Atlanta Public Schools might be guilty of cheating, but the real scandal is standardized testing

[marmar]

from In These Times:


The Need to Cheat
Atlanta Public Schools might be guilty of cheating, but the real scandal is standardized testing.

BY Bill Ayers


The road to the massive cheating scandal in Atlanta runs right through the White House.

The former superintendent, Dr. Beverly L. Hall, and her 34 obedient subordinates now face criminal charges, but the central role played by a group of un-indicted and largely unacknowledged co-conspirators, her powerful enablers, is barely noted.

Beyond her “strong relationship with the business elite” who reportedly made her “untouchable” in Atlanta, she was a national super-star for more than a decade because her work embodied the shared educational policies of the Bush and Obama administrations. In the testing frenzy that characterized both No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top Dr. Hall was a winner, consistently praised over many years by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan for raising test scores, hosted at the White House in 2009 as superintendent of the year, and appointed in 2010 by President Obama to the National Board for Education Sciences. When the Atlanta scandal broke in 2011 Secretary Duncan rushed to assure the public that it was “very isolated” and “an easy one to fix.”

That’s not true. According to a recently released study by the independent monitoring group FairTest, cheating is “widespread” and fully documented in 37 states and Washington D.C. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/14813/the_ecstasy_of_influence_or_cheating/

[xchrom]

1. du rec. nt

[HERVEPA]

2. Check out the thoughts of the Gordon Commission below on the future of testing (assessment)

http://www.gordoncommission.org/

The general idea is that testing should be used to improve teaching and learning more than as a way to place a student, or grade a teacher.

[riderinthestorm]

3. The Duncan and Obama children aren't educated this way

from the article:

"I recently interviewed leaders at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools—the school Arne Duncan attended for 12 years and the school where the Obamas, the Duncans, and the Emanuels sent their children—and asked what role test scores played in teacher evaluations there. The answer was none. I pressed the point and was told that in their view test scores have no value in helping to understand or identify good teaching. None."

http://inthesetimes.com/article/14813/the_ecstasy_of_influence_or_cheating/

And there's no NCLB testing going on at Sidwell Friends either - where the Obama children attend today.