14 ms·

How my school gamed the stats

148 points by optimalsolver 6y ago

sebmellen 6y ago
Eh, I commiserate with the author, and experienced some of the same in American public school. However, this part of the article really stood out to me, as I couldn't imagine it happening in any of my school environments (which were not optimal by any means): > There were many ways in which the school and teachers gamed the system to boost their measured performance. One way was to do exams for students. I was on a bottom set language class for French. After two years I literally couldn’t speak a single sentence in french and maybe knew 20 words in total. I still passed my exams. How? We did the tests in class. Often the teacher would go through them with us. Literally giving us the test and then going through each question on the whiteboard and telling us what to write. A different year and a different teacher, this time the teacher would sit next to us and write the answers down. Could this behavior by teachers really be widespread??? I think this is just an anomaly of the author's school. Any of my teachers would've been wary of behaving like this. Kids don't keep such things quiet! I'm sure this behavior would be quickly reprimanded by administrators or other teachers in my past schools.
- jimbob45 6y ago
  In my experience, this kind of thing happened more in lower-tier classes than upper-tier ones. Lower-quality teachers might have less compunction over cheating than their upper-quality counterparts and often get the non-AP/IB classes due to their qualifications.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    Perhaps, though I don't think that's the case in this article: > ... I was mostly in top ability streamed classes, meaning my classroom experience was likely far better than average.
    - syrrim 6y ago
      The french classes, where the exam cheating took place, were specifically described as lower tier.
- retsibsi 6y ago
  If the people further up the chain have similar incentives (higher scores = we've all done a great job), and most students are either benefiting from the cheating or being harmed by it in only a fairly minor indirect way, it's plausible to me that nobody would want to stick their neck out and make enough of a fuss to change things. I've never seen anything this egregious, but in my own experience people are usually willing to go along with systems that don't make sense (according to their ostensible purpose) and aren't very fair, if that's what everyone else is doing and there's no personal gain to be had by rocking the boat.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    Yes, you make a good point. But there's another factor that I think makes this untenable, at least in the US — the widespread use of well-proctored standardized tests. Very hard to cheat on those.
    - daniellarusso 6y ago
      I attended high school with a person whose mother pretended to be a guidance counselor, and was able to obtain a copy of the SAT test weeks before her daughter took the test. She graduated from Harvard. The mom got 24 months probation, 200 hours of community service, and had to pay $15k in restitution. Also “Operation Varsity Blues” revealed it is indeed possible to bypass ‘well-proctored’ protections.
      - sebmellen 6y ago
        Very different situation though. A school can't game its stats year after year using measures like this, because they will be caught. From your references, it seems even in isolated cases there's punishment. In larger scales, like that of a whole classroom, subversion of the system is near impossible.
        daniellarusso 6y ago
        My thought is that there are a number of parents who would say that the punishment is worth it if you can get your child into a top-tier university (based on my first reference - the parent spent no jail time away).
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  I wonder if the kids are not aware this is a test submitted. I remember doing "class exercises" which were collected and had much less security (around copying, cheating) than normal tests.
- dash2 6y ago
  Welcome to Britain :-(
- matsemann 6y ago
  On national tests in Norway I've never heard this occur. What they do instead is to ask the weaker pupils not to attend that day to increase the average score.
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    Similar shenanigans happened in California during the brief period of rating schools by student's test scores. The tests were not annual, so poor performers would repeat a grade the year before the test. Then schools were rated lower for having kids repeat grades. They did the encouraging poor performers to be absent on test day thing as well, so the state subtracted points for poor attendance and had a second day for kids who missed the first. On top of this, anecdotally it seemed that the marginal schools were made worse because they would spend time teaching to the test, while the higher performing schools didn't feel compelled to do that. There are still knock-on effects today after having stopped that. Our daughter has been consistently behind by 1-1.5 years in assessment testing in every subject from grades 1-6. It took years of fighting to get her retained. An actual conversation ended with the person we were talking to admitting that the best thing for both the school and our daughter would be to retain her, and that the only reason they were refusing was because "it is against policy for us to retain any student for any reason other than a long-term absence" Fortunately once that was said out loud we made progress through the system again. Prior to that there was all sorts of apologia for the policy, and how retaining our daughter would cause irreparable damage to her psyche; as if her knowing she was the "dumb kid" and having entire lessons go completely over her head was not at all damaging...
  - fma 6y ago
    In my state, they report the number of students who took the state test for each school as a percentage of population. I would be suspicious of any school that doesn't have over 98% take. Yeah they can have a few kids not take it, but the overall score still is impacted by 98%.
- speeder 6y ago
  What I think is a major issue is that the UN "human rights" document says that schooling is mandatory and must teach about the UN (yep! it is a "human right" to be indoctrinated) I noticed then that several governments to please the UN (and get their precious IMF money and whatnot) will then game the stats as needed. I am from Brazil, here the public schools after UN meddling got in the picture first went the route OP said, but the UN didn't rated the country education based on scores, but based on dropouts, the more dropouts you have the worse your score is. So solution is not have dropouts! Cue government doing two things: 1. Banning any possible form of homeschooling. 2. Making a law where you can't fail a kid, even if the kid is completely retarded and just drools all day, as long the kid in question can write their own name (even if they don't understand the meaning or treat it just as a drawing), they will pass... 3. Convince the population that avoiding dropouts is important, the government regularly runs massive marketing programs (doesn't even matter if government is left or right) saying how important it is for kids to finish school, and how great it is that now that they can't fail, they don't drop out.
  - DanBC 6y ago
    > What I think is a major issue is that the UN "human rights" document says that schooling is mandatory and must teach about the UN (yep! it is a "human right" to be indoctrinated) Can you post a link to this human rights document please?
    - speeder 6y ago
      https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ As for what I am talking about, read Article 26. I will quote the relevant phraseS (not the whole article) for brevity: "Elementary education shall be compulsory" and "Education shall ... tons of stuff ... and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace." And this is reinforced elsewhere. "Article 29.3: These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations." "Article 30: Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein." And just to explain why I said Brazil went with the cheating route after UN meddling: Until around 1970s, Brazil didn't need the IMF or anything like that, thus it was ignoring the UN regarding certain subjects, among them it was that then the approach to public schooling was that the purpose of the public school was the education of brilliant students, and those that didn't want to be there shouldn't be there, so bad students, bullies, etc... were outright kicked out.
- notahacker 6y ago
  One of my old school teachers (ordinary UK comprehensive) was fired for doing German speaking tests one on one with some helpful phrases written on the board in the background.
- mr_gibbins 6y ago
  In my maths GCSE (UK) one of the teachers observed I was having some trouble expanding brackets and whispered a mnemonic she had taught us weeks previously to help. One data point, one observation... but yes, I can believe it.
  - nobrains 6y ago
    But isn't that also good teaching / learning happening right there?
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      During the administration of a national exam?
- klyrs 6y ago
  I took a class at a community college and the teacher did this with take home exams. I never did understand why
- asciimike 6y ago
  I've seen a few variations on this that are less blatant but equally effective at gaming the system. Note that these all happened in college, rather than in HS--I never recall seeing this in high school. The first is professors providing previous exams for students to study from, and then only changing the numbers, not the questions (e.g. the test is a template). This wasn't the norm, but it wasn't uncommon either--several professors gained nicknames to this effect, and you knew if you were in one of their classes how everything was going to work. Even if the professor didn't provide the exam, fraternities and sororities usually kept prior exams from folks who had done well, and I believe the "learning center" also would keep copies, to the point where I am occasionally recognized when I come back to campus (mostly for recruiting) because one of my completed computer architecture tests has been given out as reference for the past decade. The second is providing study sessions the day/night before an exam where professors would run through common scenarios that might appear on tests. When done correctly, students would ask the questions and the prof would get another student to demonstrate and they would help as necessary--when done poorly (and unfortunately, in my experience, the more common of the two), it devolved to the first scenario. Neither are explicitly "cheating" in the way outlined in the parent (I don't know if they'd show up on accreditation, for instance), but they achieve the same end result. As a bonus, I worked as a proctor in the learning center for a year or two, and while the majority of students came in because they were legitimately struggling with one concept and needed tutoring to jump the knowledge gap, there was a core group of frequent fliers who were there every day basically getting their homework done by others, and thus boosting overall grades (and ultimately graduation rate). As has been stated many, many times in this thread, incentives (staying accredited, getting some arbitrary US News and World Reports ranking, having a high graduation/job placement rate, etc.) push this behavior to the detriment of student learning.
- CivBase 6y ago
  > I'm sure this behavior would be quickly reprimanded by administrators or other teachers in my past schools. Bold of you to assume the prime directive of most schools is to teach kids.
- rvba 6y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/c822qx/of_people_aged_15_30_who_say_they_can_read_write/ https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/c822qx/of_people_ag...
underwater 6y ago
I attended state run schools in Australia in the 90s and this experience sounds so foreign to me. Sure, there were shitty kids and other problems, but we were learning consistently. The Australian Federal government has since introduced standardised testing in the form of NAPLAN and, yes, schools try to teach to the test. But the idea of teachers outright cheating on behalf of students is unfathomable. Was I an outlier? Or did the author just have bad luck?
- corty 6y ago
