Posted on 05/27/2012 3:58:00 AM PDT by Libloather
Firing of Dobbs Elementary teacher upheld for aiding students on tests
By Jaime Sarrio
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
5:59 p.m. Wednesday, May 23, 2012
The firing of a fifth teacher in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal was upheld Wednesday by a tribunal.
Derrick Broadwater, a teacher at Dobbs Elementary, was accused of helping students with words they didn't know and prompting them to recheck answers if he suspected something was incorrect.
The tribunal voted to uphold APS' decision to terminate Broadwater after hearing recordings of the teacher talking to GBI investigators in March 2011.
“I always tell my kids to go back and check over their answers ... that means something is wrong. They know that’s a prompt I do,” Broadwater said on a recording.
(Excerpt) Read more at ajc.com ...
When all this testing business started up and it was attached to teacher pay-raises....you could predict with absoluteness...that bad things were to follow.
I wonder how they caught this guy in the first place—perhaps giving the help exclusively to black kids and ignoring the rest?
Imagine how dopes like this can survive in the dreaded private sector??? They can’t!! All these idiots want to be sucking up taxes via gov’t jobs
Another distinguished edumactor >>>> BUSTED!!
We live in Georgia. A few years ago a local educator had an accident involving my son. No witnesses. He was young. She blamed him so eventually our insurance had to pay. She milked our insurance company for almost $100,000. Oh, she was a teacher. I had acquaintances at the school where she worked and they told me that she had made it clear she really did not have a “soft tissue” injury but was trying to make some easy money.
I found evidence where she had pulled this stunt in other states. But as is typical of insurance companies, it was easier and cheaper to pay her off than to spend the time fighting it in court.
I wish they would take the stand and fight some of these fakers. It would cost a little bit more for a few years but then would stop this perceived gravy train for the “I am a victim crowd.”
If the only thing he ever did was to prompt kids to check their answers, or to pronounce some difficult words it might rise to a level of a severe letter of reprimand. Firing is another issue, especially if it can’t be proven he actually gave away any real answers. It depends on the amount of “wink wink, nod nod, ahem ahems” he would use in checking those tests, in accodance with any interactions going on with studets in the “checking” process.
No. The full methodology that led to targeting specific Georgia school districts, specific schools, and specific classrooms (i.e., teachers) was in the report prepared for the Georgia governor.
In brief, the investigators looked at the number of erasures on the standardized test sheets to see what percentage of the erasures changed wrong answers to right answers, then compared that to the expected number based on a large number of criteria.
Schools with a large number of classrooms that fell a large number of standard deviations from the norm (classrooms with results that statistically just wouldn't have happened randomly except once in hundreds of trillions of tries) were identified.
In some Atlanta Public School System schools, up to 80% of the classrooms experienced wrong-to-right erasures that FOR ONE CLASSROOM would happen by chance less than one time in 700 trillion times, yet 80% of the classrooms experienced those wrong-to-right erasure rates, or higher.
It wasn't by race. You just looked the answer sheets for a teacher's studnets and noticed that everything had been erased and changed to the right answer.
Thank you for the information on this Scoutmaster.
His school had some classrooms with wrong to right erasure rate at over 50 standard deviations from the norm. At seven standard deviations an event happens randomly less frequently than once in 390 billion occurrences. (I'm not talking 'statistics' very clearly).
He admitted he cheated. I'm almost sympathetic with him because he's one of the teachers who admitted cheating to the original investigators.
That info wasn’t in the news story, nor did I have the links to the report you cite....on second thought throw the bum out!
I'd suggest reading only a few pages starting at page 9 of the First Part of the report.
Do you think former Atlanta School Superintendent Beverly Hall will ever be charged?
Holy hanging chad, Batman!
Thank you for the explanation, Sir.
Yep, and it’s not hard to find out!
I could only guess. I could name factors in favor of charging her, but many more political factors that point to not charging her.
It's amazing that you could decipher it given the typos and errors in grammar.
Wrong-to-right erasure rates occur at seven standard deviations from the norm so rarely that the odds of them happening naturally are approximately the same as you buying a ticket to a concert with 14,000 other people - and you show up and everyone else there is over seven feet tall, just by chance.
Yet most of these APS classrooms (and classrooms in other public school systems) are showing WTR erasure rates sitting at 9, 15 - and 52 standard deviations from the norm.
And those classrooms are in the same school as other classrooms experiencing WTR erasure rates sitting 30, 40, and 50 standard deviations from the norm. In fact, every tested classroom in that school is showing a WTR erasure rate that would happen, by chance, independently, less frequently than one in a few hundred million (or trillion, or trillion-squared) times.
You want to talk about whether the teachers in these schools cheated and whether the test administrator and principals in these schools were complicit BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT?
My wife teaches grad-level ed leadership at a local university. I asked her if she wanted to read the Atlanta report on the cheating. She said “Heck no!”. She started reeling off facts and figures regarding cheating nationwide. The one thing I understood was that as long as there are $$$ attached to grades, this stuff will continue...and only get worse.
I'll need to find the link, but I posted the main article and several of the sub-articles here on FR.
Test scores would jump for the grades that were relevant for Annual Yearly Progress funding marks under No Child Left Behind . . . then those same children would score poorly the next year or years . . . until their test scores mattered again for AYP benchmarks under NCLB.
Conservatives didn't like NCLB when it passed for a multitude of reasons. The "Annual Yearly Progress" portion of NCLB explains the cheating scandals. It doesn't excuse them, but it explains them.
NCLB was and is bad law.
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