A principal cheating? What will we tell the children?

by David Safier

When jobs and salaries hang in the balance, people will figure out ways to boost test scores. I've written about Eraser-gate, where wrong answers are erased from student tests and replaced with right answers by staff. But there are other creative ways to boost scores, such as . . .

De-enroll low achieving students for one day — test day — then re-enroll them. One Georgia principal lost her job for taking 13 students off the rolls for a day to raise the school's test averages.

Was this a case of one bad apple? Nope.

Gary Walker of the state’s Professional Standards Commission said there are others.

He chuckled while thinking about a case of roster manipulation in another county.

He said 86 students were withdrawn, and then reinstated.

"In one day?" Belcher asked.

"Yeah, they were withdrawn one day, and a day later they were reinstated. They were out one day," he said.

In an unrelated story, D.C. former-superintendent Michelle Rhee gave out $8,000 bonuses to teachers and a $10,000 bonus to the principal of a school that made "miraculous" gains on standardized tests. She knew the school had been flagged for its pattern of erasures, but she didn't want to look into it too carefully, since the scores made her look good.

Likewise, Yuma's Carpe Diem Charter gets terrific test scores and is much loved by Huppenthal, the Goldwater Institute and educational conservatives in general. It too has been flagged for questionable erasures. Hupp isn't planning to look into it, nor is he planning to monitor this year's tests to make sure no one messes with the students' answers, since the school's "success" reinforces his privatization ideology.

And let's not forget, when teachers teach to the standardized test, it's perfectly legit, but any statistician will tell you, the test results are no longer a valid measure of student progress.

As soon as testing is used to evaluate teachers and schools, it loses its value as a measure of student learning. And all too often, high stakes testing corrupts administrators and teachers by putting pressure on them to raise test scores by any means necessary.

WEIRD HAT TIP: I found this story in "News of the Weird" on a back page of this week's Tucson Weekly. Of course, I made sure the story was covered in local Georgia papers as well before I ran with it. You never know where you're gonna find a tasty news bite.