Apparently the miraculous improvements in Atlanta Public Schools can be explained by cheating. There are many reasons this is disturbing. One is that it undermines the possibility that Americans might be coming closer to the belief that all children can learn. This trend was something that occurred to me when I finally watched Waiting for Superman. While many claims in the film were left unsubstantiated, including the statement that schools of the 1950s were doing a great job but lost their way in the 1970s. It is convenient imagery but not the truth. Regardless, what I most appreciated was that this film makes it much harder for mainstream citizens to hold onto the belief that inner city parents don’t care about their children's education. The other myth eroded by this film was that it is impossible to overcome the burden of poverty when it comes to educating a child. That these entrenched falsehoods are slightly undone by this film was my reason for hope. Perhaps the public would change its perspective about the value of educating all children. That the Atlanta Public Schools were a success was another piece of evidence -- until the curtain was pulled back and cheating was discovered.
By examining student answer sheets, officials can identify unusual response patterns. One metric they use is WTR: the number of erasures changing a Wrong answer to the Right choice. The first indication that cheating might be taking place was when some schools in Atlanta had an average of 14 WTRs on a 40 question multiple choice test. A startling statistic but circumstantial — except that after an investigation of schools with high WTRs in 2009 showed a dramatic drop in erasures for 2010. Sadly, those were accompanied by plummeting scores in some schools. A subsequent investigation (think: "mixed methods") involved interviews of hundreds of people. Many, many individuals confessed to cheating. Sometimes a teacher would tell individual students to change their answers. In certain schools, the principal made it clear that changing student responses was a desirable strategy. There were also reports of “changing parties” in which groups of adults systematically corrected mistakes.
As expected, many see this as evidence that standardized tests are inherently evil and the pressure to raise scores provoke such behaviors. If this is true then the solution would be to simply stop using standardized tests. Somehow I can’t believe that this is sufficient. After all, at some level adults were aware that their dishonest actions were harmful to children. Many who would have received educational intervention services because of low performance were not identified. And yet they and their parents were never alerted to their academic struggles. What puzzles and intrigues me is more than how widespread the problem is but rather that it is proving to be systemic. Evidence is mounting that coercion and intimidation trickled all the way down from the then-superintendent's office and to individual classrooms throughout Atlanta.
A common refrain about reform is the difficulties of making change systemic. The Atlanta situation proves otherwise albeit in an insidious way. Rather than praise the superintendent for influencing an amazing number of people to do things they might not have otherwise done, one wonders whether there is any hope for a similar transformation that is more honorable. Could we realistically imagine energy being invested throughout a large school system that would produce genuine learning gains rather than artificially inflated scores? Or is this an example where a simple solution took hold and spread whereas the more honest approach is so fraught with difficulties that it is naive to expect anything different? I would like to believe that there are leadership lessons to be learned from Atlanta that that would resonate across a school system but by drawing upon the goodness in educators and parents rather than draw out the scheming and self-interested aspects of far too many people.
By examining student answer sheets, officials can identify unusual response patterns. One metric they use is WTR: the number of erasures changing a Wrong answer to the Right choice. The first indication that cheating might be taking place was when some schools in Atlanta had an average of 14 WTRs on a 40 question multiple choice test. A startling statistic but circumstantial — except that after an investigation of schools with high WTRs in 2009 showed a dramatic drop in erasures for 2010. Sadly, those were accompanied by plummeting scores in some schools. A subsequent investigation (think: "mixed methods") involved interviews of hundreds of people. Many, many individuals confessed to cheating. Sometimes a teacher would tell individual students to change their answers. In certain schools, the principal made it clear that changing student responses was a desirable strategy. There were also reports of “changing parties” in which groups of adults systematically corrected mistakes.As expected, many see this as evidence that standardized tests are inherently evil and the pressure to raise scores provoke such behaviors. If this is true then the solution would be to simply stop using standardized tests. Somehow I can’t believe that this is sufficient. After all, at some level adults were aware that their dishonest actions were harmful to children. Many who would have received educational intervention services because of low performance were not identified. And yet they and their parents were never alerted to their academic struggles. What puzzles and intrigues me is more than how widespread the problem is but rather that it is proving to be systemic. Evidence is mounting that coercion and intimidation trickled all the way down from the then-superintendent's office and to individual classrooms throughout Atlanta.
A common refrain about reform is the difficulties of making change systemic. The Atlanta situation proves otherwise albeit in an insidious way. Rather than praise the superintendent for influencing an amazing number of people to do things they might not have otherwise done, one wonders whether there is any hope for a similar transformation that is more honorable. Could we realistically imagine energy being invested throughout a large school system that would produce genuine learning gains rather than artificially inflated scores? Or is this an example where a simple solution took hold and spread whereas the more honest approach is so fraught with difficulties that it is naive to expect anything different? I would like to believe that there are leadership lessons to be learned from Atlanta that that would resonate across a school system but by drawing upon the goodness in educators and parents rather than draw out the scheming and self-interested aspects of far too many people.
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2011/07/22/opinion/22letters-art.html
2011/07/22/opinion/22letters-art.html