  We once had a young teacher, who had to pass his own entrance exam for a permanent position. He was to be tested by teaching us, while a senior teacher sitting in the back judges him. A week before his test, this young teacher then goes through everything that was supposed to happen in that class with us, right down to the questions he'd ask and the answers a specific pupil was supposed to give. At the end of it, he promised us a keg of beer if he passed (Germany, younger pupils would maybe have gotten sweets). He passed with flying colours, after which the senior teacher asked discreetely when we intended to drink that beer, because he wanted to attend. Obviously stuff like this was completely normal and expected.
- ajxs 6y ago
  I went to a state run (public in local parlance) high school in Australia in the 2000s. The school was in an area that was beginning to gentrify. It had students from a variety of backgrounds, with the majority being working class. The school had many problem students to keep staff occupied and looked as though it was very under-funded. However I agree with GP: I never saw any of the kind of incompetence and institutional dishonesty this article talks about. One thing I'll say of Australia, it's public institutions seem reasonably honest.
- iso1210 6y ago
  I don't get this cheating comment. Schools have internal exams sure, but they don't count for much - the ones that count (at high school) are GCSEs, A-Levels, and other external exams. Teachers can't cheat on these as they don't have the tests until it opens. If the actual exams were happening in the way the author depicts, then 1) There would be a whistleblower 2) The people marking the exams would notice that people were getting the exact same answers (unlike US SATs, UK exams are mainly written answers, very few questions are multiple choice) Now teachers do have copies of previous years exams, and go over those in class, and use them for mock-exams earlier in the year, isn't that normal? It's not cheating -- exams are an imperfect system, but if you're going to have exams, having test exams and going over what worked and what didn't is valid.
retsibsi 6y ago
Link to this article on the main Less Wrong site: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yv9aj9bWD5H7aaDdy/how-my-school-gamed-the-stats https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yv9aj9bWD5H7aaDdy/how-my-sch... (Greater Wrong is probably great for powerusers, but I find the default view much uglier than LW.) The article is interesting and depressing. I'm not surprised that the metrics are gamed, but I am surprised by how awful the school was, and how normal that apparently is.
- blacktulip 6y ago
  I find the GW site is much easier to read due to larger font.
  - retsibsi 6y ago
    Default font sizes/layouts often don't suit me, so I've become very used to zooming (out, usually). LW is about right for me at 90%, while GW is a bit big at 80% but rather crowded at 70%. I can't pinpoint what I like about the LW layout, but it feels spacious without being wasteful. I think a lot of it might come down to the font itself.
m463 6y ago
In the Bay Area, the cupertino schools are well known to be excellent public schools, always 9 and 10 out of 10 ratings. Schools in surrounding areas are usually not as good. This means all kinds of things, for example cupertino homes have very strong real estate values ("cupertino schools!"). I found out how they do (part of) it. If a child living in the cupertino school district registers and is not proficient in english, they are "redirected" to a nearby school say in sunnyvale. simple.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  I thought I read somewhere that most of the richer people in San Francisco send their children to private schools (to the extent that the public schools were minority-white in a majority-white city.) I wonder how much this happens in the Cupertino. Normally there is some reasoning that public schools do well because of rich parents who can help fund the school and who generally care about their children’s education, and that’s an guess I might make about Cupertino based on your comment, but it seems to not be the case in SF.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Context: I grew up attending Cupertino schools. Cupertino schools are fairly well funded, but not as well funded as schools in say Palo Alto. It was my experience that in our school the best students did most of their learning outside of class as very few public school teachers could keep up with them. From what I hear, some parents would send their children to private schools because they would do this and the schools would have somewhat better mentoring, but overall I didn't see much difference in the quality of top students from either.
  - asciimike 6y ago
    Have you seen the state of SF public schools lately? - https://www.sfusd.edu/about/news/current-news/SF-Board-of-Education-Advances-Plan-to-Rename-Schools https://www.sfusd.edu/about/news/current-news/SF-Board-of-Ed... (which is clearly more important than https://www.sfusd.edu/services/health-wellness/covid-19-coronavirus-resources-families-students/person-learning-readiness-dashboard-phase-2a https://www.sfusd.edu/services/health-wellness/covid-19-coro...) - https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1359382113875755011 https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1359382113875755011 - https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/sf-school-lottery-Lowell-High-15663889.php https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/sf-school-lottery-L... I think your idea of "rich parents funding SF public schools" would probably be rejected by the school board, so for most it's not even worth trying, given the proliferation of high quality private schools nearby. And even if the school accepts it, the community won't. Say what you want about Zuck, but he donated $75M to the only public hospital in the city and they don't even want to keep the building named after him and his wife (who worked there no less!). Comically, they can't actually do anything about it, so they stick to meaningless non-binding resolutions. Therefore, if given the choice, those who can are much more likely to spend 30-50k/year to send their kids to private HS than to try and go through the process of dealing with the city government. I assume that dealing with Cupertino/PA/etc. is frustrating, but not nearly as insane as SF.
lordnacho 6y ago
I would have thought that the most significant form of gaming the system would be discreet student selection. This is available to both independent and state school systems. You find a kid who isn't doing well in your school, and as the head teacher you find a way to invite them to leave. That way you don't need to have the resource for whatever special requirements they need, it gets dumped on some other school. It has the nice benefit of being vaguely justifiable, because of course there are kids who genuinely need special help. On the other end you game the system by offering scholarships, and by selecting parents who are keen enough to part with a few tens of thousands of pounds a year. I'm pretty surprised at the outright exam cheating though. My guess would be that if it happened it would be the teachers doctoring the papers without the students seeing it. My impression of the UK school system is that they've done a lot with reducing bullying in the last couple of decades. It's visible when you visit a school that they care about it, and the kids have assemblies about it, something that would have been left to the kids themselves back in my day.
- occz 6y ago
  > I would have thought that the most significant form of gaming the system would be discreet student selection. This is very common in the private, for-profit schools in Sweden. The general procedure goes as follows: 1. Spend heavily on marketing to attract 'good students' 2. Avoid selecting 'bad students' 3. Automatically use the scores that follow from this selection to create a feedback loop that keeps bringing in good students 4. Cut as much spending as you can - you're getting paid a set amount of money per student from the government, after all 5. Pocket the difference Meanwhile, the public schools are not allowed to engage in the same sort of filtering and are hence required to accept the 'bad students', which constrains their resources and creating the opposite feedback loop to what the private for-profit schools have. Kind of sickening, to be honest.
  - sjg007 6y ago
    US charter schools do this extensively. It's the whole point of an entrance exam.
  - ArkanExplorer 6y ago
aronhegedus 6y ago
My grammar school definitely mentioned in assemblies before the inspections that we should all be on our best behaviour, I'm pretty sure that's fairly standard in UK.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  I think you’re right that telling students to behave is common. I think now the assessments happen wi less notice (day of or day before.) I’m not sure how I feel about inspections happening with so little notice. It’s surely a very stressful time to be a teacher. I wonder if inspections might be more fair if instead of a single inspection, several could be made over a year and then aggregated into the school’s grade.
  - dash2 6y ago
    I would think unannounced inspections might be less stressful than announced ones. You have to make less effort preparing for them, and the standards are going to be a bit more relaxed, because the inspectors won't assume that you have prepared.
    - dan-robertson 6y ago
      Well if you’re having a bad week or teaching a harder/slower/weirder part of the curriculum at the time or otherwise feel like you’re not on your best form it could be stressful. I don’t know how important inspections are to eg teachers’ pay or promotions but if they do matter then I think teachers would be stressed by a random inspection having an outsize impact on their careers compared to every other day
mattbee 6y ago
I can't see how old the author is but my son's primary school got 24hrs notice of their last inspection a coule of years back. A ex-teacher friend 10 years ago told me it was a lot less than a week's notice for her larger secondary. I'm sure some details are gameable, but what I'm more interested in are the inspectors' incentives, not just the schools'.
- timthorn 6y ago
  The author's experiences are historic. In 2012, the notice period for inspections was reduced to the afternoon before the inspectors turned up, but prior to that it could be several weeks: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/changes-to-education-inspections-announced https://www.gov.uk/government/news/changes-to-education-insp... The London Challenge was implemented to turn around the issues in London schools that the author recounts, and did so remarkably successfully: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Challeng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Challeng
etothepii 6y ago
I can't imagine teachers at my school ever actually cheating by giving results in exams. Teachers Unions in the UK fought very hard to remove exam invigilation from Teachers responsibilities, which makes that much harder. However, the inspection thing chimes strongly with my experience and the focus on the resistant materials track of design technology as a way that anyone can get a 'good pass'. All the effort went in to getting border line D kids to borderline C. If you were a borderline 5C candidate (a key metric in the UK at the time) you were on detention every night to try and trip over the line.
opheliate 6y ago
UK state schools absolutely suck. My experience mirrors that of the author in a lot of ways. I will say though, some of the content of this article appears outdated, and the author doesn't seem to have checked to see if their memory lines up with the reality of how things work today. For example, about Ofsted inspections: > Now, you may imagine that these inspections would be unannounced, so as to best get a real image of how a school works. Not the case. They’re scheduled well in advance. This is absolutely not the case today. Schools have a general idea of when an inspection will be (i.e: what season of the year) based on when their last inspection was, but they're only told that an inspection will happen on the morning of the inspection [0]. Schools don't really have a window of opportunity to game the inspection in the way the author describes. > Another way the stats were gamed was by not recording bad behavior This whole section seems a little naive. Teachers in lower sets have an incredibly tough job, and have to try to support those students who genuinely want to learn, but are struggling, while also managing the behaviour of disruptive children. Sometimes, it is the better option to just allow some disruptive behaviour slide (e.g: swearing) rather than interrupting the whole lesson just to deal with one kid. A lot of the time, if behaviour doesn't provoke any response, it won't escalate. As the author says, if a student is actually aggressive towards other students, then obviously action is taken, but I'm not sure they quite appreciate how difficult it is to try to teach a struggling class. wrt cheating, it definitely happens. I'm not personally aware of any examples quite as extreme as what the author described, but I know my Spanish teacher turned a blind eye while I let my friends copy my work, for example, and I'm sure in the lower sets behaviour such as this was more widespread. I will say though, the exams the author is talking about here are GCSEs. They don't determine your ability to get into university, they're only used by 6th-forms (equivalent of US high school) to determine what subjects you can study. While they absolutely affect parents' perception of schools, they are not quite as serious as if students were receiving A-levels based on cheating. Also, students choose GCSE subjects. If someone only speaks 20 words of French, it's unlikely they would choose to study French. 0: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/828451/School_inspections_-_a_guide_for_parents.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
