Widespread fraud in Atlanta student test scores

Schools across the nation that are under increasing pressure to raise their students’ test scores now have a choice. They can engage in all that messy and complicated teaching stuff or they can just follow Atlanta’s example and simply change the students’ incorrect answers to the correct ones.

 I am sure that Atlanta Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall figured she had found the simple answer to the school testing problem. How do you get the scores up? Since the students were giving the wrong answers on the tests, why not simply help them out a bit by erasing their wrong answers and substituting the correct ones?

 Hall was named national superintendent of the year for her brilliant success in raising the test scores and the only problem she had was keeping her secret from leaking out. After all, dozens of teachers were involved in the fraud. So she turned nasty to keep the cover-up in place, using disciplinary measures, intimidation and retaliation to keep her employees in line.

Now that the secret is out, what does she have to say? Sorry, she’s on vacation in Hawaii!

You can read a New York Times report on this here.

 It only leaked out after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution determined that the grade improvements were statistically improbable and went looking for answers. What they found were erasure marks on the tests. That’s right! The answer to improving our schools was right there all the time, on the top end of every pencil in the school!

 For those of us who spent time in higher education and constantly wondered how on earth all these kids who knew next to nothing about grammar, math and civics made it out of high school, the answer was right there at the end of the pencil.

 What does this say about the moral and ethical standards in high schools? How common is this practice? I used to think it was just dumbing down the curriculum, but now it turns out to be nothing but fraud. Ms. Hall and her co-conspirators have given up on education and abandoned their students as hopeless, unteachable morons. The only way to get them to pass a test is to cheat for them. Just when you think the state of our education system can’t get any worse, we get this news.

 Imagine the impact these scores had on students. The hopelessly dumb ones are told they are A students. “Hey, maybe I’m smart enough to go to college!” And what about the smart students who work hard only to find that the ones who rarely show up and sleep through their classes get the same grades? Why study at all? Why do we have schools at all? Why not let the teachers just take the tests and let the kids stay home in blissful ignorance?

 The U.S. Department of Education should call for a national investigation on this to find out how many other schools are doing the same thing. What good is it if no child is left behind if they aren’t really learning anything? Isn’t the goal of education teaching students rather than passing tests?