no surprise: yet another school cheating scandal

 

When students cheat on an exam, their exam is voided and, at least in college, they can be suspended or expelled.  Yet while student cheating remains a serious ethical violation, it seems that cheating among in New York City public schools is rampant. It’s gotten so bad that the New York Board of Regents just authorized an independent investigator to look at how the State Education Department handles complaints of cheating.  Not cheating by students mind you, but by teachers and administrators who change wrong answers to right answers and grade exams them so that their students who should really fail will pass.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/education/13cheating.html

More and more cheating cases are popping up at New York City schools.  Just last week the New York Post reported that at one of the new small high schools in the Bronx called the Eximius Academy (I’d like to find out how new schools got these weird names), students were given credit for classes they never took by having them retake classes they had already passed and then changing the grades for that class to apply for another class.  Pretty clever. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/bronx/grades_scam_KPq2XYFl53IFIXNzwRLl3H

Lest you think this is an aberration, consider that at Lehman high school, the principal allegedly invented credits and increased student grades by changing their transcripts after the fact. Or Kennedy High School, where English teachers charged that the principal changed scores of student Regents scores to passing.  http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/2010/06/john-f-kennedy-high-school-prinicipal.html The state education commissioner John B. King Jr. has complained to the Board of Regents that not enough is being done to detect and deter cheating by teachers and principals.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/education/09cheat.html?_r=1

The latest form of dishonesty is called “credit recovery.”  Credit recovery is where students who failed a class are given a project to complete, which then results in a credit for the failed class. There are no clear standards governing what the project consists of.  As a result, students are getting credit by completing tasks such as answering a few questions or creating a poster, either of which could be done in a matter of hours, hardly the same as attending classes and passing examinations. 

The purpose of credit recovery is to raise graduation rates. Since graduation rates are based on students graduating within four years of entering high school, credit recovery has become the primary method of getting students out of the school even if they haven’t really earned the requisite credits. Whether students actually learn anything though the credit recovery process is irrelevant to the statistics—if anything, the message to students is that they can cut class, not pay attention, etc., and then the school will bend over backward to accommodate them.  As one commentator notes, “the practice of passing students, regardless of whether they have actually attended class or done homework, has become widespread at many, if not most, high schools throughout NYC, as schools are pressured to raise their statistics or else be threatened with closure.” http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2011/07/doe-invented-credit-recovery-scam-and.html

This cheating—whether by changing exam results of awarding bogus credits—is completely understandable and indeed a logical response to the system set up by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.  The laws create an irresistible incentive to manipulate data, for unless schools show “annual yearly progress” (AYP), they face closure.  AYP is based on test results and graduation rates.  Since the easiest way to show such progress is to fake exams grades and inflate graduation rates, administrators are caught in a dilemma between being honest or losing their position.  Not only that, if some administrators are cheating, those who are honest about their scores are at a disadvantage since the city grades schools by comparing their statistics with similar schools.  “For hundreds of school principals, looking over their shoulders to stay ahead of the peer group against which they are measured, this is a matter of professional life and death. If one principal looks the other way on credit recovery in their schools, others are penalized for more rigorous standards.” http://gothamschools.org/2009/06/10/credit-recovery-joel-kleins-race-to-the-bottom/

What is happening in public schools can be liked to the steroids scandal in baseball.  Once some players began taking steroids and hitting unheard numbers of home runs, pitchers who had to face these batters and other batters felt the imperative to achieve the same (unfair) advantage as steroid users.  Any time performance is based solely on statistics, people will try to game the system by playing a numbers game rather than dealing with the underlying issues.  In the end, baseball got a handle on the problem first by admitting it, then by questioning the credibility of the statistics during the steroids age (thus McGuire’s failure to be elected to the Hall of Fame), legally going after the worst offenders (Bonds, Clemons) and setting up a system in which players must be tested without prior notice.  It is frankly amazing that the Bloomberg administration as well as the federal government have pinned school performance to statistics without setting up rigorous procedures to ensure their reliability.  I’m not the first to predict the eventual collapse of the statistical edifice upon which the supposed education gains during the Bloomberg administration are based.