School’s Success Gives Way to Doubt
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Adam Nossiter, New York Times, Oct. 30, 2008
{snip}
Somehow, Ms. Moore had transformed one of Charleston’s worst schools into one of its best, a rare breakthrough in a city where the state has deemed more than half the schools unsatisfactory. It seemed almost too good to be true.
It may have been. The state has recently started a criminal investigation into test scores at Ms. Moore’s school, seeking to determine whether a high number of erasure marks on the tests indicates fraud.
{snip}
(Posted on October 31, 2008)
Comments
After testing in 2007, the state noticed an unusually high number of erasure marks — as many as seven per child — with the erasures becoming correct answers. “That became a concern, because the likelihood of that happening is very small,” said Ms. Rose, the district official, noting that the average was around one such mark.
This year, after the tests were closely monitored, the scores plummeted. Suddenly, 44.4 percent of third graders taking the state science test met the state standard, compared with 84.6 percent in 2007. Many teachers said afterward that the presence of the auditors themselves — “cold and very distant,” as one put it — negatively influenced the scores.
I’d say a 40 point drop in one year is pretty conclusive, but the race card is still coming out (as the rest of the article makes clear).
Posted by Jill at 6:16 PM on October 31
Barack’s wife explained this unexpected success in her senior thesis:
“I wasn’t supposed to go to Princeton and Harvard because my scores were too low.”
—Michelle Obama, 1985 Princeton senior year thesis
Posted by at 6:17 PM on October 31
It is easy for the testers to analyze the tests to see if there was cheating by the teachers and schools. Simple analysis tells you whether the students actually did well on the tests or whether the schools changed the answers. Most makers of the standardized tests routinely check for cheating but seldom publish the results of their investigations. See a chapter in the book Freakonomics to see how they do this checking.
Posted by Tim at 7:47 PM on October 31
I once tried to teach in a school where the Principal raised GPAs by giving classes that met once or twice a week, like P.E., computers, music, Spanish, and art, equal weight with math and English. Only one kid in the 6th grade had a GPA below 2.0. It kept the parents and the district happy, but he couldn’t keep teachers from leaving. Fraud will always leave a trail.
Posted by Schoolteacher at 8:09 PM on October 31
The New York Times in constantly reporting on such-and-such new program that allegedly closed the achievement gap, increased graduation rates into the high 90’s, and had a hefty percentage of grads continuing on to college.
When I read them, I know it’s all lies, smoke, and mirrors. None of these programs has ever achieved what was claimed but the NYTimes reports them as gospel and is always saddened to find the programs were a sham.
Posted by sbuffalonative at 9:17 PM on October 31
Next year they’ll simply get around it by chucking the student’s answer sheets in the shredder after they’ve been turned in to the proctor and submit pre-filled forms by the faculty to the state for optical scanning and grading. No erasures, no suspicions.
Posted by Lisa at 11:30 PM on October 31
sbuffalonative:
Not true, the achievement gap has closed by 1/3 over 30 years. However, it still exists. I’m dubious that it can ever be closed. You ought to stop saying that all efforts to close the gap have completely failed though. There has been some movement.
Posted by Robert Lindsay at 12:26 AM on November 1
My brother worked at a middle school in Fall River that was a total disaster. The principal actually told a teacher to “correct” some state tests which were required for the NCLB and MCAST(sic?) ratings. The teacher documented this since is was a violation of law. This generated an investigation after a teachers union complaint. No action was ever taken and the principal continues in her position to this day.
Aside from the ideology of “teaching social justice” rather than the basics of education- reading, math and writing- this type of action is contrary to the alledged beliefs of those who push these corrupt programs. It is the children whose best interests they claim to hold sacred who are suffering the long term damage.
However, this is precisely what is desired by the likes of “education scholar” Bill Ayers and community organizer Obama. An uneducated citizenry is far easier to control.
Posted by Techie at 11:47 AM on November 1
In response to 617PM poster on Michelle Obama:
Also out there somewhere is a white person who wrote this in their senior thesis:
“I had good enough scores to go to Princeton or Harvard, but I had to settle for a second rate law school because affirmative action gave my seat to a person who was in one of the groups that gets preferred treatment in our society. As a result, I was not nearly successful as I should have been.”