- bArray 6y ago
  > This is absolutely not the case today. Schools have a general idea of when an inspection will be (i.e: what season of the year) based on when their last inspection was, but they're only told that an inspection will happen on the morning of the inspection [0]. I have family still in the school system in the UK - but they still get advanced notice. Essentially somebody at the school either knows the inspector or somebody very close to them, and gets a tip off about when it will occur. The system is still corrupt. One of the biggest things they do is to take a disruptive child and literally lock them up in a building called "room 101". The entire school would have an assembly on that morning at very first thing and told to behave or else. Half of the stories reflect exactly cases I know to have happened in my local secondary schools, where both students and teachers have acted badly, and in many cases illegally. Honestly, it really makes home schooling an attractive option if you can afford to do so.
steveharman 6y ago
I used to work in the UK care sector. The regulator there gave no notice of their arrival, they just turned up. Which feels like a far more effective way of seeing the real world operations of a school or care facility.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  I think ofsted now do (at least some) inspections with no notice or one day of notice
xerosis 6y ago
UK school leader here. I can't argue with the perceptions in general, but an important thing to acknowledge is that school inspectors are not born yesterday. The inspectors will be former school leaders, and some still will be in schools themselves. They also speak to parents and students to get a full picture of the school. Is it all disingenuous? A bit, but doesn't everyone tidy their house before someone comes round?
cybert00th 6y ago
Focusing on the bullying aspects of the article for a moment, homeschooling goes a long way towards making that a non-issue. Both our homeschooled boys played hockey for a local school and both our homeschooled girls are in Air Cadets, so they get plenty of socialising, and we've never had to deal with bullying. I understand that homeschooling's not for everyone, but if you can then you should give it serious thought. Homeschooling's been around for decades, and with the advent of the Internet, there are now plenty of resources available - pretty much regardless of what country you're in.
- violetgarden 6y ago
  When I was younger, I thought homeschooling was almost exclusively because parents were weird and controlling - maybe even in a cult like situation. Or I thought homeschooling was for socially hopeless kids that couldn’t cut it in “real” school. I have no idea why my perception was so negative. Now that I’m older, my opinion has completely flipped. I am grateful to have had access to public education, but it was probably bronze standard at best. If I had children, I’d probably homeschool them.
  - rdtwo 6y ago
    A lot of school problems don’t do away in the real world. Cheating, bullying, boredom are regular parts of daily life for many workers. There are life skills that are learned in school that aren’t just textbook educational items
    - musingsole 6y ago
      Those life skills get taught in homeschool programs too. Or are you under the impression homeschool students are locked away in a closet with a textbook and no windows until they turn 18? The only lesson a state school can teach that might be missing in a homeschool program is that large institutions are out of your control, have their own motivations, and will maim you without a second's hesitation.
    - rpiguyshy 6y ago
shiftoutbox 6y ago
Every school does this !
gambiting 6y ago
So my sister went to an extremely prestigious private school in the UK(basically Eton-level) and they had an easier way around it - they basically wouldn't let students sit exams they knew they would do poorly in, so the school wouldn't lose its great ratings. So my sister wasn't allowed to take maths or chemistry in her A-level years because the school didn't think she was good enough in those subjects to score and A or higher on the exam. So in her final year she only had literally a handful of subjects which weren't a danger to the school's academic rating.
- doovd 6y ago
  Very common practice amongst top schools in the UK.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    Mine was in the top 2% or so, and that would never fly (One of the most dumbsad things I have seen in my life so far is the sight of watching someone not open his exam paper and fall asleep then try and have a go in the last five minutes in a panicked frenzy)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  I went to the top-ranked state school in Scotland and this absolutely happened to my friends - it’s not limited to private institutions. It was obvious that they were gaming the system at the expense of the pupils even then.
- mercury_craze 6y ago
  The story I've heard a few times is that students who are expected to perform poorly in their GCSE's or A-Levels get expelled for minor behavioural infractions prior to their final exams so their poor grades don't risk bringing down the average.
  - 6y ago
not_knuth 6y ago
Every time I see an article like this about how the UK government (all large orginzations of people in general though) is obssessed with measuring meaningless things, I am reminded that it is the birthplace of Goodhart's Law [0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- IIAOPSW 6y ago
  But the alternative to decision by metrics is decision by committee. The former may be gamed, but the latter may be corrupt. The inherent human nature that leads to corruption cannot be fixed, but in theory there could be a metric that isn't flawed. Therefore the solution is not to abandon evidence based policy, but to have more and better evidence based policy.
  - caddemon 6y ago
    I've always wondered about using multiple metrics, but instead of combining them prior to selection, bin the spots and for each bin consider a subset of metrics weighted in different ways. For something like a school ranking, instead of giving a number (which is way more precision than I think these systems can actually achieve), the schools could be tiered - with each bin contributing some spots to the first tier, then repeat. At the very least it should diversify how people try to game the system, and then the "winners" of various bins could be studied to compare usage of different metrics in selection. If the specific formula could be kept mostly secret, perhaps switched up every so often, it would hopefully disincentivize gaming at all. Along those lines, committees and metrics could both be used. Give committees control over 10% of the spots or something. Corruption is obviously a downside, but I do think committees also have upsides that are difficult if not impossible to replicate with pure metrics. In doing this committee selections could also be tracked against the various metric ones for longer term outcomes.
- iheartblocks 6y ago
  I'm currently watching The Wire, and this aspect of people juking the stats to move up the ranks is a deep underlying theme. It's gotten me to thinking: what is the best alternative to focusing on metrics? Surely, relying on something other than data would be no improvement over the status quo. The only thought I've had is to: 1) Rely on a spectrum of metrics, to get a more holistic perspective. Instead of just seeing "crime is down x%" administrators would see how many reports end up classified as a lower-level infractions, how civilians rate the safety of their area, etc. 2) Add common-sense restrictions to make stat-pumping more difficult. For example, bringing in classroom inspections on random days 3) Penalizing institutions and individuals who are clearly attempting to juke the stats. Enforcement would certainly be difficult, but simply having something to this effect on the books would, imho, reduce schools dedicating time to studying for a standardized test
shawticus 6y ago
I went to a "blue ribbon" school that was attached to a continuation school. It was a great school. Kids behaved well, very upper middle class. However, if you were doing at all not great for any reason -- C average, struggling with depression or learning, anything -- they would pressure you into the continuation school right next door. So you have one school operating as two schools so that they can pretend to be the top school in the state by moving the bottom set next door.
waterhouse 6y ago
It begins to look as if the test-examination-marks business is a gigantic racket, the purpose of which is to enable students, teachers, and schools to take part in a joint pretense that the students know everything they are supposed to know, when in fact they know only a small part of it--if any at all. Why do we always announce exams in advance, if not to give students a chance to cram for them? Why do teachers, even in graduate schools, always say quite specifically what the exam will be about, even telling the type of questions that will be given? Because otherwise too many students would flunk. What would happen at Harvard or Yale if a prof gave a surprise test in March on work covered in October? Everyone knows what would happen; that's why they don't do it. ... When I was in my last year at school, we seniors stayed around an extra week to cram for college boards. Our ancient-history teacher told us, on the basis of long experience, that we would do well to prepare ourselves to write for twenty minutes on each of a list of fifteen topics that he gave us. We studied his list. We knew the wisdom of taking that kind of advice; if we had not, we would not have been at that school. When the boards came, we found that his list comfortably covered every one of the eight questions we were asked. So we got credit for knowing a great deal about ancient history, which we did not, he got credit for being a good teacher, which he was not, and the school got credit for being, as it was, a good place to go if you wanted to be sure of getting into a prestige college. The fact was that I knew very little about ancient history; that much of what I thought I knew was misleading or false; that then, and for many years afterwards, I disliked history and thought it pointless and a waste of time; and that two months later I could not have come close to passing the history college boards, or even a much easier test, but who cared? I have played the game myself. When I began teaching I thought, naively, that the purpose of a test was to test, to find out what the students knew about the course. It didn't take me long to find out that if I gave my students surprise tests, covering the whole material of the course to date, almost everyone flunked. This made me look bad, and posed problems for the school. I learned that the only way to get a respectable percentage of decent or even passing grades was to announce tests well in advance, tell in some detail what material they would cover, and hold plenty of advance practice in the kind of questions that would be asked, which is called review. I later learned that teachers do this everywhere. We know that what we are doing is not really honest, but we dare not be the first to stop, and we try to justify or excuse ourselves by saying that, after all, it does no particular harm. But we are wrong; it does great harm. It does harm, first of all, because it is dishonest and the students know it. My friends and I, breezing through the ancient-history boards, knew very well that a trick was being played on someone, we were not quite sure on whom. Our success on the boards was due, not to our knowledge of ancient history, which was scanty, but to our teacher's skill as a predictor, which was great. Even children much younger than we were learn that what most teachers' want and reward are not knowledge and understanding but the appearance of them. The smart and able ones, at least, come to look on school as something of a racket, which it is their job to learn how to beat. And learn they do; they become experts at smelling out the unspoken and often unconscious preferences and prejudices of their teachers, and at taking full advantage of them. My first English teacher at prep school gave us Macaulay's essay on Lord Clive to read, and from his pleasure in reading it aloud I saw that he was a sucker for the periodic sentence, a long complex sentence with the main verb at the end. Thereafter I took care to construct at least one such sentence in every paper I wrote for him, and thus assured myself a good mark in the course. Not only does the examination racket do harm by making students feel that a search for honest understanding is beside the point; it does further harm by discouraging those few students who go on making that search in spite of everything. The student who will not be satisfied merely to know "right answers" or recipes for getting them will not have an easy time in school, particularly since facts and recipes may be all that his teachers know. They tend to be impatient or even angry with the student who wants to know, not just what happened, but why it happened as it did and not some other way. They rarely have the knowledge to answer such questions, and even more rarely have the time; there is all that material to cover. In short, our "Tell-'em-and-test-'em" way of teaching leaves most students increasingly confused, aware that their academic success rests on shaky foundations, and convinced that school is mainly a place where you follow meaningless procedures to get meaningless answers to meaningless questions. — John Holt, How Children Fail
