Imposters Crash White House Meeting

November 30, 2009 (GBN News): The couple who crashed a state dinner honoring Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh the other night were not the only recent White House imposters. Despite heavy security, two men posing as “educational reformers” somehow not only got into the White House, but made it as far as the Oval Office for a meeting with President Obama. It is unclear just how the two pulled off the scam, but sources at the White House told GBN News that it may have been an “inside job”. Apparently the men, going by the names Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich, were personally vouched for by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

What was particularly troubling, the sources said, was that the President seems to have been warned about the two characters as early as the transition. The person who headed up his educational transition team, Linda Darling-Hammond, had reportedly cautioned the President that the sort of reforms championed by Sharpton and Gingrich were bogus. Ironically, Ms. Darling-Hammond had herself been considered for Education Secretary. Had she, and not Mr. Duncan, been chosen, it is likely that the two hucksters, and others of their ilk such as Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, would never have been permitted near the White House.

Yet Another Nail in the NYS Regents Exam Coffin

On November 19, the Office of the NY State Comptroller released a report of its findings from an audit of local district scoring of high school Regents exams. The results, while not surprising to those closest to high school education in NY State, was nevertheless stunning in its confirmation of just how badly skewed the entire Regents examination system has become. Equally startling was the mainstream press’s utter failure to note the findings, virtually all of which agreed with by the Regents themselves. (Note: only Maura Walz at the Gotham Schools website seems to have reported on this so far.)

The audit team randomly selected 200 NY State high schools and, using a team of experienced high school teachers, rescored nine non-multiple-choice questions on one 2005 subject area exam (identified only as Exam A) and thirteen non-multiple-choice questions on another 2005 subject area exam (Exam B). In total, the Review team rescored almost 2,400 Exam A papers and over 3,200 Exam B papers, looking only at questions where local school exam graders has discretion over how many points to award their students’ answers. Their findings in summary:

“…a significant tendency for local school districts to award full credit on questions requiring scorer judgment even when the exam answers were vague, incomplete, inaccurate, or insufficiently detailed.”

That sentence euphemistically recaps the much more disturbing details of their findings:

1. For Exam B, the locally reported total scores of the thirteen questions were higher than the Review Team’s re-scored total on 80% of the examination papers reviewed (totals were the same on 15% of the papers).

2. For Exam A, the locally reported total scores on the nine questions were higher than the Review Team’s re-scored total on 58% of the examination papers reviewed (totals were the same on 32% of the papers).

3. For Exam B, the locally reported total scores were at least three raw score points higher (or lower) on 34% of the exam papers re-scored by the Review Team. Three raw score points can easily scale to ten or more points on the student’s final, converted score. While not detailed in the report, one can well imagine that “bubble students’” tests were most prone to this higher level of score inflation to ensure they passed the raw score hurdle to receive a converted score of 65 or more.

4. For Exam A, the locally reported total scores were at least three raw score points higher (or lower) on 17% of the exam papers re-scored by the Review Team.

5. Exam B contained two five-point essay questions. The locally reported scores on these two questions were higher (or lower) than the Review Team’s re-scoring in 47% and 43%, respectively, of the exam papers reviewed.

6. Eighteen of 192 selected schools failed altogether to submit their requested Exam A papers, and 20 of 205 did not submit their Exam B papers. Even the Comptroller’s audit report suggests that these compliance failures might be attempts, as they put it, “to avoid scrutiny.”

7. Review of SED’s procedures for follow-up on privately-lodged complaints of scoring fraud or irregularity found no evidence that twelve of them had ever been investigated. Thus, even an honest teacher who whistle-blows on scoring fraud has virtually no guarantee that SED will conduct any investigation whatsoever. The door for cheating, fraud, or just looking the other way on exam grading is wide open and seemingly encouraged by SED’s actions and lack thereof.

Combine this pattern of fraudulently inflated grading with the persistent dumbing down of Regents exams and the concomitant lowering of the raw score needed for a passing scaled score grade, and the end result is an examination system that is utterly meaningless as a measure of knowledge or understanding. Even worse, as the Comptroller’s report makes clear, SED has failed completely to follow up on any of these issues, even having in hand another report from 2003/2004 detailing almost exactly the same problems.

