In what's likely the biggest cheating scandal in US history.

[Rickster71]

http://news.yahoo.com/americas-biggest-teacher-principal-cheating-scandal-unfolds-atlanta-213734183.html

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal and his office released a report from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that names 178 teachers and principals – 82 of whom confessed – in what's likely the biggest cheating scandal in US history.
At least 178 teachers and principals in Atlanta Public Schools cheated to raise student scores on high-stakes standardized tests, according to a report from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0705/America-s-biggest-teacher-and-principal-cheating-scandal-unfolds-in-Atlanta
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2011/07/06/2011-07-06_atlanta_superintendent_knew_about_cheating_on_standardized_tests.html?r=news/national

I remember cheating on standardized tests being exposed in the book Freakonomics, Originally published in the U.S. in 2005.

 

[pzaur]

Not surprised. Those tests are so poorly written anyways. All they try to do is trick the test taker and actually measure whether or not they know the skill being tested.

-pat

 

[markw]

We had better step up our game, and fast.

Already China and India are producing more scientific brains than out school system. As if social promotion isn't enough, if we now have to stoop to falsifying records to "appear" to the authorities and/or the public that we really arent as bad off as we think, we're totally screwed.

Do they have a teachers union down there?

 

[gmichael]

Wow. I remember when teachers would stop kids from cheating. Now they help them.
It's a sad state of affairs we are in.

 

[Chu Gai]

Teacher cheating and how it can be discovered even when the tests are destroyed was covered in the book, Freakonomics, which along with it's successor, I found to be engrossing. They talk about the Atlanta scandal here. At the bottom of the article you'll find a link to the paper, a good read.

 

[lsiberian]

Already China and India are producing more scientific brains than out school system. As if social promotion isn't enough, if we now have to stoop to falsifying records to "appear" to the authorities and/or the public that we really arent as bad off as we think, we're totally screwed.

Do they have a teachers union down there?

They have a lot more people too. But all the Indians are coming here and innovating here. But no fear there are plenty of great math and science people from the US. What we really lack is good solid working class education. We need to produce goods again.

 

[markw]

We need to produce goods again.

This is the biggie. When I graduated school, anyone willing to get up in the morning, show up for work, have reasonable intelligence, and follow orders could make a living wage by making Ford and Chevy cars, televisions, electrical instruments, in chemical plants, numerous tool and die shops, and a multitude of other areas that didn't demand a masters degree or better. ...just common sense and a good work ethic
.
(these come to mind because they all existed within a few miles of where I grew up)

All those are now overseas where they pay $.50/day with no benefits and they dump the detritus in the local water supply and sky unfettered.

So, where that "working class education" used to assure a job and a place to work, nowadays it assures nothing.

The trades are all well and good but, in a bad economy, they are not as much in demand. We need growth in new "working class" jobs and that doesn't seem to be forthcoming. So we hide our sorrow by buying chap foreign made goods at K-mart. Heck, this hobby of ours keeps several foreigh economies sailing the sea of prosperity.

No, our future is in engineering and paper shuffling, not manufacturing. If we have such a good crop of math and science people, why are they bringing them from overseas en masse, or is that another problem beyond the scope of this forum?

 

[STRONGBADF1]

If a student is motivated they will do very well in the US. No mater what field they study in. Now the unmotivated student...

 

[Adam]

This reminds me of Twister Gate 2009, likely the biggest color-fixing scandal in AH history.

 

[pzaur]

Not surprised. Those tests are so poorly written anyways. All they try to do is attempt to trick the test taker and not test the skill being tested.

-pat

Just realized my post didn't make a whole lot of sense. I dropped a few words in my haste. It's corrected here...

A quick comment on China/Japan/the whole Asian area thingy, they aren't necessarily producing more well educated students than the U.S.. How many of these countries we look at as being successful track the types school a child can attend at an early age based on "scores?"

When scores are being compared (apples to oranges, btw) between countries, many of the countries we are compared to do not include all students possible at a particular grade level. Many are shipped off to who-knows-where which keeps the overall score inflated.

The U.S. is producing excellent students. We're failing to identify them and foster the culture of success. What's important to us, as a culture? Sports. Enough said.

Do not twist this to mean our education system is awesome/perfect. Obviously, we have issues and I'm trivializing a lot. But, comparing one country to another is fundamentally flawed. It's as flawed as the way many states label passing/failing/excelling schools and excellent teachers by comparing test scores for one class to the previous class in a school. God help the teacher who gets a class entering the 4th grade reading at a 7th grade level one year and the next gets a class entering 4th reading at the 3rd grade level. You can be guaranteed those scores are going to drop on a standardized assessment. I can read it now, "Bad teacher identified by overall class score dropping 20 percentage points."

-pat

(Yes, I do teach. Yes, I've seen the tests. Yes, they are very poorly written. Yes, I know of one teacher, personally, who was fired for cheating in all my years of service. That individual was able to "retire" from his position and keep his retirement. Wow.)

 

[pzaur]

If a student is motivated they will do very well in the US. No mater what field they study in. Now the unmotivated student...

...is most likely just as unmotivated to do their work at home, unfortunately...

-pat

 

[Rickster71]

Many are shipped off to who-knows-where which keeps the overall score inflated.

Thanks for the insight Pat.

I find your above quote most interesting and would like to respond to it:

I think that's why some other countries do better than the U.S.. They don't force a square peg into a round hole by trying to educate the 'un-teachable' or what we call the 'unmotivated' student. They administer IQ tests and using that info realize that people don't have the same mental abilities. Just as we all vary in our physical abilities.......all are not destined for the Big Leagues.
They understand that society needs ditch diggers as well as doctors.

