Fool’s Gold: G.I. praises “learning gains” at a school accused of cheating on standardized tests

by David Safier

As Al Pacino [kind of] said in Godfather 3, "Just when I thought Matthew Ladner was out, he pulls me back in again."

Ladner is now a "Senior Fellow" rather than an employee at the Goldwater Institute since he moved on to work for Jeb Bush's so-called "Foundation for Excellence in Education," so I didn't think I'd be hearing much from him. But he stopped by G.I.'s Daily Email today to pat himself on the back because Bill Gates agreed with him about something.

Matthew, Matthew, Matthew, I keep telling you, if you want to be more than a high paid propagandist, you need to consider your assertions a bit more carefully.

Ladner cites a Yuma charter school, Carpe Diem, as an example of a school that's doing more with less money, citing "strong student learning gains."

The problem is, though Carpe Diem's sophomore test scores took a big leap, which should be a good thing, the number of erasures on the tests went way up along with the scores. And those erasures mainly changed wrong answers to right answers, at seven times the state average. It's possible-to-probable teachers and/or administrators went through the tests and changed answers.

So maybe there have been "strong student learning gains" at Carpe Diem, or maybe there has been some cheating by the staff to make things look better than they really were.

We may never know the answer, because Ed Supe John Huppenthal isn't interested in finding out. There won't even be state monitoring of testing at the school next spring — probably because Carpe Diem is a poster child for the conservative view that we can spend less on education and get better results. Hupp wouldn't be happy if their high test scores turned out to be a fraud.