What has become clear in the past five or six years (noticeably since the advent of NCLB), is that the NY State Regents examination system, once a moderately respectable measure of academic achievement, is now broken almost beyond repair. As long as the numbers are up, everyone rests easy; nobody seems to care that they are meaningless, as witnessed by the high levels of remediation required of first-year college student products of our state education system. As usual, the losers in this breakdown are the students and their sadly unaware parents.

It seems clear as well that the time has come for a major investigation and overhaul of SED and the Regents system. Governor Paterson and others in Albany, when will you wake up and start doing what’s right for the children in your state?

Our Children are more than test scores, Part 3: What Bloomberg, Duncan and Klein should learn from the Chinese

Today, Mayor Bloomberg announced that he would order Joel Klein to tie all teacher tenure decisions to student test scores. Whether this violates state law and/or the union contract is a matter for others to determine.

What I can say is that his decision is the logical outgrowth of the rigid, unreliable and damaging accountability system that he and Klein have imposed on our schools, and that the Obama administration is now attempting to foist on the nation.

Check out Yong Zhao’s critique of the US Dept. of Education's “Race to the Top” program, and its attempt to force states to measure success and reward teachers on the basis of standardized test scores:

I have been reading through the 775-page final notice document to be published in the Federal Register on November 18, 2009. It includes the final versions of application guidelines, selection criteria and priorities for the $4.35 billion Race to the Top Fund (RTT), the largest education grant in U.S. history.

I can guess from news reports, op-ed pieces, and blog posts that many states are working hard to prepare their applications. From my reading of the criteria, I think the following are the winning strategies and actions to include in the application, although they may be inconsistent with research findings or common sense.

Suggestion #1: Stop paying teachers and principals a salary. Instead pay teachers and principals on a per standardized test point basis each day. At the end of each school day, students should be tested using a standardized test, what a teacher and principal is paid is calculated at the end of the day based on the growth of the student, i.e., how much has the student improved over the previous day. This is true accountability and will for sure keep teachers and principals on their toes! ….

Suggestion #2: Remove all “non-core” academic activities and courses and reduce all teaching to math and reading because what the Secretary wants is “increasing student achievement in (at a minimum) reading/language arts and mathematics, as reported by the NAEP and the assessments required under the ESEA” … Actually, no need to teach them these subjects, just teaching them how to pass the tests may be even more effective.

For his other (clearly ironic) suggestions, check out Over the Top: Winning Strategies for the Race to the Top Fund.

Zhao is a Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University, and his perspective is particularly interesting, as he was raised in China and once taught there. See what he says in another posting about what the Chinese government has learned from its top-down approach – and what America should learn from China's self-acknowledged mistakes:

China is determined to reform its education to cultivate a diversity of talents and creativity. China has recognized and suffered from the damaging effects of standardized testing and has been trying very hard to move away from standards. If America or any other nation wants to worry about China, it is its determination and focus on creativity and talents, not its test scores.

Once standardized test scores become an accepted way to judge the potential and value of a child, the performance of a teacher, and the quality of school, it is very difficult to change. We are already seeing signs of this in the U.S., thanks to all the education reformers who want to make Americans “globally competitive.”

Zhao is author of Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization, and was recently on the Brian Lehrer show, Comparing Education in China to the U.S. Here is an excerpt from his book:

Clearly, American education has been moving toward authoritarianism, letting the government dictate what and how students should learn and what schools should teach. This movement has been fueled mostly through fear—fear of threats from the Soviets, the Germans, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Chinese, and the Indians. The public, as any animal under threat would, has sought and accepted the action of a protector—the government.

Let's hope that Americans reject this reflexive, damaging vision of education, and take a closer look at the potential consequences before we let our government turn our public schools into those like China's.

See also this Huffington Post column about how like China, South Korea is trying to move away from a system based solely on standardized test scores.