Posted by aey99 at 12:55 PM on November 1
Regarding the narrowing of the achievement gap over the last 30 years: I am reminded of the Army’s efforts to show that with proper conditioning, women could pass the same fitness tests as men. What they showed was that if extraordinary efforts were made, girls who were athletic to begin with could be brought up to the level of the average male recruit. But, if the same extraordinary efforts were applied to the boys, the strength gap widened.
So it is with Blacks and Whites. If the same sort of extra resources were applied to Whites as Blacks, I suspect that the achievement gap would widen, not narrow.
Posted by Schoolteacher at 1:09 PM on November 1
Not true, the achievement gap has closed by 1/3 over 30 years. .. There has been some movement.
Yes Robert, there has been some movement: The tests themselves have changed; IQs, despite the so-called Flynn effect, have not. Professor Rushton writes:
”..accepted IQ results: the average IQ scores for ‘African’, ‘Latino,’ ‘White,’ “Asian,” and ‘Jewish’ Americans are 85, 89, 103, 106, and 115, respectively…”
http://www.vdare.com/rushton/080226_gould.htm
“…The hispanic achievement gap (chart provided in the link) ‘closed’ from 33 points to 24 points between 1970 and 1990 Despite considerable efforts, the achievement gaps have grown wider since the 1990….”
“…In 1990 black-white convergence in educational attainment stopped…”
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2005/04/blackwhite_achi.php
Charles Murray reports this (in Real Education p. 51):
“…We have no evidence at all that we know how to produce lasting increases in IQ scores after children reach school…All the data..indicate that IQs stabilize around ages six to ten and typically remain unchanged until old age…”
Double digit IQs, even after factoring in the Flynn effect, (which does not raise IQ scores above 100 for blacks or hispanics), cannot progress past a rudimentary level despite trillions of dollars of wasted fiat money thrown at this intractable problems.
What to do? How about dumbing down the tests?
Murray relates this about The NAEPs tests (p. 56-57) in Real Education:
“…Given the way the NAEP measures achievement,scores can go up without the kids having learned how to do any more math than they already know.
When the Brown Center for Education Policy analyzed such items on NAEP’s math test they discovered that they required math that had usually been taught by the middle of third grade—in the test for eighth-graders..”
And:
”..The Brown Center concluded that…NAEP pays scant attention to computation skills…beyond the rudimentary topics that are found in the first chapter of a good algebra text…”
What happens in high school when blacks and hispanics have topped out and met the limits of their IQs? Is it any wonder that:
“…The average Hispanic (and black) 12th-grader reads and does math at the level of the average white 8th-grader…”
As a testing specialist from Kaplan once told me: “These aren’t the same tests you and I took in the 60’s and 70’s.” Meaning, of course, that the tests, especially the SAT test (the dumbing-down was called ‘re-norming’ or ‘re-centering’) have been re-written, the most difficult parts eliminated (i.e., analogies), and made easier for certain double digit populations.
And, as you well know, the number of White and Jewish children has fallen precipitously, especially in California and there aren’t hoards of (the highest-scoring) Asian children taking the tests.
This is the more worrisome problem (again from Murray):
“America’s Future Depends on How We Educate the Academically Gifted”
Discourse away, M. Lindsay.
Bon
Posted by BonBon at 2:08 PM on November 1
Yes, by spending massive amounts of money on Head Start, subsidized day care, busing, low student-to-teacher ratios, high-tech, modern schools, tutors, remedial courses, expensive field trips, counseling programs, free lunches, after-school, weekend school, and summer school, residential schools, and other special programs, one CAN improve the performance of Black students, so that a great many will be able to read at an 8th-grade level and do simple addition.
However, if similar amounts of money were spent on our gifted students (including those few Black and Hispanic gifted students), we would have already cured cancer, solved the energy crisis, stopped global warming, and had colonies on Mars. 90% of technological, medical, and scientific breakthroughs are made by the cognitive elite. If you want to maintain civilization (and the economy) you need to invest in those people. Instead, we invest in low IQ people, who can do little more than wash dishes, sweep floors, watch TV and have babies.
Posted by at 5:35 PM on November 1
“Not true, the achievement gap has closed by 1/3 over 30 years. However, it still exists. I’m dubious that it can ever be closed. You ought to stop saying that all efforts to close the gap have completely failed though. There has been some movement.”
Posted by Robert Lindsay at 12:26 AM on November 1
“Some movement” does not equate to the “gap” being closed, so the statement was correct in declaring all efforts to close it have failed. Closing a door doesn’t mean moving it 2 inches inward. It means closing it. Can you understand that?
