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A Middle-School Cheating Scandal Raises Questions About No Child Left Behind

129 points by sizzle 12y ago

edwhitesell 12y ago
Sweet! An article from the future.
jonah 12y ago
I had an conversation with a just-retired teacher this weekend. In addition to the days (a week?) of testing the students at her school had to endure, they were a site for testing a new test and so were subjected to another week of testing. It's possible for students to opt-out of standardized testing but of course the school is required to have a very high participation rate (90+%?) or else they'll be penalized. One of the teachers had been informing students of their right to opt-out and making the necessary forms available to them. As soon as the administration saw a number of students opting out, they brought them in one-by-one and interrogated them as to which of their teachers was doing this. He was admonished (or worse). The whole system of criteria and incentives are so broken. This is analytics and big-data gone awry. "You can't improve what you don't measure," sure, but the wrong things are being measured and the incentives are wrong and the consequences backwards. Sigh.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  When you start measuring things in education, what you get collapses onto what you are measuring, like a wave function collapsing in quantum mechanics. Everything else goes out the window. In the UK, we have a Parliamentary Committee for Education, the leader of which is Graham Stuart, a Conservative MP who has shown on a number of occasions that he is prepared to challenge the education minister, Michael Gove, when the committee sees an issue developing. One morning on the radio he said something like 'if you set targets for schools, don't be surprised if schools do what they have to do to achieve the targets'. I didn't have time to get the quote down verbatim. In the UK context this particular incident would be impossible for a variety of reasons, but we do see very heavy resources being concentrated on students expected to get a C (pass) on GCSE exams to the detriment (arguably) of weaker students and students at the top of the ability range. Triage may help manage casualties on a battle field but it is not so good for school children. Most schools call the students they focus on 'DtoC' students. Gove is trying to hack the measurement system to remove the incentives for schools doing this. Same as OA, it might be better to have a system where percentage pass scores are not mechanistically used in this way. I don't know what the answer is!
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    I posted a link to actual tests/curricula elsewhere in the thread. Please be specific - what is missing? Your complaint that UK schools maximize the number of passing students is a complaint about the particular educational goal, not testing.
    - keithpeter 12y ago
      My understanding of the OA is that the school where the teacher cheated was under threat of closure unless test scores reached some arbitrary percentage. The existence of tests themselves is not the issue as you say. Meta: could downvoters engage more?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  > This is analytics and big-data gone awry. "You can't improve what you don't measure," sure, but the wrong things are being measured and the incentives are wrong and the consequences backwards. Sigh. This works well when it's factory spitting out Chevy sedans. You measure the parts, if they don't fit you fix them or replace them. But it can't work for people. Human beings are not cogs in a machine. They're not easily measured, and the act of measuring can actually change the values... for the worse. It's fucking sick.
- bostik 12y ago
  > "You can't improve what you don't measure," sure, but the wrong things are being measured and the incentives are wrong and the consequences backwards. A direct corollary: you get what you measure. Nothing more, and nothing less. In education and humans therein lies the problem. When all effort is expended towards hitting metrics, only the chosen metrics will be improved. Everything else is left to degrade. If you add the incentives to punish for not hitting the targets, of course you get cheating. A little at first, but when the improved goals are now set based on false data, you encourage a more systematic cheating. One aspect of problem has been already witnessed in Finland, the country of supposedly superior education system. University staff are well aware of this but can do nothing about it. If I had to guess, I would say that the administators are simply divorced from reality. I don't know if there is much cheating going on. We may not be that far down in the drain; what we do have, is a constant pressure to over-achieve. There are teachers and professors who all say same the same thing. I wonder what happens when the researchers and teachers will get punished for not meeting their >100% performance targets year-over-year.
  - Rapzid 12y ago
    Maybe broader tests with lower passing scores and weighted questions in very targeted areas?
  - VLM 12y ago
