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Last December, I reported on Harvard University professor Stephan Thernstrom’s essay “Minorities in College – Good News, But …”on the Minding the Campus, a website sponsored by the New York-based Manhattan Institute. He was commenting on the results of the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, saying that the scores “mean that black students aged 17 do not read with any greater facility than whites who are four years younger and still in junior high. …Exactly the same glaring gaps appear in NAEP’s tests of basic mathematics skills.” Thernstrom asked, “If we put a randomly-selected group of 100 eight-graders and another of 100 twelfth-graders in a typical college, would we expect the first group to perform as well as the second?” In other words, is it reasonable to expect a college freshman of any race who has the equivalent of an eight-grade education to compete successfully with those having a 12^th-grade education?
.  Maybe this huge gap in black/white academic achievement was in the paternalist minds of the 6^th U. S, Circuit Court of Appeals justices who recently struck down Michigan’s ban on the use of race and sex as criteria for college admissions. The court said that it burdens minorities and violates the U. S. Constitution. Given the black education disaster, racial preferences in college admissions will become a permanent feature, because given the status quo, blacks as a group will never make it into top colleges based upon academic merit.
.  The situation is worse than we thought. U. S. New & World Report came out with a story titled “Educators Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal,” saying that “for 10 years, hundreds of Atlanta public school teachers and principals changed answers on state test in one of the largest cheating scandals in U. S. history, according to a report released by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal.” The report says that more than three-quarters of the 56 Atlanta schools investigated cheated on the 2009 standardized National Assessment of Educational Progress. Eighty-two teachers have confessed to erasing students’ answers. A total of 178 educators, including 38 principals, many of whom are black, systematically fabricated test scores of struggling black students to cover up academic failure. So far, no Atlanta educator has been criminally charged even though some of the cheating was brazen, such as teachers pointing to correct answers while pointing to correct answers while students were taking the tests and seating low-achieving students next to high-achieving students make cheating easier.
.  Teacher and principal exam cheating is not restricted to Atlanta; it’s widespread. The Detroit Free Press and USA Today released an investigative report that found higher-than-average erasure rates  on tests taken by students at 34 schools in and around Detroit in 2008 and 2009. Overall, their report “found 304 schools where experts say the gains on standardized tests in 2009-10 are so statically improbable, they merit further investigation. Besides Michigan, the other states (where suspected cheating was found) were Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Florida and California.”
..Why is there widespread cheating by America’s educators? According to Diane Ravitch, who is the research professor of education at New York University, it’s not teachers and principals who are to blame; it’s the mandates of the No Child Left Behind law, enacted during the George W. Bush administration. In other words, the devil made them do it.
.  Source: Blame NCLB for education botch, By Walter Williams. The Enquirer 7/24/11 F3

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.  ATLANTA – Teachers spent nights huddled in a back room, erasing wrong answers on students’ test sheets and filling in the correct bubbles. At another school, struggling students were seated next to higher-performing classmates so they could copy answers.
.  Those and other confessions are contained in a new state report that reveals how far some Atlanta public schools went to raise test scores in the nation’s largest-ever cheating scandal. Investigators concluded that nearly half the city’s schools allowed the cheating to go unchecked for as long as a decade, beginning in 2011.
.  Administrators – pressured to maintain high scores under the federal No Child Left Behind law- punished  or fired those who reported anything amiss and created a culture of “fear, intimidation and retaliation,” according to the report released earlier this month, two years after officials noticed a suspicious spike in some scores.
.  The report names 178 teachers and principals, and 82 of those confessed. Tens of thousands of children at the 44 schools, mostly in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, were allowed to advance to higher grades even though they didn’t know the basic concepts.
.  For teachers and their bosses, the stakes were high: Schools that perform poorly and fail to meet certain benchmarks under the federal law can face sharp sanctions. The may be forced to offer extra tutoring, allow parents to transfer children to better schools, or fire teachers and administrators who don’t pass muster.
.  In Georgia, teachers complained to investigators that some students arrived at middle school reading at a first-grade level. But, they said, principals insisted those students had to pass their standardized tests. Teachers were either ordered to cheat or pressured by administrators until they felt they had no choice, authorities said.
.  One principal forced a teacher to crawl under a desk during a faulty meeting because her scores were low. Another told teachers that “Walmart is hiring” and “the door swings both ways.”
.  Another principal told a principal on her first day that the school did whatever was necessary to meet testing benchmarks, even if that meant “breaking the rules.”
.  Educators named in the investigation could face criminal charges ranging from tampering with state documents to lying to investigators. And many could lose their teaching licenses.
.  The fallout from the state report has only begun.
.  So far, at least four of the district’s top administrators and two principals have been removed and put on paid leave. The head of the district’s human resources department resigned after investigators said she destroyed documents and tried to cover up the extent of the cheating.
.  The schools could owe hundreds of dollars in federal funding they received for good test performance – money that would be lost at a time the state’s education budget has already been slashed by millions. Districts are being forced to lay off or furlough teachers and cut programs to make ends meet.

Source: Atlanta schools reel from cheating scandal. By Dorie Turner Associated Press. Published in The Enquirer 7/17/11 A 10

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Standardized testing

Atlanta school exams fudged

State probe finds educators cheated

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
Published in The Enquirer 7/7/11   A4

.   A state probe has found that teachers and principals in dozens of Atlanta public schools doctored student’s exams, the latest scandal involving the high-stakes world of standardized testing in the nation’s school systems.

.   The investigation detailed Wednesday in a report issued by George Gov. Nathan Deal, showed that Atlanta school administrators emphasized test results “to the exclusion of integrity and ethics.” The pressure even prompted one frightened third-grade teacher to tell investigators that “there are ways that APS (Atlanta Public Schools) can get back at you” if teachers don’t go along with cheating.
.   “APS is run like the Mob,” the teacher said, according to the inquiry.
.   The results come as standardized tests generate increased scrutiny.
.   > Last week, Baltimore Public Schools CEO Andres Alonso suggested that falling scores in many city schools could partially be the result of better test security.
.   > USA TODAY last March examined standardized test scores at District of Columbia schools and found 103 public schools with high erasure rates on penciled-in answer sheets. An investigation is underway. USA TODAY found evidence of test tampering in six states besides Georgia and Maryland, including California, Florida and Ohio.
.   > The Dallas Morning News in 2007 found more than 50,000 cases of student cheating on state tests, with 90% of students in some cases showing suspicious answer patterns.
.   The Atlanta probe found a “culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation” that spread district wide over the past decade, prompting dozens of educators to covertly give answers on standardized tests and change wrong answers once kids handed in tests.
.   The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first raised suspicions about rising scores in APS schools nearly three years ago. Former Georgia governor Sonny Perdue, a republican, initiated the current probe last August, finding that the district’s investigation of suspicious erasures in 58 schools was “woefully inadequate.”
.   Student test results play an increasingly important role. At least 10 states require that student scores be the main criteria in teacher evaluations. Some states and districts reward educators for raising scores; a teacher may earn a bonus of as much as $25,000 in Washington, D.C., if student scores climb. Most of the 130 Detroit public schools closed since 2005 were cited for low test scores.