D.C. cheating issue calls test-driven incentives into question - by Charles Taylor Kerchner / commentary
by Charles Taylor Kerchner / commentary
The smoke surrounding allegations of test score cheating in the Washington, D.C., public schools burst into flame last week. In a 4,300-word blog post, titledMichelle Rhee’s Reign of Error, the veteran educational journalist John Merrow linked the former schools chancellor with documents that suggest that she knew about widespread cheating on standardized tests and looked the other way.
Merrow drew parallels between Washington and Atlanta, where former superintendent Beverly Hall and 34 others have been indicted. But the underlying question is whether school reform can successfully be driven by rewards and punishments tied to standardized tests.
First, the Watergate question: What did Rhee know and when did she know it? As U.S.A. Today reported, District of Columbia Public Schools officials have long maintained that a 2011 test-cheating scandal that generated two government probes was limited to one elementary school. Merrow, however, reported that a long-buried memo from an outside data consultant warned as far back as January 2009 that educator cheating on 2008 standardized tests could have been widespread, with 191 teachers in 70 schools “implicated in possible testing infractions.”
Consultant Fay G. Sanford noted substantial numbers of erasures on test forms where corrections were made from wrong answers to correct ones. (Erasers leave smudge marks that the machines
State toughens regs for interns teaching English learners - by Kathryn Baron
by Kathryn Baron
The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing will now require non-credentialed Teach For America teachers and other intern teachers to receive more training in how to teach English learners and to get weekly on-the-job mentoring and supervision. The Commission’s unanimous vote last week followed two hours of public testimony and debate among commissioners over 14 separate...
