Somehow I'm not shocked that someone has found something weird with Washington, DC's school district test scores under Michelle Rhee:
A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.'s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes' classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.
Basically, the schools in DC that improved the most under Rhee also had extremely high erasure rates.
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 plain fact of the matter is that when standardized test scores are the major, if not only, measure of a teacher's performance - especially if those test scores are tied to either a bonus or termination - teachers are going to game the system. The most common way to to that is to sacrifice education for test prep. My daughter's teacher has been doing that for over a month now. I don't blame her, and it's not as if she's only teaching the test.
Another way, of course, to game the system is to cheat. Surely there are teachers and principals doing this. Perhaps there are groups of teachers conspiring together to bring up their entire school's average.
It's also possible, of course, that certain superintendents and chancellors, especially those who have made their careers as "crusading reformers" who "get things done," have decided not to trust their teachers and students to get their scores high enough to justify their reforms.
It would be irresponsible to suggest that Michelle Rhee falsified test results as the DC schools Chancellor.
But I hope they nail her to the fucking wall.
