Wednesday, August 10, 2011

It's not our fault

Beverly Hall: Real progress made by APS is being ignored
[ajc "Get Schooled"] Beverly Hall tells the “rest” of the APS story in Education Week today, insisting that the real and dramatic progress in Atlanta schools is being ignored in the media frenzy over the cheating scandal.
One, Beverly Hall has no credibility left. Two, I'll concede that some progress could have been made, but yes, it's being overshadowed by the cheating scandal, and it should be. When one set of statistics is proven to be questionable, the source is tainted.

"The progress made by Atlanta’s public schools over the past decade is real and dramatic." Says you. Gonna have to have more than your say-so, Dr Hall. You don't think cheating is real and dramatic?
The cheater's fallacy: Undermining the state aptitude tests is no preparation for life
[Philadelphia Inquirer] The unidentified [Philadelphia] teacher justified her role and that of others in helping students cheat on the PSSA tests, which monitor school goals under No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The exposé came on the heels of cheating scandals in Atlanta, dozens of other cities and allegations of significant cheating in Philadelphia.

The teacher said her motivation wasn't to protect her job or bolster her school, but to protect the self-esteem of students battling poverty and the pressure of difficult home lives. She said her cheating was also meant to undermine the whole testing enterprise.
The...HELL?!?
Change the game
[Chicago Tribune] The way to stop that sort of behavior is not to waste more of our precious education dollars investigating whether teachers and administrators in Chicago and elsewhere might have changed test answers or found even more creative ways to cheat on high stakes standardized test. The way to stop the cheating is to change the rules of the assessment game. Rather than using one test to decide which schools are making grade, which teachers will keep their jobs and which administrators are effective leaders, we should be using a variety of measures over time.
Look, I want to agree. No single test is reliable enough to be worth the importance we give the CRCT. But are you seriously telling me that people who are guilty of criminal fraud should be let off the hook because President Bush and No Child Left Behind made them do it?
Bush to blame for cheating scandals
[Examiner.com] This national cheating embarrassment should bring an ugly but very necessary end to the Bush-era misevaluation of schools based on artificial targets as opposed to a holistic approach allowing teachers and administrators to assess individual students based on each child’s academic strengths and weaknesses.
I guess that's exactly what they mean.

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