    "I wonder what happens when the researchers and teachers will get punished for not meeting their >100% performance targets year-over-year." This is not considered a bug in the system, if we graduate more of them than we need, and as seen in the article cronyism and gang/mafia mentality is rampant. So in a system built on cheating, the "cooperative" will have their performance targets fixed, and the "non-team players" will be removed. Superficially the goal of standardized testing is to produce a populace thats real good at taking standardized tests, which is of course a totally useless goal, but its easy to measure. Slightly deeper, the goal of standardized testing is to remove autonomy from teachers as a punishment by forcing them to teach to the test. A bit deeper and the purpose of standardized testing is to encourage corruption. If one party has a political goal of fighting the teachers union, what better long term plan than to force them all to become thugs or leave? The other party likes it also, because who doesn't want an army of thugs? Nobody wants the kids to learn anything, unfortunately. Sometimes it happens accidentally, but it doesn't matter.
- zarify 12y ago
  Heh. I've heard from other teachers that we have the opposite issue: some schools encouraging students who will perform poorly to be absent whenever testing happens. (Australia, not US, so not sure how you lot handle absentees for testing purposes.)
bendoit 12y ago
Our small town school district has very similar cheating going on with the state tests. The teachers involved are fairly bold about it. The kids would talk about getting advance copies of the final secured tests to bring home and practice with. I made copies of these tests, contacted the state department of education, and tried to report it. That was difficult and there was a lot of runaround regarding who would accept reports. Technically parents and others are not allowed to report cheating, it is to be done only by school staff. I then contacted several local media reporters. They were surprisingly uninterested, perhaps since nearly everyone around has family members that work for schools in some capacity or another. After contacting media though the state board must have heard what I was trying to do because the person in charge of testing at the state level personally contacted me, told me that although it might technically be considered cheating it wasn't really cheating, and that there was nothing to report. Why is all this? Everyone is cheating, everyone knows they're cheating, and they all think they are so clever cheating the system because it results somehow in more federal funding via race to the top grants and the like. I let my kids finish this school year. But that's the last year in that system, and now we are going back to homeschooling where they can learn something. Despite the advantages of cheating, the school has almost total dedication to test preparation every day of the year and no time for real academics. School is a tedious bore and the students are ignorant.
- kdragon 12y ago
  "There's a reason education sucks, it's the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better, don't look for it, be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners, now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club." - George Carlin There's your answer to why. The answer to how involves more details, but it basically has to do with pacifying the concept of critical thinking from our education system and all facets of american culture, and replacing it with rote learning. It's a lower form of intelligence, which is great for passing arbitrary tests and producing the obedient workers who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. The best thing you can do for a child is teach them how to think and learn for themselves. Grow their critical thinking skills and get them into programming or engineering. Teach them empathy. Oh, and buy them a bitcoin.
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
As a father of two young children, the decision to homeschool looks better every day.
- jonah 12y ago
  Do it. Connect with other families to share educational experiences and social time with too.
- frozenport 12y ago
  Don't. Are you in dysfunctional intercity district? If you don't like the schooling can you move a few miles to a better school?
- macspoofing 12y ago
  The issues in this article go for beyond NCLB and some cheating. Parks was in a district in which students came from incredibly difficult home situations. No school or teacher or test was going to change that. That may not be your situation. Most likely, it ISN'T your situation. There are probably other reasons why you chose homeschool (there are some very bad reasons people choose to homeschool their kids, and few good ones), but you shouldn't use this one.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
    No, the implication is that people like me are supposed to school-shop by being rich enough to get jobs and homes in a "good" school district. They'll still teach to the same tests (don't want to lose status). It's just that the children are mostly untraumatized enough to pass those for them, and past that any educational efforts are superficial and shallow. That sounds like just as bad an outcome to me as if they were rotting in some inner city hellhole.
    - turar 12y ago