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
Twenty years ago I was sharing a conclusion w/ my kids' principal - that preparing for state assessment tests was cheating. The point of the tests is to evaluate the schools overall effectiveness. As much as test-centric cramming effects those results, it creates a false picture. Some notes and observations: Because the state both accommodates and encourages this scenario, the fault can't reasonably be laid on the schools. A more impeccable (but problematic) way to handle these tests would be for the state to show up with little/no notice and administer it. I'm personally inclined to scrap state assessment testing altogether. The zero-sum nature of pitting the schools against each other for limited funding consumes a great deal of precious teaching time for little clear benefit. This conversation happened at our county's first charter school. A few years earlier, this principal happened to be my son's PS teacher.
- andrei_says_ 6y ago
  What is the expected benefit of punishing schools by underfunding them if they get beaten by other schools’ test scores? Have school districts not yet discovered that competition applied to learning is counterproductive?
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    I believe it is district funding that suffers for low grades and that it takes a few years of consistently low performance before the state applies any action. I should note that our schools are primarily funded from county taxes but state funding is enough to matter. However, the testing dynamic tends to nurture a perverse incentive for counties to showcase their high performing schools and increase funding to them. Some school boards resist that temptation better than others.
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    Personally, I feel we have reached the limits of what schools can do with the current structures, that there is very little improvement that can be mined. The things we do to maximize fiscal efficiency (grouping by age, school start times during optimal sleep periods) aren't in the students' best interests. The OP's article seems to bear witness of that.
rpiguyshy 6y ago
i went to one of the best public schools in the states. even then the environment was toxic. heroin was dealt in the hallways, many kids even died of heroin overdoses. kids were viciously bullied and physically assaulted while the drooling, slack-jawed staff looked onward. i never put it together until now that this was probably because formally acknowledging what was going on would negatively impact the schools numbers/ratings. the school system as a whole wore away at the physical and psychological health of a massive number of kids because of the insane schedule that deprives them of sleep. this was scientifically proven a while ago. american public schools are a disgrace. i would never enroll my kids into a public school. they are glorified daycare centers where the inmates run the asylum. and all you have to do is reflect on your interactions with average americans to understand the fact that these schools are more likely to damage a person intellectually than advance them. the only thing that separates people who had a good experience vs people who didnt is their personality. if you are not on the spectrum then its just one big pleasant vacation. but if you are unhealthy, on the spectrum, have a troubled childhood or for whatever reason fall behind emotionally or socially, then public schools are worse than a death sentence. everyone involved should be ashamed.
ilamont 6y ago
In the U.S., I heard from a parent whose kids go to exclusive private schools that the schools will often hold new students back a year or even two, as they are more likely to do better in class, do well on standardized tests, and exceed in certain sports - all of which burnish the schools' reputations and lead to better college placements, which often means Ivies and other elite schools. Another option for students who struggle at public or private high schools (and whose parents can afford it) is a "post-graduate" year at a dedicated private academy for 18 and 19 year olds. The main purpose of these academies is to bring their grades and SATs up to a good level so they are more likely to get in to a good college. I know two people who did this in the 90s, one of them got into NYU after the post-grad academy.
- cafard 6y ago
  There is a private school I know of that has the reputation of putting new students back a year--but this typically would be in intake years such as sixth grade. Given that the school is also known for sports, I'm not sure to what extent this is for academics and to what extent for athletics.
timthorn 6y ago
The UK government introduced a test to check how children were progressing in phonics. Teachers were told the pass mark to aid in assessment, but the national results showed a remarkable bump for exactly the pass mark: https://schoolsweek.co.uk/phonics-check-needs-rethink-after-data-shows-something-dodgy/ https://schoolsweek.co.uk/phonics-check-needs-rethink-after-... The government decided to not share the pass mark ahead of time for tests in future years. I attended a conference that year at which the Education Secretary gave a keynote to an audience of educators; he got booed for not trusting teachers as a result.
cloudedcordial 6y ago
Same kind of cheating is present in Canadian public schools, too. This is a case that has been exposed. Just to give some context, the French language schools in an English speaking area in Canada is highly desirable by parents. Only the students who are strong academically attend those schools. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/eqao-cambridge-principal-test-french-school-1.3980277 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/eqao-cambr...
zackmorris 6y ago
I hadn't seen greaterwrong.com, and was hoping that it would offer counterarguments to articles on lesswrong.com, but it's just a summary of it. I get frustrated by articles like this because they focus on second-order causes instead of first-order. I don't know how it works overseas, but the main problem in the US is that schools are funded by property taxes from state and local governments instead of the federal government (which only accounts for less than 10% of funding): https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index.html https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index.html Which means that public schools are a magnifying glass for issues like discrimination and wealth inequality that the whole country is wrestling with. Want to know why schools in the south side of Chicago are doing worse than schools in Beverly Hills? There's your answer. Full stop. Until we fix that nationally, expect more of the same. What's the solution? To me it's very simple, but unfortunately we need some kind of consensus on this, and that's not going to happen until people start reaching similar conclusions when presented with the same facts. But we're more polarized than ever.. so.. let me offer an analogy instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel America is quite strong in certain areas (finance, the military, etc) but so weak in others (education, health and human services, etc) that we've become vulnerable. Look at Texas right now: the fossil fuel energy capital of America (maybe the world?) unable to keep the lights on as its citizens slowly freeze to death. Look at the US response to COVID-19 as hundreds of thousands of people die unnecessary deaths because we weren't brave enough to quarantine long enough. If that stuff isn't biblical, I don't know what is. No, these problems are not due to failings at the personal or local level. They're systemic, national and cultural.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > Want to know why schools in the south side of Chicago are doing worse than schools in Beverly Hills? There's your answer. Full stop. This analysis completely fails; the correlation between student performance and per-student spending in US schools is negative.
  - bsanr2 6y ago
    Those figures never weigh parental wealth, income, and credit access.
amrrs 6y ago
Exactly the same thing I read about Delhi (Indian) Schools, 10th standard is board exams where the marks are published Nation-wide so to look good on Media, students who didn't do well during their 9th standard were "Pushed-out" of it to different schools so that their 10th std cohort looks awesome - https://thewire.in/education/delhi-govts-push-out-policy-for-class-10-students-forces-thousands-to-drop-out-of-school https://thewire.in/education/delhi-govts-push-out-policy-for...
alexpotato 6y ago
In high school, state and ETS (e.g. PSAT/SAT) tests were always required to be taken at a school from another district. For example, if you went to school in district A, everyone from district A took the test in a school building located in district B. The reverse was also true. This has always struck me as such an easy system to implement that I'm always surprised when I hear about the "teachers just changed the results" stories. While I'm sure this doesn't eliminate the risk of collusion, doesn't it dramatically reduce it? Plus, wasn't an entire chapter of Freakonomics dedicated to how teacher cheating can largely be caught algorithmically? In this day and age I would think it's even easier.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
physicsguy 6y ago
Ofsted has changed somewhat because they moved to 24 hour notice of inspection. When I was at secondary school, we did the same lesson three times with my French teacher before an upcoming OFSTED inspection and he said if we all kept quiet, he'd buy us all an Aero.
marshmallow_12 6y ago
the uk DofE are themselves guilty of the same crime. The school league tables do not include gcse statistics for key stage 3 students. This is because students in state schools don't take gcses before ks4- only private schools offer them. In order not to draw attention to the academic superiority of private schools and embarrass the state run schools, they simply ignore those gcse results! this artificially "improves" the quality of state education vs private.
gumby 6y ago
I have to confess a little sympathy even though I agree it’s dishonest. Most schools are struggling to evolve in an environment they weren’t set up for. And in parallel, parents with money and/or education for it definitely try to game the system as well. Hence a bit of sympathy on my part. I attended a private school that did the opposite: no “GPA” (just letter grades, no average nor class rank computed), its own curriculum, no designated “AP” courses (you could take the exam if you liked). And all the graduates did fine at university. It was very clear to me that they could get away with this because they had spent centuries educating kids. They strongly discouraged gaming the system...because they had gamed it at a deeper level already.

