. We'll be offered a rescue of privatization soon.

[tsu_]

think it already started with for-profit universities.

[littlelauren86]

Sounds about right. I haven't even thought about it that way.

[romp]

I watched it happen for years in the US but didn't seen the pattern until I noticed it in Canada. It's how gov't services like ferries systems have been privatized. I noticed too that there are businesses offering art classes to parents who can afford them not that music and art are often cut in schools.

The right has made a lot of headway in the last several generations convincing people that profit is a requirement so there's no place for public services.

[ladypolitik]

Ugh. I teach after-school tutorials that prep students for the annual literacy standardized test in Ontario (Canada), with the test occurring on the 11th, so this is a comforting reminder of what BS the process is. Our tests are not used to determine teacher salary, but the results are otherwise appropriated for politicized means, such as school rankings put out by libertarian-leaning think tanks and other lobby groups that sport epic hard-ons for agendas that revolve around privatizing education/cutting public school funding. Since our salaries arent determined by the nonsense, I hope Ontario teachers are not feeling desperate to pull such stunts over it.

[romp]

Yeah, I've been disappointed to see Canada doing this lock-step with the US.

[kishmet]

blergh. It's such a broken system everywhere that I hate to see this pursued without going to the root cause of the problem. Very few people outside Georgia will even hear about this/care or mentally connect it to the fact that the US educational system basically asks for these types of abuses

or the fact that linking test scores positively with funding is FUCKING STUPID ugh

[recorded]

My HS didn't have to have the teachers cheat for us. The students learned to cheat to get by in life :) Ah, high school education.