Charles Taylor Kerchner

Charles Taylor Kerchner

The smoke surrounding allegations of examination score cheating in the Washington, D.C., public schools outburst into flame last week. In a 4,300-word blog post, titled Michelle Rhee's Reign of Error, the veteran educational journalist John Merrow linked the former schools chancellor with documents that suggest that she knew about widespread adulterous on standardized tests and looked the other way.

Merrow drew parallels between Washington and Atlanta, where former superintendent Beverly Hall and 34 others have been indicted. Only the underlying question is whether school reform tin successfully be driven by rewards and punishments tied to standardized tests.

Start, the Watergate question: What did Rhee know and when did she know it? Equally U.S.A. Today reported, District of Columbia Public Schools officials take long maintained that a 2022 exam-cheating scandal that generated two regime probes was express to one elementary school. Merrow, however, reported that a long-buried memo from an outside data consultant warned as far back equally Jan 2009 that educator cheating on 2008 standardized tests could have been widespread, with 191 teachers in seventy schools "implicated in possible testing infractions."

Consultant Fay K. Sanford noted substantial numbers of erasures on test forms where corrections were made from wrong answers to correct ones. (Erasers leave smudge marks that the machines doing the grading recognize along with the answers.) "It is common knowledge in the high-stakes testing community that one of the easiest ways for teachers to artificially inflate student test scores is to erase educatee wrong responses to multiple choice questions and recode them as correct," Sanford wrote.

When asked, Rhee said that she didn't recall getting a memo from Sanford, an exclamation she repeated this week to the Los Angeles Times editorial board.

A solar day later the Merrow report was issued, another investigation was released citing "disquisitional" violations of test security in 18 classrooms located in 7 commune schools and four charters. The exam was given in more than than 2,600 classrooms, and electric current D.C. schools chancellor Kaya Henderson said in a statement, "We are pleased that this is yet another investigation that confirms that there is no widespread adulterous at DCPS."

Just Henderson is not quelling demands for a district-broad investigation. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has chosen for an independent investigation, as has Washington Postal service writer Valerie Strauss, who said, "The memo does not offer conclusive evidence that cheating occurred, but information technology literally begs for a thorough probe to be conducted—this time past investigators with subpoena powers."

Meanwhile, an in-depth evaluation of D.C. schools by a National Research Council panel continues. The study is chaired past ii Californians: Carl Cohn, a professor at Claremont Graduate Academy and fellow member of the State Board of Didactics, and Lorraine McDonnell, a professor of political science at U.C. Santa Barbara. Their work is not confined to test tampering, but considers the overall effect of governance and management changes.

Examination tampering just the symptom

Education policy organizations that have mostly supported Rhee were quick to minimize the exam tampering equally "bad judgment." Michelle Gininger at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute cautioned that: "Critics are spring to say that all reforms that Rhee stands for — teacher evaluations, tenure reform, and school choice — should be dismissed. Only allow's not abandon didactics reform and accountability at the expense of our students, which getting rid of testing surely would."

Merely, along with her fright-based management style, reliance on test scores is the Achilles' heel of Rhee's reform policies. Accurate examination scores grade the basis for her performance-based pay organization and means to determine which teachers and administrators should exist kept or fired.

Unfortunately, the organisation Rhee advocates inherently motivates people to cheat. As Cornell Law Schoolhouse professor Lynn Stout wrote in the Los Angeles Times , "It'south almost incommunicable to design objective performance metrics that can't be met through illegal or undesirable behavior….  And when you create a system that inadvertently incentivizes illegal or undesirable behavior, you become more of information technology."

This is the lesson of organizational history, non an isolated "bad judgment" abnormality. It'southward about more than than school test scores in the District of Columbia, Atlanta, Texas or even Rhee's maybe outsized claims of how well her students did during the three years she taught schoolhouse in Baltimore. The policies Rhee endorses create bad incentives. Bad incentives lead to disastrous results. They certainly played a part in the largest business collapses in recent history: Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers and the collapse of the subprime mortgage market.

The antidote is not to abandon incentives tied to test scores and other measures of achievement, simply to use them in ways that really motivate teachers, and more importantly students, who are the existent workers in the education arrangement.

What motivates teachers most? Pupil success: If an organizational arrangement of curriculum, education, professional training and school organization helps students experience success, then teachers are highly motivated. Teachers are motivated by being role of a winning team, a schoolhouse that does well at its ain mission, which nearly often is not test score maximization. Teachers are motivated by being part of an occupation that is honored and trusted. These are the lessons from a century of study.

How should we then employ achievement data? First, build feedback into the lesson and project level of schooling rather than waiting for end-of-twelvemonth tests. Second, employ tests that actually measure student functioning on substantive tasks. In other words, build data feedback into the everyday life of teaching and learning.

What policies utilize information effectively?

  • Policies that build time into the school day for teachers to work together to interpret pupil results and cocky-correct;
  • Policies that invest in smart software that adapts to student performance and build computer routines that broaden teacher attempt;
  • Policies that build capacity into the education system.

This existent route to educatee success is substantively at odds with Rhee'south policies. The difference is no small matter. Rhee's StudentsFirst system is attempting to create a political counterforce to the existing establishment of public educational activity and nigh current ideas virtually improving student achievement. In the words of Rhee'southward contempo book, its ideas are, indeed, Radical.Although information technology refers to itself as a nonprofit, giving StudentsFirst the public gloss of a thoughtful policy institute, information technology operates every bit a political organization. The Internal Revenue Service classifies it as a 501(c)four arrangement, which means that contributions to it are non deductible on individual or business tax returns.

StudentsFirst is gathering supporters. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and former state senator Gloria Romero have signed on, as has Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval and Rhee's mentor, old New York schools chancellor Joel Klein. Bill Cosby and Connie Chung are amid its glory board members. Subsidiary organizations accept been founded in several states.

StudentsFirst has started grading states. California received an F for its educational policies. (This same ranking grades Louisiana a top-of-the-pack A, and gives Massachusetts, which leads the globe on some international measures, a D+.)

StudentsFirst also poured $250,000 into the recent Los Angeles Unified School District races, and supported candidates in Burbank and suburban Sacramento.

More the question of examination score cheating, information technology's the logic and practice of Rhee'southward policies and politics that deserve test. To employ the descriptors Rhee favors, they just may be "crappy" and "suck."

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Charles Taylor Kerchner is Research Professor in the School of Educational Studies at Claremont Graduate University, and a specialist in educational organizations, educational policy and teachers unions. In 2008, he and his colleagues completed a four-year study of education reform of the Los Angeles Unified School Commune.

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