148 points by optimalsolver 6y ago

Eh, I commiserate with the author, and experienced some of the same in American public school. However, this part of the article really stood out to me, as I couldn't imagine it happening in any of my school environments (which were not optimal by any means): > There were many ways in which the school and teachers gamed the system to boost their measured performance. One way was to do exams for students. I was on a bottom set language class for French. After two years I literally couldn’t speak a single sentence in french and maybe knew 20 words in total. I still passed my exams. How? We did the tests in class. Often the teacher would go through them with us. Literally giving us the test and then going through each question on the whiteboard and telling us what to write. A different year and a different teacher, this time the teacher would sit next to us and write the answers down. Could this behavior by teachers really be widespread??? I think this is just an anomaly of the author's school. Any of my teachers would've been wary of behaving like this. Kids don't keep such things quiet! I'm sure this behavior would be quickly reprimanded by administrators or other teachers in my past schools.

jimbob45 6y ago
In my experience, this kind of thing happened more in lower-tier classes than upper-tier ones. Lower-quality teachers might have less compunction over cheating than their upper-quality counterparts and often get the non-AP/IB classes due to their qualifications.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  Perhaps, though I don't think that's the case in this article: > ... I was mostly in top ability streamed classes, meaning my classroom experience was likely far better than average.
  - syrrim 6y ago
    The french classes, where the exam cheating took place, were specifically described as lower tier.
retsibsi 6y ago
If the people further up the chain have similar incentives (higher scores = we've all done a great job), and most students are either benefiting from the cheating or being harmed by it in only a fairly minor indirect way, it's plausible to me that nobody would want to stick their neck out and make enough of a fuss to change things. I've never seen anything this egregious, but in my own experience people are usually willing to go along with systems that don't make sense (according to their ostensible purpose) and aren't very fair, if that's what everyone else is doing and there's no personal gain to be had by rocking the boat.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  Yes, you make a good point. But there's another factor that I think makes this untenable, at least in the US — the widespread use of well-proctored standardized tests. Very hard to cheat on those.
  - daniellarusso 6y ago
    I attended high school with a person whose mother pretended to be a guidance counselor, and was able to obtain a copy of the SAT test weeks before her daughter took the test. She graduated from Harvard. The mom got 24 months probation, 200 hours of community service, and had to pay $15k in restitution. Also “Operation Varsity Blues” revealed it is indeed possible to bypass ‘well-proctored’ protections.
    - sebmellen 6y ago
      Very different situation though. A school can't game its stats year after year using measures like this, because they will be caught. From your references, it seems even in isolated cases there's punishment. In larger scales, like that of a whole classroom, subversion of the system is near impossible.
      - daniellarusso 6y ago
        My thought is that there are a number of parents who would say that the punishment is worth it if you can get your child into a top-tier university (based on my first reference - the parent spent no jail time away).
jokethrowaway 6y ago
I wonder if the kids are not aware this is a test submitted. I remember doing "class exercises" which were collected and had much less security (around copying, cheating) than normal tests.
dash2 6y ago
Welcome to Britain :-(
matsemann 6y ago
On national tests in Norway I've never heard this occur. What they do instead is to ask the weaker pupils not to attend that day to increase the average score.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  Similar shenanigans happened in California during the brief period of rating schools by student's test scores. The tests were not annual, so poor performers would repeat a grade the year before the test. Then schools were rated lower for having kids repeat grades. They did the encouraging poor performers to be absent on test day thing as well, so the state subtracted points for poor attendance and had a second day for kids who missed the first. On top of this, anecdotally it seemed that the marginal schools were made worse because they would spend time teaching to the test, while the higher performing schools didn't feel compelled to do that. There are still knock-on effects today after having stopped that. Our daughter has been consistently behind by 1-1.5 years in assessment testing in every subject from grades 1-6. It took years of fighting to get her retained. An actual conversation ended with the person we were talking to admitting that the best thing for both the school and our daughter would be to retain her, and that the only reason they were refusing was because "it is against policy for us to retain any student for any reason other than a long-term absence" Fortunately once that was said out loud we made progress through the system again. Prior to that there was all sorts of apologia for the policy, and how retaining our daughter would cause irreparable damage to her psyche; as if her knowing she was the "dumb kid" and having entire lessons go completely over her head was not at all damaging...
- fma 6y ago
  In my state, they report the number of students who took the state test for each school as a percentage of population. I would be suspicious of any school that doesn't have over 98% take. Yeah they can have a few kids not take it, but the overall score still is impacted by 98%.
speeder 6y ago
What I think is a major issue is that the UN "human rights" document says that schooling is mandatory and must teach about the UN (yep! it is a "human right" to be indoctrinated) I noticed then that several governments to please the UN (and get their precious IMF money and whatnot) will then game the stats as needed. I am from Brazil, here the public schools after UN meddling got in the picture first went the route OP said, but the UN didn't rated the country education based on scores, but based on dropouts, the more dropouts you have the worse your score is. So solution is not have dropouts! Cue government doing two things: 1. Banning any possible form of homeschooling. 2. Making a law where you can't fail a kid, even if the kid is completely retarded and just drools all day, as long the kid in question can write their own name (even if they don't understand the meaning or treat it just as a drawing), they will pass... 3. Convince the population that avoiding dropouts is important, the government regularly runs massive marketing programs (doesn't even matter if government is left or right) saying how important it is for kids to finish school, and how great it is that now that they can't fail, they don't drop out.
- DanBC 6y ago
  > What I think is a major issue is that the UN "human rights" document says that schooling is mandatory and must teach about the UN (yep! it is a "human right" to be indoctrinated) Can you post a link to this human rights document please?
  - speeder 6y ago
    https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ As for what I am talking about, read Article 26. I will quote the relevant phraseS (not the whole article) for brevity: "Elementary education shall be compulsory" and "Education shall ... tons of stuff ... and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace." And this is reinforced elsewhere. "Article 29.3: These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations." "Article 30: Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein." And just to explain why I said Brazil went with the cheating route after UN meddling: Until around 1970s, Brazil didn't need the IMF or anything like that, thus it was ignoring the UN regarding certain subjects, among them it was that then the approach to public schooling was that the purpose of the public school was the education of brilliant students, and those that didn't want to be there shouldn't be there, so bad students, bullies, etc... were outright kicked out.
notahacker 6y ago
One of my old school teachers (ordinary UK comprehensive) was fired for doing German speaking tests one on one with some helpful phrases written on the board in the background.
mr_gibbins 6y ago
In my maths GCSE (UK) one of the teachers observed I was having some trouble expanding brackets and whispered a mnemonic she had taught us weeks previously to help. One data point, one observation... but yes, I can believe it.
- nobrains 6y ago
  But isn't that also good teaching / learning happening right there?
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    During the administration of a national exam?
klyrs 6y ago
I took a class at a community college and the teacher did this with take home exams. I never did understand why
asciimike 6y ago
I've seen a few variations on this that are less blatant but equally effective at gaming the system. Note that these all happened in college, rather than in HS--I never recall seeing this in high school. The first is professors providing previous exams for students to study from, and then only changing the numbers, not the questions (e.g. the test is a template). This wasn't the norm, but it wasn't uncommon either--several professors gained nicknames to this effect, and you knew if you were in one of their classes how everything was going to work. Even if the professor didn't provide the exam, fraternities and sororities usually kept prior exams from folks who had done well, and I believe the "learning center" also would keep copies, to the point where I am occasionally recognized when I come back to campus (mostly for recruiting) because one of my completed computer architecture tests has been given out as reference for the past decade. The second is providing study sessions the day/night before an exam where professors would run through common scenarios that might appear on tests. When done correctly, students would ask the questions and the prof would get another student to demonstrate and they would help as necessary--when done poorly (and unfortunately, in my experience, the more common of the two), it devolved to the first scenario. Neither are explicitly "cheating" in the way outlined in the parent (I don't know if they'd show up on accreditation, for instance), but they achieve the same end result. As a bonus, I worked as a proctor in the learning center for a year or two, and while the majority of students came in because they were legitimately struggling with one concept and needed tutoring to jump the knowledge gap, there was a core group of frequent fliers who were there every day basically getting their homework done by others, and thus boosting overall grades (and ultimately graduation rate). As has been stated many, many times in this thread, incentives (staying accredited, getting some arbitrary US News and World Reports ranking, having a high graduation/job placement rate, etc.) push this behavior to the detriment of student learning.
CivBase 6y ago
> I'm sure this behavior would be quickly reprimanded by administrators or other teachers in my past schools. Bold of you to assume the prime directive of most schools is to teach kids.
rvba 6y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/c822qx/of_people_aged_15_30_who_say_they_can_read_write/ https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/c822qx/of_people_ag...

underwater 6y ago

I attended state run schools in Australia in the 90s and this experience sounds so foreign to me. Sure, there were shitty kids and other problems, but we were learning consistently. The Australian Federal government has since introduced standardised testing in the form of NAPLAN and, yes, schools try to teach to the test. But the idea of teachers outright cheating on behalf of students is unfathomable. Was I an outlier? Or did the author just have bad luck?