      I will have to choose school soon for my son, and seems like my choice is private or homeschooling.
patio11 12y ago
The reporting on this scandal has focused on NCLB as the evil outside influence which corrupted the garden of Eden that was Atlanta public schools. That is like blaming the coroner's office for a spate of murders. Atlanta schools were ineffectual, corrupt money pits which failed generations of poor students, and that was not a problem until Washington upset the apple cart and put a number on it.
- haberman 12y ago
  I think the question is whether the intervention from Washington actually made things better.
  - tankenmate 12y ago
    Indeed, when the stats themselves say that between 1% to 14% of the students' mark was determined by the quality of the teacher. One has to wonder if as much time and effort was put into the other 86%. It brings back to mind a similarly minded statement made by my Uni stats professor; make sure you're measuring what you think you're measuring.
    - danielweber 12y ago
      It seems very useful to know how much of the students' performance is up to the teacher. If very little, than we don't need to worry about quality teachers, and just get the minimum level necessary to keep the peace in the classroom. If a lot, then we should worry a lot about teacher quality, and work hard to make sure that we are only recruiting and keeping very effective teachers.
      - zarify 12y ago
        I know we love to harp on about teacher quality, but there are plenty of other factors that are just as important like access to the right learning programs, classroom mix and so on. As a teacher I'll be the first to admit that for some students about the best we can hope for is to keep the peace until the mature or find something compelling that gives them a reason to succeed. It's not as simple as "all teachers make $difference%".
tn13 12y ago
Questions about "No Child Left Behind" exist irrespective of cheating scandals.
frozenport 12y ago
Should be titled: A Middle-School Cheating Scandal Raises Questions About the Effectiveness of Schools It appears that there was nothing teachers could do to raise students to the level of standardize tests. With schools that are unable to perform their education task, one wonders why we have them in the first place. One potential solution to these problems is to aggressively segment students into winning and loosing groups based on academic performance. Although doing so has often been met with accusation of racism.
- cowpig 12y ago
  > With schools that are unable to perform their education task, one wonders why we have them in the first place. > One potential solution to these problems is to aggressively segment students into winning and loosing groups based on academic performance. Although doing so has often been met with accusation of racism. Why stop there? Let's just round up all the kids who can't do Math and just send them to labor camps. Might as well prepare them for what they'll be good for from an early age! If you read the article, you'll see that the school in question was, in fact, doing extremely well when compared to other schools in the area, before the cheating even began. The use of metrics, as well as the fact that they were arbitrarily or unrealistically set resulted in the disaster (or so argues the author)
- a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
  Yeah, the harsh reality of the situation is that instead of "no child left behind" we really do need "leave about a fifth of the children behind." At least in terms of academic test performance. I'm sure they can benefit from education in other ways.
- VLM 12y ago
  We segment our students by real estate into winning and losing groups based on the assumption that parental income = academic performance. The primary result of NCLB is proving this has a rather intense correlation. Locally our housing is hyper segregated (despite not being in the South) so naturally our schools are also racially segregated, as are our test results. Racial income inequality is not likely to be solved by metric data worship, although that does act as an effective distractor from the root cause(s).
sizzle 12y ago
@dang/mods could you update the url with full page view: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/07/21/140721fa_fact_aviv?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/07/21/140721fa_fact_... Thanks.
davidgerard 12y ago
The essential problem is the frankly insane practice of funding schools from local property taxes. Then being surprised when the poor schools are terrible. Then attempting to fix it with NCLB and Common Core and berating teachers and so forth, as if desperately trying to avoid the root cause of the problem.
- a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
  Money is irrelevant. Many of the worst schools in America are the most lavishly funded.
  - ejstronge 12y ago
    I find this very hard to believe - are there data available on the correlation between funding and school performance? Also, how long has this correlation occurred?
    - Glide 12y ago
      Living in NOVA it's hard to ignore the issues of DC public schools. A quick search gives this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/23/the-dramatic-inequality-of-public-school-spending-in-america/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/23/t... And googling "DC public school spending" gives a figure closer to 29K per student.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - ejstronge 12y ago
