USA Today came out with an explosive investigation last week regarding testing fraud in the Washington D.C. school system. In their investigation, USA Today found an enormously high number of erasures on the standardized tests administered at D.C. schools.
The erasures were overwhelming instances of wrong answers being changed to right answers. The paper reported in one case the odds of the erasures found occurring by chance were lower than the odds of winning the Powerball lottery. The obvious culprit for the extraordinary number of erasures is cheating. It appears test answers were being changed to artificially inflate scores.
This discovery should deal an enormous blow to the specific brand of education reform that has become popular in documentaries and among some students on university campuses. The chancellor of the D.C. school system at the time that the apparent fraud occurred was education-reform superstar Michelle Rhee.
During her time there, Rhee became loved by the new brand of education reformers after she fired 600 teachers, dozens of principles and implemented merit pay. She, like every other misguided education reformer in recent years, was certain that really pressing on schools was going to squeeze out better results.
Luckily for her extremist theories and behavior, she appeared to be correct. Scores were skyrocketing in ways that were unbelievable. Well, it is becoming clear now that they were unbelievable — because they were fake.
It turns out, firing a bunch of teachers, teaching to standardized tests and putting extreme amounts of pressure on schools does not actually make students perform better. It just makes teachers — who risk termination under the ridiculous view that they are primarily to blame for student failures — feel the need to cheat in order to inflate student scores.
Of course, this outcome is entirely predictable. The entire suite of recent reform efforts — Teach for America, charter schools, privitization, etc. — all make the same basic error: they assume the cause of low educational achievement has anything to do with the school.
Teach for America has proven itself to be an utter failure — studies indicate its recruits perform significantly worse than certified teachers.
Charter schools have also failed, with only 17 percent of them performing better than public schools, while 37 percent perform worse than public schools — the rest perform the same. And lo and behold, merit pay, quick firings, and business-like school administration also is a total failure.
Bizarrely enough, everyone sees the same problem. Poor children do worse in school than rich children. This fact has touched the hearts of some of the privileged, and they want to do something about it.
Yet, they consistently avoid the problem that they have already diagnosed: the proliferation of poor children.
If any of these reformers were seriously concerned about the fact that poor children do worse in school, they would be screaming about the fact that our country presently allows one in five of its children to live in poverty.
They would be organizing efforts for better pay, lower inequality and other types of poverty-reducing efforts. But instead, they spin their wheels on useless school-reform efforts that do not even make an attempt to address the root of the problem.
For all of those students on campus who are preparing to waste their time in the coming years doing Teach for America or hooking on to one of these other education fads, I urge you to reconsider.
If you want to help poor children do better in school, make them less poor. You could even start this goal right now by working towards a living wage for campus workers, many of whom no doubt struggle to raise the very children you will one day waste your time not helping.
— Matt Bruenig, philosophy senior
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TheJeff 1 year, 1 month ago
"Charter schools have also failed, with only 17 percent of them performing better than public schools"
I'd like to see more specific statistics. Inner city to inner city. Was my school light years ahead of richer school districts like Edmond? I think it was probably at least as good. Was it light years ahead of any other school in the Oklahoma City district? You bet your bottom dollar. There were still plenty of poor people, but their families gave enough of a crap to get them into a school where the school gave a crap.
Not all charter schools are run the same, but the way mine were run in OKC were definitely better than their traditional counterparts. Done right, they're a wonderful tool in education reform. Much better than pretending everything would just be okay if we kept on trucking.
bruenig 1 year, 1 month ago
The cited statistics come from the Stanford CREDO study which included over 70% of all charter schools in the country in their sample size. You can find it online.
One anecdote that your school was one of the very fringe number that actually did better of course is predictable. Some students have to be in the 17%. Of course, more than twice as many more students will have to be in the 37%.
If I had a reform effort in mind that could improve 37% of charter schools while only worsening 17%, this would be a fantastic innovation I have come across. Of course, it already exists: non-charter public schools.
That someone would continue to push for charter schools when more than twice as many do worse than do better can only be attributed to the wonders of documentaries and wishful thinking.
I mean, what's sad is the failure of charter schools is not only documented, but is entirely theoretically predictable. If schools were the problem, then you would expect poor children who happen to go to a school largely populated by rich children would do the same (i.e. you would not expect achievement to be class stratified within schools, only among schools). So, wealthy children who happened to go to a predominately low-income school would do just as bad as the poor children. And, poor children who happened to go to a predominately high-income school would do just as well as wealthy children.
But that isn't what actually happens. Poor children do worse than rich children when they are attending the same school! This problem is obviously not school-side, but reformers (possibly horrified at the idea that their laissez-faire delusion is not reality) hate to consider poverty itself into the question. They don't want to admit that allowing obscene inequality can in-and-of-itself be damaging to children. So, they waste their time trying to manage this cognitive dissonance so that they can simultaneously be ok with 1 in 7 Americans living in poverty (because screw poor adults right?), while also feel like they are not dooming the children who have to live in poverty (because only adults should live horrible poverty-stricken lives, not children).
They will not consider the two together lest they be accused of socialism, and lest they feel bad about what is often their own obscene privilege (Bill Gates for example who these days pretends to know things about school despite no background).
dargus 1 year, 1 month ago
"Bill Gates for example who these days pretends to know things about school despite no background"
You mean like some guy named Matt Bruenig?
kdbp1213 1 year, 1 month ago
wait a minute, please. should we really trust the usa today newspaper? mcnewspaper?
TheJR 1 year, 1 month ago
Basing a teacher's salary on the collective scores of the students they are teaching is the worst policy to come out of education reform, well, ever.
CWard 1 year, 1 month ago
"Teach for America has proven itself to be an utter failure — studies indicate its recruits perform significantly worse than certified teachers."
I just read a book about Teach For America, and it is definitely not a failure. I found an article online that says:
While Teach for America only provides short-term help for these disadvantaged students, several studies have been done that support the work. The largest was by CREDO (Center for Research on Education Outcomes at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University) in August 2001. This study looked at the performance outcomes of students in the Houston public schools working with Teach for America corps members and comparing their outcomes with students working with other teachers. The results showed that "TFA is a viable and valuable source of teachers and that they perform as well as, and in many cases better than other teachers hired by HISD" (Raymond et al. 2001).
URL: http://learningtogive.org/papers/paper161.html
This article also cites CREDO, the Stanford study you referenced. I think it's safe to say that Teach For America has its success and its failures, just like every public school system in the country.
JKC 1 year, 1 month ago
The debate about education reform always falls into two camps: blame the parents and blame the teachers. It's either crappy parents who raise kids in crappy neighborhoods or crappy teachers who suck at teaching.
This debate has one of the most contrived and artificial dichotomies out there. Obviously bad parents' kids won't do well in school; obviously bad teachers' students won't do so well. There's no point in trying to take a side; you will just be ignoring the other, probably equally valid, cause.
Bruenig makes an excellent point in this article: Poor kids do poorly in school...so make them UNpoor and they will do better (obviously).
However, to pretend that making all kids middle class will magically fix the education system is wrongheaded. We must simultaneously make teachers better at their jobs. While standardized testing and paying according to their results is obviously a failure (as Bruenig points out), there have to be ways to get better teachers.
I for one propose that we pay them better; this will undoubtedly attract more candidates and increase competition so that only good teachers will be hired. I, for one, would teach public school if I could make $100k a year. Since I can't (and this sounds selfish), I'm going to find a job elsewhere.