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Scandalous Schools
April 19, 2013
One of the bad features of the school reform movement that was cited in our posting of March 29 (“Hit Again”) is the obsession over standardized testing and the linkage between children’s scores and adults’ salaries. The length to which some so-called educators have gone reached new highs (or perhaps lows) in Atlanta recently; but that’s far from the only school testing travesty we’ve seen, as Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post Writers Group reported on LSJ.com on April 4, 2013:
“It is time to acknowledge that the fashionable theory of school reform – requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students’ standardized test scores – is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket.
“I mean that literally. Beverly Hall, the former superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools, was indicted on racketeering charges Friday for an alleged cheating scheme that won her more than $500,000 in performance bonuses. Hall, who retired two years ago, has denied any wrongdoing.
“Also facing criminal charges are 34 teachers and principals who allegedly participated in the cheating, which involved simply erasing students’ wrong answers on test papers and filling in the correct answers.
“In 2009, the American Association of School Administrators named Hall ‘National Superintendent of the Year’ for improvement in student achievement. For educators who worked for Hall, bonuses and promotions were based on test scores. After a day of testing, teachers would allegedly be told to gather the students’ test sheets and change the answers. Suddenly a failing school would become a model of education reform. The principal and teachers would get bonuses. Hall would get a much bigger bonus.
“State education officials became suspicious. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote probing stories. There seemed to be no way to legitimately explain the dramatic improvement in such a short time, or the statistically improbable number of erasures on answer sheets.
“Sonny Perdue was governor at the time, and in August 2010 he ordered a blue-ribbon investigation. Hall resigned shortly before the release of the investigators’ report, which alleged that 178 teachers and principals cheated over nearly a decade. Those findings laid the foundation for Friday’s Grand Jury indictment.
“My Washington Post colleague Valerie Strauss, a veteran education reporter and columnist, wrote Friday that there have been ‘dozens’ of alleged cheating episodes around the country, but only Atlanta’s has been aggressively and thoroughly investigated.
“Standardized achievement tests are a vital tool, but treating test scores the way a corporation might treat sales targets is wrong. Students are not widgets. Even absent cheating, the blind obsession with test scores implies that teachers are interchangeable implements of information transfer, rather than caring professionals who know their students as individuals.
“School reform has to be something that is done with a community of teachers, students and parents – with honesty and, yes, a bit of old fashioned humility.”
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Penalty Points
August 26, 2016
The five years that followed the adoption of a tougher transfer rule in the early 1980s were the busiest ever for Michigan High School Athletic Association lawyers. The tough rule made sense to parents until it applied to their own children, and was defended by coaches until applied to their own players.
The most recent five years have provided the most significant toughening of MHSAA rules in the 30 years since the contentious early ‘80s, most notably (1) adopting the athletic-related transfer rule (“links law”) that doubles the length of ineligibility for some transfer students who do not make a full and complete residential change, and (2) lengthening the maximum penalty for undue influence from up to one year to up to four years for students and adults involved.
Predictably, the recently enhanced rules have led to increases in challenges to the enforcement of those rules. What were good rules in theory sometimes have been challenged when put into actual practice. Ironically, the MHSAA has received criticism from some insiders that penalties have been too severe, and from a few outsiders that penalties have been too light. Which means we are reading these situations just about right.
It is MHSAA policy not to issue statements at the time penalties are assessed unless the penalties have a direct and immediate effect on MHSAA postseason tournament eligibility or progression. This is fitting for a voluntary association of schools which have the legal responsibility of enforcing rules as to their own students, coaches and others. The MHSAA does not want to embarrass member schools; and in those rare instances when it is necessary to issue a public statement of an action taken or to clarify an MHSAA policy or procedure, the MHSAA avoids identifying minor students and most adults who are the subjects of penalties.
While these procedures have served school-sponsored sports well in Michigan since the founding of the MHSAA, it is possible that the increase of 24/7/365 electronic communications produced by decreasingly professional/experienced/ethical personnel requires change. Taking full-body slams by media who have less than half the facts is not just a nuisance to the MHSAA, it’s disparaging to the goodness of the school sports brand.