With all due respect my self-hating white friend I’m getting really tired of your falsification of facts and your lack of any real comprehension in support of blacks on this board, because you obviously feel obsessed with some kind of fanatical zeal to try to constantly put one over on us, and you’re called on it every time, but it doesn’t seem to register with you.
The achievement gap was altered because of constant black and radical leftist carping about how stats were being reported, and it wasn’t until deceit was interjected into the equation there appeared out of no nowhere a slight difference by manipulating the figures.
I would ask you what kind of excuses you’re going to make after Obama takes over and at the end of his term nothing has changed for the better for blacks, but, you know what? I’m just getting really tired of your fabrications and exaggerations, so I’m not going to do that.
Posted by q at 10:08 PM on November 1
I would ask you what kind of excuses you’re going to make after Obama takes over and at the end of his term nothing has changed for the better for blacks, but, you know what? I’m just getting really tired of your fabrications and exaggerations, so I’m not going to do that.
Posted by q at 10:08 PM on November 1
It’s a delusion to think an Obama presidency will make things better for blacks. An Obama presidency might make some blacks think they (blacks) are in control, however with a much greater portion of the economic pie belonging to whites, one has to conclude whites (the corporations, lobbyists, the rich, policy makers, etc) are the ones really in control.
Posted by Emmanuel at 7:08 PM on November 2
“Not true, the achievement gap has closed by 1/3 over 30 years. However, it still exists. I’m dubious that it can ever be closed. You ought to stop saying that all efforts to close the gap have completely failed though. There has been some movement.”
Posted by Robert Lindsay
It’s “not true”? Why isn’t it true?
What you have stated above is double talk. You admit that it still exists. Either it still exists, or it doesn’t!
Posted by at 10:26 PM on November 2
“Not true, the achievement gap has closed by 1/3 over 30 years.”
There have been some marginal improvements in test scores but nothing I would point to as ‘closing the gap’. All this proves to me is that it takes extraordinary time, money, and programs to get blacks to rise a few points while whites achieve such levels with normal measures. It simply takes more to educate a black than it does to educate a white and then the results are minimal and costly. There’s a small bang for big bucks
Right now, there’s a big promotion of a program called KIPP: Knowledge is Power Program.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIPP
I watched an interview with a woman on c-span and she made extraordinary claims of success but the devil is found in the details.
The program is highly selective and hardly a representational sampling of minority students.
First the minority children are chosen because they’ve shown some aptitude for learning and motivation. Then they interview the parents to see how committed the parents are to helping their children succeed academically. Next they’re given specialized education.
Now if you select only the best and brightest of the minority population and give them extra help, sure they’ll benefit. But selecting the best of the best is not a representative population sample of minority children and so you can’t not use this as an example and say, ‘see, with extra attention, any minority child can succeed’. This is a lie and the liars know it which is why they commit fraud.
I’m all for providing kids with equal resources and equal education. The problem is that well-meaning people believe in equal outcomes.
As I said, every one of these programs has proven to be either manipulating numbers and test results to out and out fraud and lies.
If you select the best and brightest minority kids and give them extra help, of course a good number will succeed. The problem is that the vast majority of minority kids can not meet basic levels and no amount of extra money, extra programs, extra resources, extra anything is going to change the realities of genes, race, and IQ.
Posted by sbuffalonative at 11:09 PM on November 2
There have been some marginal improvements in test scores but nothing I would point to as ‘closing the gap’. All this proves to me is that it takes extraordinary time, money, and programs to get blacks to rise a few points while whites achieve such levels with normal measures. It simply takes more to educate a black than it does to educate a white and then the results are minimal and costly. There’s a small bang for big bucks.
……………………………
Exactly. It’s too small a bang for the buck. The Marxists and their social engineers are obsessed with proving equality. Well, you can “prove” anything if you really want to. But at what cost? You could take some tribesman from the Congo and invest lavish time and effort in teaching him to pay a sonata on the violin. But with a fraction of that time and effort you could have done the same with a European (or Asian) — and with far better results.
It’s like the parable of the monkey. If you take a monkey and sit it at a typewriter and let it poke the keys for infinity, eventually, it will have typed all the works of Shakespeare. So what does that prove? Absolutely nothing!
Posted by ghw at 4:23 PM on November 3
Testing is the bane of low achievers. The SAT, IQ tests, and civil service exams are to minorities what garlic is to vampires.
Posted by rld at 6:41 PM on November 3