        The article you link indeed shows there's surprising spending levels in some states but this doesn't quite link spending to school performance. I'm only making this statement because it's sometimes easy to cite a correlation to support a point when there's no causal relationship. Thus, irrespective of how much a school spends per-pupil, it's critical to relate spending to educational outcomes. You could imagine a case, for example, where schools on the East Coast necessarily spend more than schools on the West Coast to maintain old buildings (I'm not saying this is the case, of course).
deleted 12y ago
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axus 12y ago
One thing the SAT gets right, you have to go to an independent location for the testing.
billyhoffman 12y ago
I was born and raised in Atlanta, Marietta specifically. It is a wealthy area with some of the best public schools in Georgia. I went to Dickerson Middle School. The vast majority of my peers had 2 parent homes. Both parents worked and could afford a babysitter/nanny, or one parent's income was enough for the other to stay home. The area is incredibly safe. I rode my bike to school. At Parks, as this article says, the majority of students have a single parent household, with drug abuse problems, and extreme poverty. 2 of Parks middle school students were raped in a single school year. Comparing Dickerson's test scores to Parks's test scores is insane. Should Parks, and schools like it, be held to certain standards? Yes. Absolutely. But excellence in education is affected by far more factors than the quality of the school and its teachers. The article discusses how Lewis, a teacher, was operating almost as a social worker for many of these kids (doing laundry, driving them home at night, etc). The solution isn't "throw more money at the school" or "hold them to a standard test metric." Its more complicated than you think. Education, crime, employment, these things are linked. We can't address these in isolation.
- jseliger 12y ago
  Education, crime, employment, these things are linked. For an alternate perspective: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2014/06/25/smartest-kids-in-the-world-finland/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2014/06/25/smartest-kids-... . The book is worth reading too. Also: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2014/05/17/why-cant-we-solve-poverty-or-solve-it-through-schools/ http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2014/05/17/why-cant-we-solve-p... .
mschuster91 12y ago
Shifting the blame for low scores onto the teachers SUCKS. Teachers are in no position at all to help their students when their parents are too damn poor or high to ensure an environment in which their children can actually learn.
- veritas20 12y ago
  Ok, so what is your suggestion for making the parents less poor or less high? General and baseless comments like these do not contribute positively to the collective conversation.
  - mschuster91 12y ago
    Choose another metric to compare schools/teachers (next to impossible), or factor in the "poorness" of the students/their parents. E.g. a rich, clean white hood gets higher thresholds for A than a poor black hood filled with junkies and violence. This is not perfect either, but a rich/poor offset allows for a far better comparison.
    - yummyfajitas 12y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling
jeffdavis 12y ago
This is a complicated issue, of course, but here are a few basics to guide the conversation: 1. When passing out tax dollars, the tax payers want the recipients to be accountable. That's true even if the accountability is misguided, partial, biased, creates some bad incentives, etc. Saying "we want tax dollars to educate children, but we don't want any responsibility to show you results" is just not a sustainable situation. 2. The more remote the taxpayers are, the more they will rely on cold, objective numbers to satisfy the accountability. A local community knows more about how its students are doing and whether the school is accomplishing its goals and will rely less on the numbers. Federal dollars being sent thousands of miles away will come along with standardized tests, because the taxpayers have no other way to judge whether their money is accomplishing anything. 3. Some subjects are more easily tested objectively than others, e.g. arithmetic tests are more accurate than creative writing tests. 4. People tend to optimize more for things that can be objectively measured, e.g. money over happiness; or math over painting; or horsepower over interior comforts. 5. Tests are most effective when they don't directly influence the test-takers. For instance, a street survey about who can name the 9 justices on the Supreme Court might tell us quite a bit about the knowledge of average citizens about government. But if we keep asking the same question again and again all over the place, people will learn the answer to that single question, making the results look better. But the citizen's knowledge about government hasn't really changed much.

