The Miracle That Wasn’t
Michelle Rhee is the firmer chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public schools, appointed by Mayor Adrian Fenty. She’s highly lauded by education reformers because of her performance there – there were dramatic turnarounds in proficiency in some of the worst-performing schools during her tenure. She has opened her own education reform foundation and the solutions she are pushing are breaking teacher contracts and charter schools. Will new revelations about the supposed miracle affect her reputation?
In just two years, Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus went from a school deemed in need of improvement to a place that the District of Columbia Public Schools called one of its “shining stars.”
Standardized test scores improved dramatically. In 2006, only 10% of Noyes’ students scored “proficient” or “advanced” in math on the standardized tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Two years later, 58% achieved that level. The school showed similar gains in reading.
…
In 2007-08, six classrooms out of the eight taking tests at Noyes were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of high wrong-to-right erasure rates. The pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, when 80% of Noyes classrooms were flagged by McGraw-Hill.
On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.
“This is an abnormal pattern,” says Thomas Haladyna, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University who has studied testing for 20 years.
The USA Today investigation found that the scores were swinging wildly. The fourth grade went from 22% proficient to 84% and then back down to 52%.
I dint know how you feel about education reform but from my view education reform focuses too narrowly on tests scores and teacher-blaming. Until reformers stop looking for miracle one-size-fits-all solutions we will see things like this happen. I feel really sorry for the kids in this case because they gain absolutely nothing by being labeled falsely proficient.
Tags: Charter Schools, Education, Michelle Rhee
This would be a good research opportunity to check other evaluation measures to see if some of the kids actually rose to meet the raised expectations, even if they were fake.
If the fake test scores caused some of the kids to be placed into more challenging classes rather than dropped to easier classes, maybe there is a silver lining.
If you read Freakonomics you will discover that this happened a little more than a decade ago in Chicago schools as well. The math behind how they tracked this down is interesting, and it is frightening what it tells you about the vulnerability of standardized tests. I always said during the DSTP years that if a child of mine every flunked the test I would challenge in court because DOE always used too few test items and the whole thing had neither validity nor reliability in the statistical sense.
To anon: the evidence in Chicago and elsewhere suggests that the silver lining you hope for does not exist.
Agree w/ Steve–no silver lining in “more challenging classes”. Most students until middle or high school are herded thru heterogenous groupings under the laughable “differentiated instruction” to meet their academic prowess or lack thereof.
But the irony is–everyone hates the test, and reporting and labeling of test scores–but if they do well, they sure puff their chests and take on the reformer’s job circuit!! Such hacks.
There is too much focus placed on the standardized tests. When students are accountable for the outcome of a test, some students will cheat. When schools are accountable, some schools will cheat. The higher the stakes, the more the cheating.
Standardized tests are a fine idea, as long as they are not the primary measure. Accountability should rest on a whole basket of measures, not just standardized tests. The reason there is so much emphasis on the standardized tests is simply because they are easy to capture and compare using computers.
Educators know full well other metrics are equally important if not more so, but they are difficult to capture in a computer, so they are ignored. Not enough effort has gone into capturing and measuring other important metrics.
For example, everyone agrees and research shows homework completion rate is a critical metric. Yet nobody captures it and reports on it in an automated fashion. Few schools capture homework completion rates, and those that do, use hinky manual logging notebooks that introduc a subjective element, depend on compliance, and are never used in systemwide reporting.
Go ask your district what their overall homework completion rate is, and if rates are improving or declining over the last five years, and you will see they have no answer.
Sorry–standardized tests have lost their way in our system, when we’ve become a society of standardized test prep tests, and practice sessions. Gimme a B-C student w/ an outstanding emotional quotient, and I’ll give you back a responsible,bright, humanistic society.
So then what happens when twenty million kids show up at Harvard clutching letters attesting to their emotional intelligence?
They won’t be so hell bent on going to Harvard.
This is what happens when you require teachers to “teach to the test” instead of trying to actually teach kids to think and reason. Administrators are so geared towards getting high marks on standardized tests that they will do what they will to show “progress and achievement.”
The teachers and so called educators who changed the test score on those kids should be prosecuted. They have stolen from the children the oppty for an education. These children can never get back that time they spent in school. By inflating the test scores, the ‘cheaters’ didnt just hurt themselves- ‘cheaters never prosper’ buy they allowed the children to be placed into classes that were most likely too difficult for the children.
we do need some method of measuring a child’s ability as well as to hold teachers accountable. I dont have the answer.
This is just another example of how our education system is broken.
And I do agree with Freakenomics above.
For example, everyone agrees and research shows homework completion rate is a critical metric. Yet nobody captures it and reports on it in an automated fashion.
Actually, it is captured in Delaware, or at least the mechanism for doing so is in existence and used by many districts. It’s called the Homework Access Center (HAC), and we use it on a regular basis to follow three different teenagers in two different schools on an assignment-by-assignment basis.
Delaware has a lot of potential to follow all sorts of variables that other states would have difficulty covering because we have assigned student numbers for every kid in the system and their data follows them from school to school, district to district.
The problem: DOE has been inhabited for years by standards and standardized-test gurus, who are driven by the fact that increasingly all Federal dollars are also driven by compliance with standardized test agendas.
Delaware has a lot of potential to follow all sorts of variables
We’re on the same page, Steve. The problem is, HAC does not distinguish between homework that was never completed, or completed homework that has some other problem. HAC is useful to individual parents, but currently does not provide system wide reporting on homework completion rates. Actually this is possible with HAC, with some creative configuration, but so far there doesn’t seem to be any interest in pursuing this.
“Gimme a B-C student w/ an outstanding emotional quotient, and I’ll give you back a responsible,bright, humanistic society.”
Now that is one of the most insightful comments about educations I’ve read in a long time.
It is heartwarming and has truth in it, but in practical terms, the problem is coming up with a ranked list of students with outstanding emotional quotient.
I think my kid is #1. Prove me wrong.
Arlene Ackerman in Philadelphia is no better.