And here's why they do it:
Posted on 05/14/2007 11:01:49 PM PDT by bd476
Some help students during standards test - or fix answers later - and California's safeguards may leave more breaches unreported and California's safeguards may leave more breaches unreported
Teachers have helped students cheat on California's high-stakes achievement tests -- or blundered badly enough to compromise their validity -- in at least 123 public schools since 2004, a Chronicle review of documents shows.
Schools admitted outright cheating in about two-thirds of the cases. And while the number reporting problems represents a small fraction of the state's 9,468 public schools, some experts think the practice of cooking the test results is more widespread.
That's because the California Department of Education relies on schools to come forward voluntarily, and to investigate themselves when a potential problem is flagged.
"The vast majority of educators are ethical and play by the rules. (But) when identification of potential cheating hinges largely on self-reports, it is almost certainly underreported," said Greg Cizek, who teaches testing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is the author of "Cheating on Tests: How to Do It, Detect It, and Prevent It."
Records show that California teachers who unfairly helped students boost scores usually did so during the test. For example:
- Teachers in East Palo Alto, Los Angeles and Alhambra (Los Angeles County) let students consult world maps or helpful reference sheets as they took their state exams.
- Modesto, a teacher let his eighth-graders use calculators on the 2006 math test.
- Teachers in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Alameda, Redwood City, San Jose and elsewhere simply helped students answer the questions.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
And here's why they do it:
VERBATIM
I guess I don’t understand these tests.
One of my grand children scored a perfect score, the other missed 1 out of 180. They are just regular kids... They don’t seem to me as being specially gifted. Is everybody else just stupid?
California’s public schools ranked 50th in the nation in reading in a 2005 standardized test study that I saw. Only Washington, D.C., did worse. A sad state of affairs when our nation’s capital and it’s most populous state are bottom draggers. That said, states like Vermont, New Hampshire, Wyoming, Iowa, and Montana ranked at the top. Ahhh, the value of diversity!
Our nation’s schools are a terrible weakness in our nation. We are constantly outperformed by nations across the globe, and we seem to be expecting less and less and trying to explain away more and more. We throw out all of this money at computers and then have to recruit from abroad to bring in enough engineers to keep our nation running.
There are some priorities than need to be rearranged, frankly.
Rotten from top to bottom.
I've been thinking for awhile now, that the only way to "fix" the public school system is to destroy it.
Decertifying the NEA/AFT might also help.
In Stockton California the graduation rate is approximately 50%. Stockton has no majority population. All races are minorities. Diversity is really great.
The Ohio Graduation Test is designed with use of a calculator in mind. One state you're fried, and another state you're applauded.
All of the math classes and a couple of the science classes in our high school use calculators in some capacity.
That's what you get when you have a school system that mirrors the welfare system.
Time to jettison it. The welfare schools aren't working.
We'd blacken the answers on our score sheets with a Number 2 pencil. The answer sheets were then fed into a scanner. The machine scored our tests. There really weren't too many ways to cheat.
Are these test done differently now?
My 12th grade government teacher would actually program the scoring machine for in-class tests to mark some correct answers as wrong. He wanted us to go back and find out why we missed the question. If we didn’t catch the fact that he scored a correct answer as wrong, the score stayed as it was.
I am forever grateful to him for that. It taught me what lying, conniving, underhanded people teachers have the potential to be.
Excellent anecdote! Hardnosed teachers are a rare blessing these days.
They're giving these bubble tests to second graders who are still trying to color within lines (not that there's anything wrong about coloring outside lines...)
and each grade between.
Interesting article. I like the timing, considering SOL’s start tomorrow for 3-5th graders in my daughter’s school.
I am proctoring this week at my daughter’s middle school. If you want to do something to prevent this, an upstanding proctor would be a great help in every classroom. Aside from the fact it took the teacher almost 20 minutes with pencil and paper to figure out the ending time of 58 mins, it was a good experience. The children were well behaved and obviously well trained in EOGs. I will be there all week.
For a change, this year we’ve actually had more than enough parent volunteers in the classrooms in our school - which is a good thing, IMO. Good for you for being part of the solution.
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