corty 6y ago
We once had a young teacher, who had to pass his own entrance exam for a permanent position. He was to be tested by teaching us, while a senior teacher sitting in the back judges him. A week before his test, this young teacher then goes through everything that was supposed to happen in that class with us, right down to the questions he'd ask and the answers a specific pupil was supposed to give. At the end of it, he promised us a keg of beer if he passed (Germany, younger pupils would maybe have gotten sweets). He passed with flying colours, after which the senior teacher asked discreetely when we intended to drink that beer, because he wanted to attend. Obviously stuff like this was completely normal and expected.
ajxs 6y ago
I went to a state run (public in local parlance) high school in Australia in the 2000s. The school was in an area that was beginning to gentrify. It had students from a variety of backgrounds, with the majority being working class. The school had many problem students to keep staff occupied and looked as though it was very under-funded. However I agree with GP: I never saw any of the kind of incompetence and institutional dishonesty this article talks about. One thing I'll say of Australia, it's public institutions seem reasonably honest.
iso1210 6y ago
I don't get this cheating comment. Schools have internal exams sure, but they don't count for much - the ones that count (at high school) are GCSEs, A-Levels, and other external exams. Teachers can't cheat on these as they don't have the tests until it opens. If the actual exams were happening in the way the author depicts, then 1) There would be a whistleblower 2) The people marking the exams would notice that people were getting the exact same answers (unlike US SATs, UK exams are mainly written answers, very few questions are multiple choice) Now teachers do have copies of previous years exams, and go over those in class, and use them for mock-exams earlier in the year, isn't that normal? It's not cheating -- exams are an imperfect system, but if you're going to have exams, having test exams and going over what worked and what didn't is valid.

retsibsi 6y ago

Link to this article on the main Less Wrong site: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yv9aj9bWD5H7aaDdy/how-my-school-gamed-the-stats https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yv9aj9bWD5H7aaDdy/how-my-sch... (Greater Wrong is probably great for powerusers, but I find the default view much uglier than LW.) The article is interesting and depressing. I'm not surprised that the metrics are gamed, but I am surprised by how awful the school was, and how normal that apparently is.

blacktulip 6y ago
I find the GW site is much easier to read due to larger font.
- retsibsi 6y ago
  Default font sizes/layouts often don't suit me, so I've become very used to zooming (out, usually). LW is about right for me at 90%, while GW is a bit big at 80% but rather crowded at 70%. I can't pinpoint what I like about the LW layout, but it feels spacious without being wasteful. I think a lot of it might come down to the font itself.

m463 6y ago

In the Bay Area, the cupertino schools are well known to be excellent public schools, always 9 and 10 out of 10 ratings. Schools in surrounding areas are usually not as good. This means all kinds of things, for example cupertino homes have very strong real estate values ("cupertino schools!"). I found out how they do (part of) it. If a child living in the cupertino school district registers and is not proficient in english, they are "redirected" to a nearby school say in sunnyvale. simple.

dan-robertson 6y ago
I thought I read somewhere that most of the richer people in San Francisco send their children to private schools (to the extent that the public schools were minority-white in a majority-white city.) I wonder how much this happens in the Cupertino. Normally there is some reasoning that public schools do well because of rich parents who can help fund the school and who generally care about their children’s education, and that’s an guess I might make about Cupertino based on your comment, but it seems to not be the case in SF.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Context: I grew up attending Cupertino schools. Cupertino schools are fairly well funded, but not as well funded as schools in say Palo Alto. It was my experience that in our school the best students did most of their learning outside of class as very few public school teachers could keep up with them. From what I hear, some parents would send their children to private schools because they would do this and the schools would have somewhat better mentoring, but overall I didn't see much difference in the quality of top students from either.
- asciimike 6y ago
  Have you seen the state of SF public schools lately? - https://www.sfusd.edu/about/news/current-news/SF-Board-of-Education-Advances-Plan-to-Rename-Schools https://www.sfusd.edu/about/news/current-news/SF-Board-of-Ed... (which is clearly more important than https://www.sfusd.edu/services/health-wellness/covid-19-coronavirus-resources-families-students/person-learning-readiness-dashboard-phase-2a https://www.sfusd.edu/services/health-wellness/covid-19-coro...) - https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1359382113875755011 https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1359382113875755011 - https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/sf-school-lottery-Lowell-High-15663889.php https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/sf-school-lottery-L... I think your idea of "rich parents funding SF public schools" would probably be rejected by the school board, so for most it's not even worth trying, given the proliferation of high quality private schools nearby. And even if the school accepts it, the community won't. Say what you want about Zuck, but he donated $75M to the only public hospital in the city and they don't even want to keep the building named after him and his wife (who worked there no less!). Comically, they can't actually do anything about it, so they stick to meaningless non-binding resolutions. Therefore, if given the choice, those who can are much more likely to spend 30-50k/year to send their kids to private HS than to try and go through the process of dealing with the city government. I assume that dealing with Cupertino/PA/etc. is frustrating, but not nearly as insane as SF.

lordnacho 6y ago

I would have thought that the most significant form of gaming the system would be discreet student selection. This is available to both independent and state school systems. You find a kid who isn't doing well in your school, and as the head teacher you find a way to invite them to leave. That way you don't need to have the resource for whatever special requirements they need, it gets dumped on some other school. It has the nice benefit of being vaguely justifiable, because of course there are kids who genuinely need special help. On the other end you game the system by offering scholarships, and by selecting parents who are keen enough to part with a few tens of thousands of pounds a year. I'm pretty surprised at the outright exam cheating though. My guess would be that if it happened it would be the teachers doctoring the papers without the students seeing it. My impression of the UK school system is that they've done a lot with reducing bullying in the last couple of decades. It's visible when you visit a school that they care about it, and the kids have assemblies about it, something that would have been left to the kids themselves back in my day.

occz 6y ago
> I would have thought that the most significant form of gaming the system would be discreet student selection. This is very common in the private, for-profit schools in Sweden. The general procedure goes as follows: 1. Spend heavily on marketing to attract 'good students' 2. Avoid selecting 'bad students' 3. Automatically use the scores that follow from this selection to create a feedback loop that keeps bringing in good students 4. Cut as much spending as you can - you're getting paid a set amount of money per student from the government, after all 5. Pocket the difference Meanwhile, the public schools are not allowed to engage in the same sort of filtering and are hence required to accept the 'bad students', which constrains their resources and creating the opposite feedback loop to what the private for-profit schools have. Kind of sickening, to be honest.
- sjg007 6y ago
  US charter schools do this extensively. It's the whole point of an entrance exam.
- ArkanExplorer 6y ago

aronhegedus 6y ago

My grammar school definitely mentioned in assemblies before the inspections that we should all be on our best behaviour, I'm pretty sure that's fairly standard in UK.

dan-robertson 6y ago
I think you’re right that telling students to behave is common. I think now the assessments happen wi less notice (day of or day before.) I’m not sure how I feel about inspections happening with so little notice. It’s surely a very stressful time to be a teacher. I wonder if inspections might be more fair if instead of a single inspection, several could be made over a year and then aggregated into the school’s grade.
- dash2 6y ago
  I would think unannounced inspections might be less stressful than announced ones. You have to make less effort preparing for them, and the standards are going to be a bit more relaxed, because the inspectors won't assume that you have prepared.
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    Well if you’re having a bad week or teaching a harder/slower/weirder part of the curriculum at the time or otherwise feel like you’re not on your best form it could be stressful. I don’t know how important inspections are to eg teachers’ pay or promotions but if they do matter then I think teachers would be stressed by a random inspection having an outsize impact on their careers compared to every other day

mattbee 6y ago

I can't see how old the author is but my son's primary school got 24hrs notice of their last inspection a coule of years back. A ex-teacher friend 10 years ago told me it was a lot less than a week's notice for her larger secondary. I'm sure some details are gameable, but what I'm more interested in are the inspectors' incentives, not just the schools'.

timthorn 6y ago
The author's experiences are historic. In 2012, the notice period for inspections was reduced to the afternoon before the inspectors turned up, but prior to that it could be several weeks: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/changes-to-education-inspections-announced https://www.gov.uk/government/news/changes-to-education-insp... The London Challenge was implemented to turn around the issues in London schools that the author recounts, and did so remarkably successfully: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Challeng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Challeng

etothepii 6y ago

I can't imagine teachers at my school ever actually cheating by giving results in exams. Teachers Unions in the UK fought very hard to remove exam invigilation from Teachers responsibilities, which makes that much harder. However, the inspection thing chimes strongly with my experience and the focus on the resistant materials track of design technology as a way that anyone can get a 'good pass'. All the effort went in to getting border line D kids to borderline C. If you were a borderline 5C candidate (a key metric in the UK at the time) you were on detention every night to try and trip over the line.

