Look jackasses, I’ll make this brief. If you’d like your kids to grow up as good, productive people, you might want them to think cheating is, what’s the right word—WRONG! So when a bunch of school administrators are caught doing just that,you don’t come to their defense and excuse their behavior. The biggest problem your kids face is not the school they attend, it’s YOU. You bunch of assholes. :rolleyes:
I don’t see the parents excusing the administrators behavior or saying that the cheating was justified. Rather they are saying that in spite of the cheating scandal that they approved of the school. Its possible that outside of the cheating, the school was good for the students who attended and that the parents are legitimately worried that the replacement will hurt their children’s education. If this was the true, how would you want the parent to act?
Going only by your own linked article, I notice that:
- The cheating is only alleged, not proven yet
- The parents cited the quality of education given overall (reading between the lines, I get the feeling that the parents think the teachers were enthusiastic to help the children, which is a very good, but apparently rare thing in some areas)
That is not condoning cheating, that’s stating good education.
Furthermore, because cheating is as yet only alleged, we don’t know what happened:
Did the teachers hand out the answer sheet along with the test, making it obvious to the children that cheating was going on;
or did they get the test questions early and spend special drill to improve the score?
In the movie “Stand by me” about dedicated Latino teacher deciding to teach AP calculus at a low-quality High School in poor neighborhood, the officials suspect his students of cheating, too, the first time around because they all get similar results with the same methods. He explains that he drilled them strictly into certain routines resulting in same methods, and challenges the officials to do a retake for his students only under special supervision. They pass again with similar results, vindicated.
That could be going on.
Or it could be a case of a test that is important for the state/ funding reasons, but which the teachers think - based on their daily experience - has little value for real education, but because funding depends on it, they decide to help disadvantaged children a bit.
We simply don’t know at this point what happened and if it was wrong.
This may give some background into what is going on generally, as well. Atlanta has a huge scandel in this, and of course, the responsible administration is taking a “Shucks, we din know nuffin” approach all through. Given the scale of allegations, it’s extremely unlikely that any administrative parties were totally innocent. Some teachers were likely innocent of anything except knuckling under severe pressure and outright threats, though no doubt others actively aided and abetted the cheating.
I haven’t been following it that closely, but I do want to mention that standardized test cheating doesn’t have to involve a whole lot of people. It can literally be one or two people with a good memory, access to the test, a pile of #2 pencils and a couple long nights.
Considering that the system is rigged to punish the teachers for being honest and reward them for cheating, I’m not surprised at all by the allegations or by the parents defending the teachers and the school. The current testing system under NCLB is <I>insane</I> and should be dismantled.
Stand and Deliver, in case anyone is interested. Unfortunately it won’t stream on Netflix, though.
The paper is using “alleged” as a legal formality because there have not been court cases yet. However, there have been detailed investigations and without a shadow of a doubt there was wide scale cheating by both teachers and administrators in the Atlanta Public School system (APS).
All sorts of stuff, but the biggest was taking the completed test papers and changing the answers. What kicked off the whole set of investigations was an analysis of the number of answers that were changed from wrong to right. This showed an extremely unlikely scenario, statistically. Schools with the highest number of erasures were targeted for further investigation. APS did it’s own shoddy investigation, finding not much wrong. The governor, Sonny Purdue, rejected their report and ordered a detailed state-level investigation led by the GBI. This investigation issued its report recently that confirmed massive levels of cheating involving principals, teachers and administrators.
If you had followed the case in detail, you really would not make this statement.
Not the case. This is dozens, perhaps hundreds of teachers across Atlanta, and a hell of a lot of them pointing at the department (and the administrator) demands for improbable improvement - and naked demands for cheating.
I nowhere did say that I followed this case in detail; contrary, I stated that I only used the newspaper article that the OP linked to. If the OP has more evidence or better details, then he should give them, because if everybody knows the case already, it’s not new, right?
Dunno. It’s a pit thread - do we need full details presented by the “prosecution”? Do we expect responders to do detailed background research before replying? I suspect not in either case. I was not criticizing anyone in my original post, merely filling in the background details so that people would understand the situation better. This cheating situation has been big news here in Atlanta for a little while.
Well, “hundreds” is not a huge percentage in a system with over a hundred schools.
From Wikipedia:
This is actually exactly the sort of thing I was trying to describe: when you get this sort of wide-spread cheating, it’s not usually on the classroom level: you just can’t keep that secret. I think most people hear “cheating scandal” and imagine the teacher putting the answers on the board or going around to each child and giving hints. But it’s not like that: it’s a handful of people at each location altering tests afterward (say 200/44=4 or 5 per school) . So when you hear about schools where they went from virtually all failing to virtually all passing, it doesn’t mean virtually all the teachers were in on it.
I am not at all trying to apologize or justify the people that did this: it’s absolutely appalling, and as a teacher I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the “we were forced” defense: frankly, when you’ve got little cabals getting together to cheat in the middle of the night, the people recruited for the cabals are not going to be wide-eyed idealists who just happen to have sick grandmas and can’t quit their job. My point is just that it can be done with surprisingly few people per incident–and it seems as if that was true in Atlanta.
Some more background and numbers. The suspicious test results were from the CRCT, which is only given in elementary and middle schools. The number of wrong-to-right erasures suggested issues at 191 schools state-wide. 58 of these were in Atlanta. There are 75 elementary and middle schools in Atlanta.
The analysis was done on a classroom basis, by which I mean that these 58 schools had a certain number of classes where the number of erasures was suspicious. There were other schools where the number of classes with erasures may have indicated a problem, but the evidence was less strong and these were not investigated further.
56 APS schools (I do not know why not all 58) were investigated further and this led to the identification of 44 schools and 178 people (including 38 principals) where the evidence of cheating was sufficiently strong to name them. We have to suspect that there were others.