Posted on 11/03/2011 3:34:14 AM PDT by Libloather
Atlanta schools caught up in cheating scandal get federal standing yanked over inflated scores
Article by: DORIE TURNER, Associated Press
Updated: November 2, 2011 - 9:32 AM
ATLANTA - Georgia has revoked the federal standing for more than 40 Atlanta elementary and middle schools named in a massive cheating scandal.
**SNIP**
That means the schools can face sanctions under federal law and may have to return thousands of dollars in federal money for each year they reported inflated test scores.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
Teachers and administrators cheat, parents and students pay!
But the Poor teachers looking out for the kids. Or is it pass them along in society not educated enough to balance a checkbook or fill out a Job application.
And to think that these low-life cheaters are trusted with others’ children each school day. Sheesh!
“GOOD ! “
Irrelevant. As long as our public school system remains in place we’ll continue our march to the GUTTER.
Anyone fired? Funding cut?
What an example to set for today’s young people.
Yup, those poor schools were just standing there, minding their own business, and then low and behold, the next thing they knew they were "caught up" in a cheating scandal!
Just shows you how difficult it is to survive in nasty ol' America today.
Those schools don’t have to worry about this. Obama will take care of his people.
My niece attends 5th grade in the Atlanta public school system. She says lots of teachers she saw last year are gone. I’ve explained the whole mess to her, to counter any ‘spin’ she may be getting from school. She gets it.
The result of this cheating is in front of her face daily.
A girl in her class CANNOT READ! My niece is astonished that she’s been in school for 6 grades and is illiterate. I explained that the teachers she had obviously didn’t care if she learned or not, they just fixed the paperwork and passed her to the next grade.
Result- my 11 year old niece, who is in the gifted program, is tutoring the girl, teaching her to read.
And the saddest thing of all is- the Atlanta public school system is STILL lightyears better than any in the New Orleans area.
Very cool. They'll probably be friends forever.
You'll find that cheating was certainly more widespread in Atlanta and throughout Georgia than reported.
Schools were selected for review based on how many erasures were made on tests where wrong answers were erased and correct answers were entered.
A school, whether in Atlanta or elsewhere in Georgia, was only selected for review, if 20% or more of its classes experienced wrong-to-right erasures of more than three standard deviations from the statistical norm (you'll find that on page 5 of Part 1). A deviation of three standard deviations only occurs naturally one in 370 times. Four standard deviations occur only once every 15,778 times (Page 10).
So the only schools that were tagged as possible cheaters had one fifth of their classrooms experiencing a wrong-to-right erasure rate less likely to occur than 1 in 370 times in a single classroom - approaching or passing the level where more than 20% of your classrooms individually experienced a wrong-to-right erasure rate for each classroom that was likely to have happened randomly than 1 in 15,778 times or less. If your cheating wasn't that blatant - nobody cared.
You had to seriously cheat before anyone evern looked at you.
Atlanta area schools had "many classrooms" with standard deviations falling from the 20s into the 50s (Page 11). How unlikely is that without human intervention? Well, a school is likely to get a single classroom at the seven standard deviation mark randomly once every 390,600,000,000 tests.
Some of these school had almost 90% of their classes experiencing wrong-to-right erasure rates that would occur randomly, in one class, exponentially less frequently than once every 390,600,000,000 tests.
The facts in the report are staggering. The summary, which is what the newspapers read and reported upon, are nothing compared to the body of the report. The Atlanta Public School District paid for a study when accused of cheating; when the study showed cheating, the school district ordered that all copies of the report be destroyed and all electronic copies be deleted. Those writing the report only found it - after being told that it didn't exist - because somebody had forgotten to remove a copy that existed as an attachment to an email.
And the scariest thing is that those writing the report state that they are only including enough details in the report to show the cheating. They withheld facts necessary for criminal prosecutions.
But I digress. There was clearly cheating going on in other school districts in Georgia. The standard you had to meet before the investigators would even consider your school was so high that your cheating had to be extreme and outrageous before you were investigated.
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