opheliate 6y ago

UK state schools absolutely suck. My experience mirrors that of the author in a lot of ways. I will say though, some of the content of this article appears outdated, and the author doesn't seem to have checked to see if their memory lines up with the reality of how things work today. For example, about Ofsted inspections: > Now, you may imagine that these inspections would be unannounced, so as to best get a real image of how a school works. Not the case. They’re scheduled well in advance. This is absolutely not the case today. Schools have a general idea of when an inspection will be (i.e: what season of the year) based on when their last inspection was, but they're only told that an inspection will happen on the morning of the inspection [0]. Schools don't really have a window of opportunity to game the inspection in the way the author describes. > Another way the stats were gamed was by not recording bad behavior This whole section seems a little naive. Teachers in lower sets have an incredibly tough job, and have to try to support those students who genuinely want to learn, but are struggling, while also managing the behaviour of disruptive children. Sometimes, it is the better option to just allow some disruptive behaviour slide (e.g: swearing) rather than interrupting the whole lesson just to deal with one kid. A lot of the time, if behaviour doesn't provoke any response, it won't escalate. As the author says, if a student is actually aggressive towards other students, then obviously action is taken, but I'm not sure they quite appreciate how difficult it is to try to teach a struggling class. wrt cheating, it definitely happens. I'm not personally aware of any examples quite as extreme as what the author described, but I know my Spanish teacher turned a blind eye while I let my friends copy my work, for example, and I'm sure in the lower sets behaviour such as this was more widespread. I will say though, the exams the author is talking about here are GCSEs. They don't determine your ability to get into university, they're only used by 6th-forms (equivalent of US high school) to determine what subjects you can study. While they absolutely affect parents' perception of schools, they are not quite as serious as if students were receiving A-levels based on cheating. Also, students choose GCSE subjects. If someone only speaks 20 words of French, it's unlikely they would choose to study French. 0: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/828451/School_inspections_-_a_guide_for_parents.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

bArray 6y ago
> This is absolutely not the case today. Schools have a general idea of when an inspection will be (i.e: what season of the year) based on when their last inspection was, but they're only told that an inspection will happen on the morning of the inspection [0]. I have family still in the school system in the UK - but they still get advanced notice. Essentially somebody at the school either knows the inspector or somebody very close to them, and gets a tip off about when it will occur. The system is still corrupt. One of the biggest things they do is to take a disruptive child and literally lock them up in a building called "room 101". The entire school would have an assembly on that morning at very first thing and told to behave or else. Half of the stories reflect exactly cases I know to have happened in my local secondary schools, where both students and teachers have acted badly, and in many cases illegally. Honestly, it really makes home schooling an attractive option if you can afford to do so.

steveharman 6y ago

I used to work in the UK care sector. The regulator there gave no notice of their arrival, they just turned up. Which feels like a far more effective way of seeing the real world operations of a school or care facility.

dan-robertson 6y ago
I think ofsted now do (at least some) inspections with no notice or one day of notice

xerosis 6y ago

UK school leader here. I can't argue with the perceptions in general, but an important thing to acknowledge is that school inspectors are not born yesterday. The inspectors will be former school leaders, and some still will be in schools themselves. They also speak to parents and students to get a full picture of the school. Is it all disingenuous? A bit, but doesn't everyone tidy their house before someone comes round?

cybert00th 6y ago

Focusing on the bullying aspects of the article for a moment, homeschooling goes a long way towards making that a non-issue. Both our homeschooled boys played hockey for a local school and both our homeschooled girls are in Air Cadets, so they get plenty of socialising, and we've never had to deal with bullying. I understand that homeschooling's not for everyone, but if you can then you should give it serious thought. Homeschooling's been around for decades, and with the advent of the Internet, there are now plenty of resources available - pretty much regardless of what country you're in.

violetgarden 6y ago
When I was younger, I thought homeschooling was almost exclusively because parents were weird and controlling - maybe even in a cult like situation. Or I thought homeschooling was for socially hopeless kids that couldn’t cut it in “real” school. I have no idea why my perception was so negative. Now that I’m older, my opinion has completely flipped. I am grateful to have had access to public education, but it was probably bronze standard at best. If I had children, I’d probably homeschool them.
- rdtwo 6y ago
  A lot of school problems don’t do away in the real world. Cheating, bullying, boredom are regular parts of daily life for many workers. There are life skills that are learned in school that aren’t just textbook educational items
  - musingsole 6y ago
    Those life skills get taught in homeschool programs too. Or are you under the impression homeschool students are locked away in a closet with a textbook and no windows until they turn 18? The only lesson a state school can teach that might be missing in a homeschool program is that large institutions are out of your control, have their own motivations, and will maim you without a second's hesitation.
  - rpiguyshy 6y ago

shiftoutbox 6y ago

Every school does this !

gambiting 6y ago

So my sister went to an extremely prestigious private school in the UK(basically Eton-level) and they had an easier way around it - they basically wouldn't let students sit exams they knew they would do poorly in, so the school wouldn't lose its great ratings. So my sister wasn't allowed to take maths or chemistry in her A-level years because the school didn't think she was good enough in those subjects to score and A or higher on the exam. So in her final year she only had literally a handful of subjects which weren't a danger to the school's academic rating.

doovd 6y ago
Very common practice amongst top schools in the UK.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Mine was in the top 2% or so, and that would never fly (One of the most dumbsad things I have seen in my life so far is the sight of watching someone not open his exam paper and fall asleep then try and have a go in the last five minutes in a panicked frenzy)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
alasdair_ 6y ago
I went to the top-ranked state school in Scotland and this absolutely happened to my friends - it’s not limited to private institutions. It was obvious that they were gaming the system at the expense of the pupils even then.
mercury_craze 6y ago
The story I've heard a few times is that students who are expected to perform poorly in their GCSE's or A-Levels get expelled for minor behavioural infractions prior to their final exams so their poor grades don't risk bringing down the average.
- 6y ago

not_knuth 6y ago

Every time I see an article like this about how the UK government (all large orginzations of people in general though) is obssessed with measuring meaningless things, I am reminded that it is the birthplace of Goodhart's Law [0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

IIAOPSW 6y ago
But the alternative to decision by metrics is decision by committee. The former may be gamed, but the latter may be corrupt. The inherent human nature that leads to corruption cannot be fixed, but in theory there could be a metric that isn't flawed. Therefore the solution is not to abandon evidence based policy, but to have more and better evidence based policy.
- caddemon 6y ago
  I've always wondered about using multiple metrics, but instead of combining them prior to selection, bin the spots and for each bin consider a subset of metrics weighted in different ways. For something like a school ranking, instead of giving a number (which is way more precision than I think these systems can actually achieve), the schools could be tiered - with each bin contributing some spots to the first tier, then repeat. At the very least it should diversify how people try to game the system, and then the "winners" of various bins could be studied to compare usage of different metrics in selection. If the specific formula could be kept mostly secret, perhaps switched up every so often, it would hopefully disincentivize gaming at all. Along those lines, committees and metrics could both be used. Give committees control over 10% of the spots or something. Corruption is obviously a downside, but I do think committees also have upsides that are difficult if not impossible to replicate with pure metrics. In doing this committee selections could also be tracked against the various metric ones for longer term outcomes.
iheartblocks 6y ago
I'm currently watching The Wire, and this aspect of people juking the stats to move up the ranks is a deep underlying theme. It's gotten me to thinking: what is the best alternative to focusing on metrics? Surely, relying on something other than data would be no improvement over the status quo. The only thought I've had is to: 1) Rely on a spectrum of metrics, to get a more holistic perspective. Instead of just seeing "crime is down x%" administrators would see how many reports end up classified as a lower-level infractions, how civilians rate the safety of their area, etc. 2) Add common-sense restrictions to make stat-pumping more difficult. For example, bringing in classroom inspections on random days 3) Penalizing institutions and individuals who are clearly attempting to juke the stats. Enforcement would certainly be difficult, but simply having something to this effect on the books would, imho, reduce schools dedicating time to studying for a standardized test

shawticus 6y ago

I went to a "blue ribbon" school that was attached to a continuation school. It was a great school. Kids behaved well, very upper middle class. However, if you were doing at all not great for any reason -- C average, struggling with depression or learning, anything -- they would pressure you into the continuation school right next door. So you have one school operating as two schools so that they can pretend to be the top school in the state by moving the bottom set next door.

waterhouse 6y ago

It begins to look as if the test-examination-marks business is a gigantic racket, the purpose of which is to enable students, teachers, and schools to take part in a joint pretense that the students know everything they are supposed to know, when in fact they know only a small part of it--if any at all. Why do we always announce exams in advance, if not to give students a chance to cram for them? Why do teachers, even in graduate schools, always say quite specifically what the exam will be about, even telling the type of questions that will be given? Because otherwise too many students would flunk. What would happen at Harvard or Yale if a prof gave a surprise test in March on work covered in October? Everyone knows what would happen; that's why they don't do it. ... When I was in my last year at school, we seniors stayed around an extra week to cram for college boards. Our ancient-history teacher told us, on the basis of long experience, that we would do well to prepare ourselves to write for twenty minutes on each of a list of fifteen topics that he gave us. We studied his list. We knew the wisdom of taking that kind of advice; if we had not, we would not have been at that school. When the boards came, we found that his list comfortably covered every one of the eight questions we were asked. So we got credit for knowing a great deal about ancient history, which we did not, he got credit for being a good teacher, which he was not, and the school got credit for being, as it was, a good place to go if you wanted to be sure of getting into a prestige college. The fact was that I knew very little about ancient history; that much of what I thought I knew was misleading or false; that then, and for many years afterwards, I disliked history and thought it pointless and a waste of time; and that two months later I could not have come close to passing the history college boards, or even a much easier test, but who cared? I have played the game myself. When I began teaching I thought, naively, that the purpose of a test was to test, to find out what the students knew about the course. It didn't take me long to find out that if I gave my students surprise tests, covering the whole material of the course to date, almost everyone flunked. This made me look bad, and posed problems for the school. I learned that the only way to get a respectable percentage of decent or even passing grades was to announce tests well in advance, tell in some detail what material they would cover, and hold plenty of advance practice in the kind of questions that would be asked, which is called review. I later learned that teachers do this everywhere. We know that what we are doing is not really honest, but we dare not be the first to stop, and we try to justify or excuse ourselves by saying that, after all, it does no particular harm. But we are wrong; it does great harm. It does harm, first of all, because it is dishonest and the students know it. My friends and I, breezing through the ancient-history boards, knew very well that a trick was being played on someone, we were not quite sure on whom. Our success on the boards was due, not to our knowledge of ancient history, which was scanty, but to our teacher's skill as a predictor, which was great. Even children much younger than we were learn that what most teachers' want and reward are not knowledge and understanding but the appearance of them. The smart and able ones, at least, come to look on school as something of a racket, which it is their job to learn how to beat. And learn they do; they become experts at smelling out the unspoken and often unconscious preferences and prejudices of their teachers, and at taking full advantage of them. My first English teacher at prep school gave us Macaulay's essay on Lord Clive to read, and from his pleasure in reading it aloud I saw that he was a sucker for the periodic sentence, a long complex sentence with the main verb at the end. Thereafter I took care to construct at least one such sentence in every paper I wrote for him, and thus assured myself a good mark in the course. Not only does the examination racket do harm by making students feel that a search for honest understanding is beside the point; it does further harm by discouraging those few students who go on making that search in spite of everything. The student who will not be satisfied merely to know "right answers" or recipes for getting them will not have an easy time in school, particularly since facts and recipes may be all that his teachers know. They tend to be impatient or even angry with the student who wants to know, not just what happened, but why it happened as it did and not some other way. They rarely have the knowledge to answer such questions, and even more rarely have the time; there is all that material to cover. In short, our "Tell-'em-and-test-'em" way of teaching leaves most students increasingly confused, aware that their academic success rests on shaky foundations, and convinced that school is mainly a place where you follow meaningless procedures to get meaningless answers to meaningless questions. — John Holt, How Children Fail