129 points by sizzle 12y ago

Sweet! An article from the future.

jonah 12y ago

I had an conversation with a just-retired teacher this weekend. In addition to the days (a week?) of testing the students at her school had to endure, they were a site for testing a new test and so were subjected to another week of testing. It's possible for students to opt-out of standardized testing but of course the school is required to have a very high participation rate (90+%?) or else they'll be penalized. One of the teachers had been informing students of their right to opt-out and making the necessary forms available to them. As soon as the administration saw a number of students opting out, they brought them in one-by-one and interrogated them as to which of their teachers was doing this. He was admonished (or worse). The whole system of criteria and incentives are so broken. This is analytics and big-data gone awry. "You can't improve what you don't measure," sure, but the wrong things are being measured and the incentives are wrong and the consequences backwards. Sigh.

keithpeter 12y ago
When you start measuring things in education, what you get collapses onto what you are measuring, like a wave function collapsing in quantum mechanics. Everything else goes out the window. In the UK, we have a Parliamentary Committee for Education, the leader of which is Graham Stuart, a Conservative MP who has shown on a number of occasions that he is prepared to challenge the education minister, Michael Gove, when the committee sees an issue developing. One morning on the radio he said something like 'if you set targets for schools, don't be surprised if schools do what they have to do to achieve the targets'. I didn't have time to get the quote down verbatim. In the UK context this particular incident would be impossible for a variety of reasons, but we do see very heavy resources being concentrated on students expected to get a C (pass) on GCSE exams to the detriment (arguably) of weaker students and students at the top of the ability range. Triage may help manage casualties on a battle field but it is not so good for school children. Most schools call the students they focus on 'DtoC' students. Gove is trying to hack the measurement system to remove the incentives for schools doing this. Same as OA, it might be better to have a system where percentage pass scores are not mechanistically used in this way. I don't know what the answer is!
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  I posted a link to actual tests/curricula elsewhere in the thread. Please be specific - what is missing? Your complaint that UK schools maximize the number of passing students is a complaint about the particular educational goal, not testing.
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    My understanding of the OA is that the school where the teacher cheated was under threat of closure unless test scores reached some arbitrary percentage. The existence of tests themselves is not the issue as you say. Meta: could downvoters engage more?
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
> This is analytics and big-data gone awry. "You can't improve what you don't measure," sure, but the wrong things are being measured and the incentives are wrong and the consequences backwards. Sigh. This works well when it's factory spitting out Chevy sedans. You measure the parts, if they don't fit you fix them or replace them. But it can't work for people. Human beings are not cogs in a machine. They're not easily measured, and the act of measuring can actually change the values... for the worse. It's fucking sick.
bostik 12y ago
> "You can't improve what you don't measure," sure, but the wrong things are being measured and the incentives are wrong and the consequences backwards. A direct corollary: you get what you measure. Nothing more, and nothing less. In education and humans therein lies the problem. When all effort is expended towards hitting metrics, only the chosen metrics will be improved. Everything else is left to degrade. If you add the incentives to punish for not hitting the targets, of course you get cheating. A little at first, but when the improved goals are now set based on false data, you encourage a more systematic cheating. One aspect of problem has been already witnessed in Finland, the country of supposedly superior education system. University staff are well aware of this but can do nothing about it. If I had to guess, I would say that the administators are simply divorced from reality. I don't know if there is much cheating going on. We may not be that far down in the drain; what we do have, is a constant pressure to over-achieve. There are teachers and professors who all say same the same thing. I wonder what happens when the researchers and teachers will get punished for not meeting their >100% performance targets year-over-year.
- Rapzid 12y ago
  Maybe broader tests with lower passing scores and weighted questions in very targeted areas?
- VLM 12y ago
  "I wonder what happens when the researchers and teachers will get punished for not meeting their >100% performance targets year-over-year." This is not considered a bug in the system, if we graduate more of them than we need, and as seen in the article cronyism and gang/mafia mentality is rampant. So in a system built on cheating, the "cooperative" will have their performance targets fixed, and the "non-team players" will be removed. Superficially the goal of standardized testing is to produce a populace thats real good at taking standardized tests, which is of course a totally useless goal, but its easy to measure. Slightly deeper, the goal of standardized testing is to remove autonomy from teachers as a punishment by forcing them to teach to the test. A bit deeper and the purpose of standardized testing is to encourage corruption. If one party has a political goal of fighting the teachers union, what better long term plan than to force them all to become thugs or leave? The other party likes it also, because who doesn't want an army of thugs? Nobody wants the kids to learn anything, unfortunately. Sometimes it happens accidentally, but it doesn't matter.
zarify 12y ago
Heh. I've heard from other teachers that we have the opposite issue: some schools encouraging students who will perform poorly to be absent whenever testing happens. (Australia, not US, so not sure how you lot handle absentees for testing purposes.)

