Posted on 08/11/2011 7:30:22 AM PDT by Libloather
Hall: 'I Deeply Regret' Atlanta Cheating Scandal
WSB-TV
Updated: 2:44 pm EDT August 10, 2011
**SNIP**
Hall retired from Atlanta schools just days before state investigators released a scathing report implicating nearly 180 educators in the scandal. Educators accused in the probe said they were under immense pressure to improve students' scores by any means possible amid a culture of "fear and retaliation," investigators said.
Educators, who said they were either directed to cheat by superiors or felt they had no other option, huddled in back rooms at night erasing wrong answers and filling in correct ones or led students to choose correct answers through voice inflection, investigators found. Some seated students next to their higher-performing classmates so they could copy answers.
Teachers who reported the cheating to administrators were punished or fired, investigators found.
Hall's column is the second time she's written publicly about the cheating scandal since her retirement June 30. Just days after the July 5 state investigation was released, Hall — who has largely kept quiet about the investigation because she could face criminal charges — apologized to the people of Atlanta in an op-ed piece in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
But she has stopped short of taking responsibility for the cheating, saying she thought she put enough measures in place to prevent such behavior.
She wrote in Wednesday's column that the cheating scandal should not overshadow the legitimate gains made by Atlanta students since more testing security was put in place last year. Hall said under the "strictest testing conditions," about 80 percent of students in most grades performed at acceptable levels.
they cheated to get federal money! arrest and charge them.. wait they aren’t white? nevermind..
I can understand the anger directed at people like this, but anybody with half a brain saw this coming from a mile away once the Federal government began providing performance-based financial incentives to school districts. It’s an open invitation to manipulation at all levels of education, and I predict that this kind of nonsense is far more commonplace than anyone wants to admit.
Just like Hollywood: an outfit set up by themselves to honor themselves.
“Educators accused in the probe said they were under immense pressure to improve students’ scores by any means possible amid a culture of “fear and retaliation,””
In other words they were under pressure to actually DO THE JOB THEY WERE HIRED FOR, AND IF THEY SHOWED POOR PERFORMANCE THEY WOULD BE FIRED. That’s what they call “fear and retaliation”. In reality it’s called having a real job.
Oh, yeah, she LOOKS extremely regretful, doesn’t she...another generation of kids who can’t read their diplomas.
They may not know their abc’s but I’m sure they’ve been drilled on the letter “D” in time to vote...
I expect you’re right, of course: here’s hoping at least that this exposure makes others back off somewhat.
First they told us that black kids were not learning because they had low self esteem so they added black history to the curriculum.
When the scores didnt increase they said it was because black kids learned differently they needed black teachers, so they hired a bunch of black teachers, scores didn’t go up.
Then they told us that it was because there werent enough black Principals so they hired black Principals, scored didnt go up.
Then they said it was because there werent enough blacks school board members and black superintendants. Still no improvement.
Meanwhile they are stuck with a bunch of affirmative action, barely literate teachers and school administrators who can do nothing but complain about the school system they helped dismantle.
My wife is a public elementary school teacher in one of metro Atlanta's main school districts - but not the Atlanta Public Schools. We have two kids out of college and one in a private Christian high school. I have to be careful about anonymity because public discussion of the CRCT cheating scandal by a metro-Atlanta school system teacher or relative- even a teach in a system other than the Atlanta Public School System - is an easy way to get fired.
I may post a vanity pointing out some of the tastiest points of the report.
Most of the media accounts you've read come from the report's conclusions; the detailed contents of the report are much worse than you've read (but at 400+ pages, the report's too long for many reporters to read, and too long for others to summarize).
For one thing, the only schools that were subject to investigation really had to show indications of widespread cheating. How high was the bar?
A school was only investigated if more than 20% of its classes experienced "wrong-to-right" erasures at a rate more than three standard deviations from the norm. On a random basis, a variance of three standard deviations would occur only once in 370 tests. Yet for a school to be reviewed, more than 20% of its classes had to experience wrong-to-right erasures at a rate less likely to randomly occur than 1 in 370 times.
Do you realize that a school could have ALL of its classes experience a wrong-to-right erasure rate exactly three deviations from the norm - each class could have a wrong-to-right erasure rate likely to occur randomly only 1 in 370 tests - and it would NOT be investigated.
Out of approximately 1,800 school districts in Georgia, almost exactly half of the schools in the entire State with more than 20% of its classes experiencing wrong-to-right erasures at a rate of more than three standard deviations from the norm were in the Atlanta Public Schools district.
In Atlanta, some teachers experienced wrong-to-right erasures at up to 54 standard deviations from the norm (seven standard deviations occur randomly once ever 390 billion+ tests). And they experienced this unlikely wrong-to-right erasure rate on all three tests - language arts, reading, and math - in the same year, and on all three tests for three or more years in a row.
The report is chock full of details of retribution against whistleblowers, negative consultant reports being deleted from all computers in the APS, and miscellaneous tales of criminal and unethical behavior. Powerful stuff that's not in the summary you've read.
And the report specifically states that not all of the evidence and details are in the report - the investigators are apparently holding back a lot of the good stuff to be used in any criminal, civil, or administrative actions against those involved.
b
School Superintendents, the highest paid migrant workers in the country. Just pick one and follow their career. Take a job, create chaos and loot the district funds, get found out, resign/be fired with a big contract buyout, and move on to the next mark. The reason that this works is that the idiots on the school board don’t want to be exposed for not watching the store. One of the ones we had left and immediately the district office had an “unexplained fire” which conveniently destroyed critical records. Then a few weeks later, it “caught fire” again. The superintendent involved moved to Berkeley, California where he fit right in.
Recovering Beverly Hall's $580K bonuses may be too costly
This points up one of the biggest reasons government has gone out of control: they write each others' contracts.
Not only would APS have to pay her legal bills in any case brought against her in her capacity as Superintendent, they also have to pay any damages she is ruled to have incurred.
This is insanity.
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