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago

Twenty years ago I was sharing a conclusion w/ my kids' principal - that preparing for state assessment tests was cheating. The point of the tests is to evaluate the schools overall effectiveness. As much as test-centric cramming effects those results, it creates a false picture. Some notes and observations: Because the state both accommodates and encourages this scenario, the fault can't reasonably be laid on the schools. A more impeccable (but problematic) way to handle these tests would be for the state to show up with little/no notice and administer it. I'm personally inclined to scrap state assessment testing altogether. The zero-sum nature of pitting the schools against each other for limited funding consumes a great deal of precious teaching time for little clear benefit. This conversation happened at our county's first charter school. A few years earlier, this principal happened to be my son's PS teacher.

andrei_says_ 6y ago
What is the expected benefit of punishing schools by underfunding them if they get beaten by other schools’ test scores? Have school districts not yet discovered that competition applied to learning is counterproductive?
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  I believe it is district funding that suffers for low grades and that it takes a few years of consistently low performance before the state applies any action. I should note that our schools are primarily funded from county taxes but state funding is enough to matter. However, the testing dynamic tends to nurture a perverse incentive for counties to showcase their high performing schools and increase funding to them. Some school boards resist that temptation better than others.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  Personally, I feel we have reached the limits of what schools can do with the current structures, that there is very little improvement that can be mined. The things we do to maximize fiscal efficiency (grouping by age, school start times during optimal sleep periods) aren't in the students' best interests. The OP's article seems to bear witness of that.

rpiguyshy 6y ago

i went to one of the best public schools in the states. even then the environment was toxic. heroin was dealt in the hallways, many kids even died of heroin overdoses. kids were viciously bullied and physically assaulted while the drooling, slack-jawed staff looked onward. i never put it together until now that this was probably because formally acknowledging what was going on would negatively impact the schools numbers/ratings. the school system as a whole wore away at the physical and psychological health of a massive number of kids because of the insane schedule that deprives them of sleep. this was scientifically proven a while ago. american public schools are a disgrace. i would never enroll my kids into a public school. they are glorified daycare centers where the inmates run the asylum. and all you have to do is reflect on your interactions with average americans to understand the fact that these schools are more likely to damage a person intellectually than advance them. the only thing that separates people who had a good experience vs people who didnt is their personality. if you are not on the spectrum then its just one big pleasant vacation. but if you are unhealthy, on the spectrum, have a troubled childhood or for whatever reason fall behind emotionally or socially, then public schools are worse than a death sentence. everyone involved should be ashamed.

ilamont 6y ago

In the U.S., I heard from a parent whose kids go to exclusive private schools that the schools will often hold new students back a year or even two, as they are more likely to do better in class, do well on standardized tests, and exceed in certain sports - all of which burnish the schools' reputations and lead to better college placements, which often means Ivies and other elite schools. Another option for students who struggle at public or private high schools (and whose parents can afford it) is a "post-graduate" year at a dedicated private academy for 18 and 19 year olds. The main purpose of these academies is to bring their grades and SATs up to a good level so they are more likely to get in to a good college. I know two people who did this in the 90s, one of them got into NYU after the post-grad academy.

cafard 6y ago
There is a private school I know of that has the reputation of putting new students back a year--but this typically would be in intake years such as sixth grade. Given that the school is also known for sports, I'm not sure to what extent this is for academics and to what extent for athletics.

timthorn 6y ago

The UK government introduced a test to check how children were progressing in phonics. Teachers were told the pass mark to aid in assessment, but the national results showed a remarkable bump for exactly the pass mark: https://schoolsweek.co.uk/phonics-check-needs-rethink-after-data-shows-something-dodgy/ https://schoolsweek.co.uk/phonics-check-needs-rethink-after-... The government decided to not share the pass mark ahead of time for tests in future years. I attended a conference that year at which the Education Secretary gave a keynote to an audience of educators; he got booed for not trusting teachers as a result.

cloudedcordial 6y ago

Same kind of cheating is present in Canadian public schools, too. This is a case that has been exposed. Just to give some context, the French language schools in an English speaking area in Canada is highly desirable by parents. Only the students who are strong academically attend those schools. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/eqao-cambridge-principal-test-french-school-1.3980277 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/eqao-cambr...

zackmorris 6y ago

I hadn't seen greaterwrong.com, and was hoping that it would offer counterarguments to articles on lesswrong.com, but it's just a summary of it. I get frustrated by articles like this because they focus on second-order causes instead of first-order. I don't know how it works overseas, but the main problem in the US is that schools are funded by property taxes from state and local governments instead of the federal government (which only accounts for less than 10% of funding): https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index.html https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index.html Which means that public schools are a magnifying glass for issues like discrimination and wealth inequality that the whole country is wrestling with. Want to know why schools in the south side of Chicago are doing worse than schools in Beverly Hills? There's your answer. Full stop. Until we fix that nationally, expect more of the same. What's the solution? To me it's very simple, but unfortunately we need some kind of consensus on this, and that's not going to happen until people start reaching similar conclusions when presented with the same facts. But we're more polarized than ever.. so.. let me offer an analogy instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel America is quite strong in certain areas (finance, the military, etc) but so weak in others (education, health and human services, etc) that we've become vulnerable. Look at Texas right now: the fossil fuel energy capital of America (maybe the world?) unable to keep the lights on as its citizens slowly freeze to death. Look at the US response to COVID-19 as hundreds of thousands of people die unnecessary deaths because we weren't brave enough to quarantine long enough. If that stuff isn't biblical, I don't know what is. No, these problems are not due to failings at the personal or local level. They're systemic, national and cultural.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> Want to know why schools in the south side of Chicago are doing worse than schools in Beverly Hills? There's your answer. Full stop. This analysis completely fails; the correlation between student performance and per-student spending in US schools is negative.
- bsanr2 6y ago
  Those figures never weigh parental wealth, income, and credit access.

amrrs 6y ago

Exactly the same thing I read about Delhi (Indian) Schools, 10th standard is board exams where the marks are published Nation-wide so to look good on Media, students who didn't do well during their 9th standard were "Pushed-out" of it to different schools so that their 10th std cohort looks awesome - https://thewire.in/education/delhi-govts-push-out-policy-for-class-10-students-forces-thousands-to-drop-out-of-school https://thewire.in/education/delhi-govts-push-out-policy-for...

alexpotato 6y ago

In high school, state and ETS (e.g. PSAT/SAT) tests were always required to be taken at a school from another district. For example, if you went to school in district A, everyone from district A took the test in a school building located in district B. The reverse was also true. This has always struck me as such an easy system to implement that I'm always surprised when I hear about the "teachers just changed the results" stories. While I'm sure this doesn't eliminate the risk of collusion, doesn't it dramatically reduce it? Plus, wasn't an entire chapter of Freakonomics dedicated to how teacher cheating can largely be caught algorithmically? In this day and age I would think it's even easier.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

physicsguy 6y ago

Ofsted has changed somewhat because they moved to 24 hour notice of inspection. When I was at secondary school, we did the same lesson three times with my French teacher before an upcoming OFSTED inspection and he said if we all kept quiet, he'd buy us all an Aero.

marshmallow_12 6y ago

the uk DofE are themselves guilty of the same crime. The school league tables do not include gcse statistics for key stage 3 students. This is because students in state schools don't take gcses before ks4- only private schools offer them. In order not to draw attention to the academic superiority of private schools and embarrass the state run schools, they simply ignore those gcse results! this artificially "improves" the quality of state education vs private.

gumby 6y ago

I have to confess a little sympathy even though I agree it’s dishonest. Most schools are struggling to evolve in an environment they weren’t set up for. And in parallel, parents with money and/or education for it definitely try to game the system as well. Hence a bit of sympathy on my part. I attended a private school that did the opposite: no “GPA” (just letter grades, no average nor class rank computed), its own curriculum, no designated “AP” courses (you could take the exam if you liked). And all the graduates did fine at university. It was very clear to me that they could get away with this because they had spent centuries educating kids. They strongly discouraged gaming the system...because they had gamed it at a deeper level already.