bendoit 12y ago

Our small town school district has very similar cheating going on with the state tests. The teachers involved are fairly bold about it. The kids would talk about getting advance copies of the final secured tests to bring home and practice with. I made copies of these tests, contacted the state department of education, and tried to report it. That was difficult and there was a lot of runaround regarding who would accept reports. Technically parents and others are not allowed to report cheating, it is to be done only by school staff. I then contacted several local media reporters. They were surprisingly uninterested, perhaps since nearly everyone around has family members that work for schools in some capacity or another. After contacting media though the state board must have heard what I was trying to do because the person in charge of testing at the state level personally contacted me, told me that although it might technically be considered cheating it wasn't really cheating, and that there was nothing to report. Why is all this? Everyone is cheating, everyone knows they're cheating, and they all think they are so clever cheating the system because it results somehow in more federal funding via race to the top grants and the like. I let my kids finish this school year. But that's the last year in that system, and now we are going back to homeschooling where they can learn something. Despite the advantages of cheating, the school has almost total dedication to test preparation every day of the year and no time for real academics. School is a tedious bore and the students are ignorant.

kdragon 12y ago
"There's a reason education sucks, it's the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better, don't look for it, be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners, now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club." - George Carlin There's your answer to why. The answer to how involves more details, but it basically has to do with pacifying the concept of critical thinking from our education system and all facets of american culture, and replacing it with rote learning. It's a lower form of intelligence, which is great for passing arbitrary tests and producing the obedient workers who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. The best thing you can do for a child is teach them how to think and learn for themselves. Grow their critical thinking skills and get them into programming or engineering. Teach them empathy. Oh, and buy them a bitcoin.

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago

As a father of two young children, the decision to homeschool looks better every day.

jonah 12y ago
Do it. Connect with other families to share educational experiences and social time with too.
frozenport 12y ago
Don't. Are you in dysfunctional intercity district? If you don't like the schooling can you move a few miles to a better school?
macspoofing 12y ago
The issues in this article go for beyond NCLB and some cheating. Parks was in a district in which students came from incredibly difficult home situations. No school or teacher or test was going to change that. That may not be your situation. Most likely, it ISN'T your situation. There are probably other reasons why you chose homeschool (there are some very bad reasons people choose to homeschool their kids, and few good ones), but you shouldn't use this one.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  No, the implication is that people like me are supposed to school-shop by being rich enough to get jobs and homes in a "good" school district. They'll still teach to the same tests (don't want to lose status). It's just that the children are mostly untraumatized enough to pass those for them, and past that any educational efforts are superficial and shallow. That sounds like just as bad an outcome to me as if they were rotting in some inner city hellhole.
  - turar 12y ago
    I will have to choose school soon for my son, and seems like my choice is private or homeschooling.