 

[STRONGBADF1]

...is most likely just as unmotivated to do their work at home, unfortunately...

-pat

Very true.

Just to clarify, I was speaking of the student and it's parents, not schools and teachers. I believe that a good educator can motivate a couple of students here and there and a great one maybe a few more, but true motivation comes more often than not from the home.

 

[Rickster71]

Teacher cheating and how it can be discovered even when the tests are destroyed was covered in the book, Freakonomics, which along with it's successor, I found to be engrossing. They talk about the Atlanta scandal here. At the bottom of the article you'll find a link to the paper, a good read.

That was a great book, I've read it twice.
It sums it up well, everyone cheats and it's usually for personal & financial gain.

An excerpt from the book chapter 1:

For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor. Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less. So it isn’t just the boldface names—inside-trading CEOs and pill-popping ballplayers and perk-abusing politicians—who cheat. It is the waitress who pockets her tips instead of pooling them. It is the Wal-Mart payroll manager who goes into the computer and shaves his employees’ hours to make his own performance look better. It is the third grader who, worried about not making it to the fourth grade, copies test answers from the kid sitting next to him.

Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive.
Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly.
It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number for each child. Suddenly, seven million children—children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms—vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.

The incentive for those cheating taxpayers was quite clear. The same for the waitress, the payroll manager, and the third grader. But what about that third grader’s teacher? Might she have an incentive to cheat? And if so, how would she do it?

 

[stratman]

Cheating has become the norm .....for every facet of industry. government, scholastic...if they they need to "fudge" figures....oh well......where does it stop?

Figures don't lie but liers figure.

 

[krzywica]

J
A quick comment on China/Japan/the whole Asian area thingy, they aren't necessarily producing more well educated students than the U.S.. How many of these countries we look at as being successful track the types school a child can attend at an early age based on "scores?"

When scores are being compared (apples to oranges, btw) between countries, many of the countries we are compared to do not include all students possible at a particular grade level. Many are shipped off to who-knows-where which keeps the overall score inflated.

Thats an excellent point Pat, I know Japan has been doing this for a long time in just about every aspect of government. I remember watching Freakonomics, and they did a portion about the Japanese Police and how they don't actually investigate crimes that they know they cannot solve, thus keeping their conviction rates extremely high and their unsolved cases percentage very low.

 

[pzaur]

Thanks for the insight Pat.

I find your above quote most interesting and would like to respond to it:

I think that's why some other countries do better than the U.S.. They don't force a square peg into a round hole by trying to educate the 'un-teachable' or what we call the 'unmotivated' student. They administer IQ tests and using that info realize that people don't have the same mental abilities. Just as we all vary in our physical abilities.......all are not destined for the Big Leagues.
They understand that society needs ditch diggers as well as doctors.

But an IQ test itself is flawed. There are many people in society who score extremely low on IQ tests but are still able to thrive and add greatly to society.

The biggest difference between our society and many others is freedom to choose. The freedom to choose what to study, where to study, what to do in life. No one else is deciding for me before I truly know who/what I am.

There is no harm in opening the doors for the unteachable/unmotivated. The problem lies when the teachable and motivated are shoved through the wrong door because they "scored too low" on a test. My brother is a very intelligent person and a horrible test taker. I consider myself intelligent, but not to his level and I take tests like a pro. Guess who scores better?

-pat

 

[pzaur]

Very true.

Just to clarify, I was speaking of the student and it's parents, not schools and teachers. I believe that a good educator can motivate a couple of students here and there and a great one maybe a few more, but true motivation comes more often than not from the home.

I totally got that at the first read. I just had to finish the statement!

-pat

 

[Rickster71]

(Yes, I do teach. Yes, I've seen the tests. Yes, they are very poorly written. Yes, I know of one teacher, personally, who was fired for cheating in all my years of service. That individual was able to "retire" from his position and keep his retirement. Wow.)

Pat, I didn't know you were a teacher, for some reason I thought you were in Computers or I.T. and good beer.

But an IQ test itself is flawed. There are many people in society who score extremely low on IQ tests but are still able to thrive and add greatly to society.

The biggest difference between our society and many others is freedom to choose. The freedom to choose what to study, where to study, what to do in life. No one else is deciding for me before I truly know who/what I am.

There is no harm in opening the doors for the unteachable/unmotivated. The problem lies when the teachable and motivated are shoved through the wrong door because they "scored too low" on a test. My brother is a very intelligent person and a horrible test taker. I consider myself intelligent, but not to his level and I take tests like a pro. Guess who scores better?
-pat

I used the words IQ Test in a broad sense, more along the lines of aptitude testing and not IQ tests alone.

I'm sure there will always be exceptions.
Just in case the overall point got missed... it seems countries that rank globally better than the U.S. in math and science (and most do) seem to steer kids to what they have an aptitude for. Rather than trying to send all to college.
I.Q. tests not withstanding, I think a teacher knows the kids that belong in college and the one's that don't, somewhere between the 8th and 10th grade. IMHO

 

[pzaur]

Pat, I didn't know you were a teacher, for some reason I thought you were in Computers or I.T. and good beer.

Not yet. I'm working my way there. I actually have a second certification test (Comptia A+ 220-702) tomorrow. I already passed the first test.
After that, it's onto the Network+ and possibly Security+ certifications.

...I think a teacher knows the kids that belong in college and the one's that don't, somewhere between the 8th and 10th grade. IMHO

Usually...I am surprised every year by what I see past students accomplish. Some of them completely blow away my perceptions of what they were in 6th grade. The problem with many of the other countries is they start "guiding" students earlier than 8th/10th grades.

-pat