But if you play Scrabble, you already knew...

TEACHER anagrams to CHEATER. According to an article in yesterday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, one hundred nine employees in the Atlanta school system, including 40 principals or other administrators, have been flagged for possible sanctions due to the widespread cheating scandal based on the 2009 CRCT (Georgia's acronym for the state-mandated testing I regularly refer to).  Of note, "many" of the schools involved performed dramatically worse on the 2010 CRCT, with failure rates of 2 - 4 times that of 2009.  Of the 109 employees flagged in Atlanta, 78 are from 12 schools.  All 12 of those principals have been reassigned, pending final state review and a decision on their certification.


One final note on the specifics of this story: the investigators presumably wanted to find out if teachers cheated.  There are several ways to cheat, including erasing wrong answers and filling in correct ones after the student has turned in the exam.  Another is to give correct answers to students during the test, or provide other assistance during the actual exam.  So of course, you'd want to interview a lot of kids to see if this kind of thing happened.  How many kids were interviewed? 12.  Of 292 total interviews, 12 were with kids. Hmmm....

"The commission's report cited no evidence that either Hall (the Atlanta schools Superintendent), who created an aggressive accountability system tied to test scores, or other top officials orchestrated or condoned cheating."


I have two issues here... first, I am deeply troubled by the fact that nearly 70 teachers in one school district are highly likely to have cheated.  I don't know how many teachers there are in total in Atlanta's elementary and middle schools, but 70 has to be a non-trivial percentage of them.  And that's just the ones who cheated blatantly enough to get caught.  And of course it doesn't include the ones who would have cheated but didn't get the opportunity or didn't need to because the kids they proctored were good enough on their own.  I thought teachers were the ones who abhorred cheaters...


Second, I find it laughable to suggest, as the quote above does, that the Superintendent has no culpability in this affair.  I don't think she encouraged cheating; I think, if asked directly, she would have forcefully discouraged cheating.  But I also think she set up a game in which CRCT scores were the only measure of how well you played, and she set the stakes on the outcome at an incredibly high level.  You have to be a fool to imagine, in that environment, there won't be widespread cheating.  Maybe she simultaneously "created an aggressive accountability system" tied to abiding by the rules, but I tend to doubt it.  (By the way, if the Journal-Constitution hadn't run several articles about the statistical near-impossibility of the test gains from 2008 to 2009, there'd be no scandal. The demise of newspapers will have costs.)


Bottom line: she, like most administrators I've encountered so far, cared about higher test scores, not better education.  The reason for that is simple:  she gets compensated for higher test scores.  When will we learn that to get better teaching, we need to incentivize teachers to teach better, and administrators to create an environment that fosters it?  Instead, we incentivize everyone to have students who get better scores, just because scores are easier to measure.


Final rant (of this message):  The school grade, the most important factor in the principal's bonus compensation, is based in part on graduation rate.  Suppose a senior is failing your Biology class, a subject he needs to graduate.  You're called into the principal's office to discuss this student.  Which of the following is the most likely to occur:
a) the principal praises you for maintaining high standards and insisting students master the content the state says they must in order to graduate,
b) the principal encourages you to work harder with this student to enable him to master the content he needs to pass your course, and offers support to enable you to do that,
c) the principal informs you that the failure rate in your classes is unacceptably high, and that you are not only not eligible for a bonus based on teaching excellence, but your job is potentially in jeopardy if that rate doesn't come down.
d) option (c), plus the student is withdrawn from your class and put into an on-line Biology course he miraculously manages to pass within 2 weeks despite being unable to spell "biology," or speak in full sentences.