patio11 12y ago

The reporting on this scandal has focused on NCLB as the evil outside influence which corrupted the garden of Eden that was Atlanta public schools. That is like blaming the coroner's office for a spate of murders. Atlanta schools were ineffectual, corrupt money pits which failed generations of poor students, and that was not a problem until Washington upset the apple cart and put a number on it.

haberman 12y ago
I think the question is whether the intervention from Washington actually made things better.
- tankenmate 12y ago
  Indeed, when the stats themselves say that between 1% to 14% of the students' mark was determined by the quality of the teacher. One has to wonder if as much time and effort was put into the other 86%. It brings back to mind a similarly minded statement made by my Uni stats professor; make sure you're measuring what you think you're measuring.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    It seems very useful to know how much of the students' performance is up to the teacher. If very little, than we don't need to worry about quality teachers, and just get the minimum level necessary to keep the peace in the classroom. If a lot, then we should worry a lot about teacher quality, and work hard to make sure that we are only recruiting and keeping very effective teachers.
    - zarify 12y ago
      I know we love to harp on about teacher quality, but there are plenty of other factors that are just as important like access to the right learning programs, classroom mix and so on. As a teacher I'll be the first to admit that for some students about the best we can hope for is to keep the peace until the mature or find something compelling that gives them a reason to succeed. It's not as simple as "all teachers make $difference%".

tn13 12y ago

Questions about "No Child Left Behind" exist irrespective of cheating scandals.

frozenport 12y ago

Should be titled: A Middle-School Cheating Scandal Raises Questions About the Effectiveness of Schools It appears that there was nothing teachers could do to raise students to the level of standardize tests. With schools that are unable to perform their education task, one wonders why we have them in the first place. One potential solution to these problems is to aggressively segment students into winning and loosing groups based on academic performance. Although doing so has often been met with accusation of racism.

cowpig 12y ago
> With schools that are unable to perform their education task, one wonders why we have them in the first place. > One potential solution to these problems is to aggressively segment students into winning and loosing groups based on academic performance. Although doing so has often been met with accusation of racism. Why stop there? Let's just round up all the kids who can't do Math and just send them to labor camps. Might as well prepare them for what they'll be good for from an early age! If you read the article, you'll see that the school in question was, in fact, doing extremely well when compared to other schools in the area, before the cheating even began. The use of metrics, as well as the fact that they were arbitrarily or unrealistically set resulted in the disaster (or so argues the author)
a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
Yeah, the harsh reality of the situation is that instead of "no child left behind" we really do need "leave about a fifth of the children behind." At least in terms of academic test performance. I'm sure they can benefit from education in other ways.
VLM 12y ago
We segment our students by real estate into winning and losing groups based on the assumption that parental income = academic performance. The primary result of NCLB is proving this has a rather intense correlation. Locally our housing is hyper segregated (despite not being in the South) so naturally our schools are also racially segregated, as are our test results. Racial income inequality is not likely to be solved by metric data worship, although that does act as an effective distractor from the root cause(s).

sizzle 12y ago

@dang/mods could you update the url with full page view: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/07/21/140721fa_fact_aviv?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/07/21/140721fa_fact_... Thanks.

davidgerard 12y ago

The essential problem is the frankly insane practice of funding schools from local property taxes. Then being surprised when the poor schools are terrible. Then attempting to fix it with NCLB and Common Core and berating teachers and so forth, as if desperately trying to avoid the root cause of the problem.

a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
Money is irrelevant. Many of the worst schools in America are the most lavishly funded.
- ejstronge 12y ago
  I find this very hard to believe - are there data available on the correlation between funding and school performance? Also, how long has this correlation occurred?
  - Glide 12y ago
    Living in NOVA it's hard to ignore the issues of DC public schools. A quick search gives this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/23/the-dramatic-inequality-of-public-school-spending-in-america/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/23/t... And googling "DC public school spending" gives a figure closer to 29K per student.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - ejstronge 12y ago
      The article you link indeed shows there's surprising spending levels in some states but this doesn't quite link spending to school performance. I'm only making this statement because it's sometimes easy to cite a correlation to support a point when there's no causal relationship. Thus, irrespective of how much a school spends per-pupil, it's critical to relate spending to educational outcomes. You could imagine a case, for example, where schools on the East Coast necessarily spend more than schools on the West Coast to maintain old buildings (I'm not saying this is the case, of course).

