Jun 12, 2007 4:28 PM
In David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Glengarry Glen Ross,” we learn about the stress-filled lives of real estate salesmen who must lie, cheat and steal every day on their jobs in order to keep those jobs. Is that what teachers are going to face in our school system?
From the atrocious No Child Left Behind to the harrowing Regents results, we have all of these new accountabilities, performance standards and innovative pressures to incessantly inflate test scores. Principals, administrators and teachers of New York City — and, regrettably, all across the nation — can achieve tenure and monetary bounty by falsifying reading scores.
In Little Rock, Ark., a teacher may earn an extra $100 for every digit they increase a student’s reading score. One such educator recently walked away with $18,000 in bonuses. Perhaps the day is not too far off when administrators will roam the corridors with “walking around money” lining their pockets so they can provide financial incentives to educators: “Mr. Smith, that was a fantastic pivotal question you just asked, right up there with the top echelons of Bloom’s taxonomy. Here’s fifty bucks. Take your wife out to dinner tonight.”
The omnipresent temptation of scrubbing the scores hovers over the gamut of our standardized examinations. Any exam that is marked in-house is fair game for chicanery. Several years ago I was marking English Regents at Flushing HS and witnessed teachers racking their brains to eke out enough extra points to turn grades of 48 and 49 into passing scores of 55.
The Regents has become so watered down that spelling and grammar no longer count in the grading process; the testee need only regurgitate the facts and ideas neatly spelled out for him or her. The particularly laughable social studies exam requires no knowledge of the subject.
A complex rubric on the short answers enables one to garner just a few correct responses to breach mediocrity. The so-called “essay” portion then ushers our callow youngster over the happy summit of passing.
Of course, in-house marking has invited cooking the books since time immemorial. Every once in a while administrators or teachers who altered grades or morphed wrong answers appear in the newspaper, something the anti-public school papers love to play up into a finger-wagging scandal. Teachers are often accused of providing the students with the answers in advance or assisting them while they take the tests. Cheating seems to have escalated into a cottage industry, with time and money now wasted on apprehending “dishonest” staff members.
The best-selling book “Freakonomics,” by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, devoted 10 pages to a Chicago public school cheating scandal, where teachers were coerced to raise test scores for tenure. (This, of course, is the shape of things to come in New York City.) Chicago’s school board then invested considerable capital into snaring devious teachers.
A symposium of the best and the brightest in Windy City education attempted to uncover methods that staff employed to polish the grades. For example, they regarded the idea as “unlikely” that teachers would make changes in the first few incorrect multiple choice answers, that is, erase the incorrect answers and bubble in correct responses. So a software company was hired to devise computer algorithms to determine which answers would most likely be fiddled with and thereby possibly flush out the culprits.
At a cost of more than $1 million, all the test answer sheets were run through a specially programmed computer. The software picked up on certain teachers who had entire classes with a string of five or six identically correct answers in the middle of the test. The students all missed certain easy questions at the start of the exam but were correct on these more difficult queries in the middle of the exam.
Eureka! The teachers had allegedly erased wrong answers in the middle of the exam and substituted correct responses in their place. The perpetrators were found and drummed out of the Chicago school system in disgrace.
The media and the powers that be always act as if the teachers are the problem when it is, in fact, the system they operate under. Principals use numerous scare tactics to intimidate staff members, such as proclaiming the impending closure of schools with unacceptable scores. By crucifying education on a cross of meaningless exams, they are placing pedagogues in a quagmire where the choices are between maintaining one’s integrity or maintaining one’s job.