Showing posts with label test cheating. Show all posts
Showing posts with label test cheating. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Thirteen Ohio School Districts "Scrubbing" Low Scoring Students
From CantonRep.com:
Four more Ohio districts, including Canton City Schools, removed poor-performing students from their rolls, state Auditor David Yost said Monday in the final step of his investigation into a practice whereby schools attempted to improve performance ratings.
More than 70 schools or districts also had attendance reporting errors, though these didn’t appear to be purposeful, Yost said.
The four districts bring to nine the number that Yost has identified in his investigation of the data withdrawal practice known as “scrubbing.”
The districts Yost identified Monday are Canton and Cincinnati city schools, Winton Woods city schools in Hamilton County and Northridge Local schools in Montgomery County.
Yost’s top recommendation Monday was requiring the state to peg school funding on yearlong attendance figures to encourage attendance through the entire year. Now, attendance figures are based on a count in October.
“Importantly, schools that break enrollment under such a system would suffer a loss of funding as a result,” Yost’s report said.
Yost also said the state should require independent oversight of districts’ data reporting instead of the current honor system, and the state should also independently monitor transfers by at-risk students.
Yost previously said Campbell, Cleveland, Columbus, Marion and Toledo city schools improperly removed students. . . .
I have seen no better example than this of Campbell's Law:
"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
Monday, August 22, 2011
Will the Oligarchs' Venomous Poster Girl Be Charged with Fraud?
WASHINGTON — Why won’t Michelle Rhee talk to USA Today?Read on here.
Ms. Rhee, the chancellor of the Washington public schools from 2007 to 2010, is the national symbol of the data-driven, take-no-prisoners education reform movement.
It’s hard to find a media outlet, big or small, that she hasn’t talked to. She’s been interviewed by Katie Couric, Tom Brokaw and Oprah Winfrey. She’s been featured on a Time magazine cover holding a broom (to sweep away bad teachers). She was one of the stars of the documentary “Waiting for Superman.”
These days, as director of an advocacy group she founded, StudentsFirst, she crisscrosses the country pushing her education politics: she’s for vouchers and charter schools, against tenure, for teachers, but against their unions.
Always, she preens for the cameras. Early in her chancellorship, she was trailed for a story by the education correspondent of “PBS NewsHour,” John Merrow.
At one point, Ms. Rhee asked if his crew wanted to watch her fire a principal. “We were totally stunned,” Mr. Merrow said.
She let them set up the camera behind the principal and videotape the entire firing. “The principal seemed dazed,” said Mr. Merrow. “I’ve been reporting 35 years and never seen anything like it.”
And yet, as voracious as she is for the media spotlight, Ms. Rhee will not talk to USA Today.
At the end of March, three of the paper’s reporters — Marisol Bello, Jack Gillum and Greg Toppo — broke a story about the high rate of erasures and suspiciously high test-score gains at 41 Washington schools while Ms. Rhee was chancellor.
At some schools, they found the odds that so many answers had been changed from wrong to right randomly were 1 in 100 billion. In a fourth-grade class at Stanton Elementary, 97 percent of the erasures were from wrong to right. Districtwide, the average number of erasures for seventh graders was fewer than one per child, but for a seventh-grade class at Noyes Elementary, it was 12.7 per student. At Noyes Elementary in 2008, 84 percent of fourth graders were proficient in math, up from 22 percent in 2007.. . . .
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
National Lessons to be Learned from Studying Atlanta Cheating Scandal
From Bob Schaeffer, posted at ARN:
Two excellent news stories put the Atlanta scandal in a national context and began examining the root causes of cheating.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/05/atlanta-public-schools-cheating_n_890526.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0705/America-s-biggest-teacher-and-principal-cheating-scandal-unfolds-in-Atlantahttp://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0705/America-s-biggest-teacher-and-principal-cheating-scandal-unfolds-in-Atlanta
The full Georgia Office of Special Investigators' report was just posted online -- no time to read its 400+ pages, let alone digest them, but a quick scan finds these superb quotations (it is informative to substitute the words "Bush and Obama administrations" and "Arne Duncan" in appropriate places to see the national implications of this story).
WHY CHEATING OCCURREDBob Schaeffer, Public Education Director
Three primary conditions led to widespread cheating on the 2009 CRCT"
- The targets set by the district were often unreasonable, especially given their cumulative effect over the years. Additionally, the administration put unreasonable pressure on teaches and principals to achieve targets;
- A culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation spread throughout the district; and,
- Dr Hall and her administration emphasized test results and public praise to the exclusion of integrity and ethics."
http://www.ajc.com/news/volume-3volume-3-conclusions-why-1000781.html p. 350
and
"What has become clear through our investigation is that ultimately, the data and meeting 'targets' by whatever means necessary, became more important than true academic progress" (p. 356).
FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing
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