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axus 12y ago

One thing the SAT gets right, you have to go to an independent location for the testing.

billyhoffman 12y ago

I was born and raised in Atlanta, Marietta specifically. It is a wealthy area with some of the best public schools in Georgia. I went to Dickerson Middle School. The vast majority of my peers had 2 parent homes. Both parents worked and could afford a babysitter/nanny, or one parent's income was enough for the other to stay home. The area is incredibly safe. I rode my bike to school. At Parks, as this article says, the majority of students have a single parent household, with drug abuse problems, and extreme poverty. 2 of Parks middle school students were raped in a single school year. Comparing Dickerson's test scores to Parks's test scores is insane. Should Parks, and schools like it, be held to certain standards? Yes. Absolutely. But excellence in education is affected by far more factors than the quality of the school and its teachers. The article discusses how Lewis, a teacher, was operating almost as a social worker for many of these kids (doing laundry, driving them home at night, etc). The solution isn't "throw more money at the school" or "hold them to a standard test metric." Its more complicated than you think. Education, crime, employment, these things are linked. We can't address these in isolation.

jseliger 12y ago
Education, crime, employment, these things are linked. For an alternate perspective: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2014/06/25/smartest-kids-in-the-world-finland/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2014/06/25/smartest-kids-... . The book is worth reading too. Also: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2014/05/17/why-cant-we-solve-poverty-or-solve-it-through-schools/ http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2014/05/17/why-cant-we-solve-p... .

mschuster91 12y ago

Shifting the blame for low scores onto the teachers SUCKS. Teachers are in no position at all to help their students when their parents are too damn poor or high to ensure an environment in which their children can actually learn.

veritas20 12y ago
Ok, so what is your suggestion for making the parents less poor or less high? General and baseless comments like these do not contribute positively to the collective conversation.
- mschuster91 12y ago
  Choose another metric to compare schools/teachers (next to impossible), or factor in the "poorness" of the students/their parents. E.g. a rich, clean white hood gets higher thresholds for A than a poor black hood filled with junkies and violence. This is not perfect either, but a rich/poor offset allows for a far better comparison.
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling

jeffdavis 12y ago

This is a complicated issue, of course, but here are a few basics to guide the conversation: 1. When passing out tax dollars, the tax payers want the recipients to be accountable. That's true even if the accountability is misguided, partial, biased, creates some bad incentives, etc. Saying "we want tax dollars to educate children, but we don't want any responsibility to show you results" is just not a sustainable situation. 2. The more remote the taxpayers are, the more they will rely on cold, objective numbers to satisfy the accountability. A local community knows more about how its students are doing and whether the school is accomplishing its goals and will rely less on the numbers. Federal dollars being sent thousands of miles away will come along with standardized tests, because the taxpayers have no other way to judge whether their money is accomplishing anything. 3. Some subjects are more easily tested objectively than others, e.g. arithmetic tests are more accurate than creative writing tests. 4. People tend to optimize more for things that can be objectively measured, e.g. money over happiness; or math over painting; or horsepower over interior comforts. 5. Tests are most effective when they don't directly influence the test-takers. For instance, a street survey about who can name the 9 justices on the Supreme Court might tell us quite a bit about the knowledge of average citizens about government. But if we keep asking the same question again and again all over the place, people will learn the answer to that single question, making the results look better. But the citizen's knowledge about government hasn't really changed much.