Under Pressure, Teachers Tamper With Test Scores
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There is a certain strain of teacher who never felt their reputation, livelihood, or psychic essence was at danger when they were merely failing to educate, for decades. After all, to the extent that anyone noticed, it was poor black kids. Who the heck cares what they think.
That strain of teacher is now motivated by fear of exposure. Which is as it should be.
If you raise your standards high enough, those who were formerly honest will be forced into cheating while those who remain honest are forced out. If you raise standards high enough, you end up with only cheaters, because past some threshold, it's no longer possible to meet expectations honestly.
Evidence for this empirical statement?
(There is some idea what an average child can learn in our current system but that's such a small part of the possible state space of educational systems I don't pay much attention to it.)
For good information about what is possible for young learners around the world, see
and
For thoughts on how to improve teaching in United States schools, see (among many other sources)
http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf
or
I will say that the statement relies on the assumption that honest folks cannot get a perfect score consistently. Although, even then, if one person always gets a perfect and the other person goofs up rarely and the business has to lay one of the two off, guess what usually happens?
The obvious difference is that in the case of steroids in sports, it's an arbitrary system designed primarily to entertain people and make money; the outcomes are completely irrelevant to the success of the enterprise as such. In the case of child education, if everyone cheats, no one learns, and we've just raised a generation of dishonest, ignorant children.
A perfect example would be the high school that I attended. This is a school in a small community (40k people when I attended, maybe 60k now) with a significant amount of wealth. The high school specifically has received massive amounts of donations for both academics and sports. Since the inception of NCLB the school has routinely made AYP however in 2008-2009 the school did not. The reason the school didn't is entirely due to students receiving "Individualized Education Plans" (IEP). With the mainstreaming of special needs and special education students this means that an entire school is being placed on the needs improvement list due to a small subset of the population receiving special education services.
I fully expect that in the next three to five years the vast majority of schools that have routinely made AYP will no longer be able to show adequate growth. When the children of upper middle class families start attending "failing" schools you'll start to hear a lot of complaints about NCLB.
Poor black kids are going to stay lower than everyone else, because poor black kids, statistically, have much less family involvement, and a (again, statistically), substantially less 'structured' home life. THIS is the number one problem with the low end of the socio-economic academic performance ladder. Rich white kids and poor black kids attending the same class, at the same school, will not perform the same, unless the parents are both involved to the same amount. Making everybody take tests to prove this out doesn't accomplish anything. Firing teachers because parents won't do anything to help their children also does not accomplish anything.
This issue is near and dear to me - I worked in one of the school districts cited in the NYT article for 7 years, and my wife is currently teaching there. It's a farce.
Supporting reference: Your Child's Growing Mind http://books.google.com/books?id=V1wfk_l2Ch4C
This is the classic practical book on brain development in children and adolescents. One of its main themes is that children mature in different areas at different rates, and that teaching them something before they're ready is fruitless, emotionally risky, and actually damages their later ability to reason naturally.
True, but most groups of 30-40 children are roughly the same. There will be a few smarties, a few morons, and a multitude of people in the middle. It's called the law of large numbers.
Or even better, you can compute a statistical predictor of his student's expected performance, and measure the deviation between predicted and actual performance.
The point is that individual variation in students is irrelevant. It is extremely unlikely that a teacher will get a class full of dumb kids.
- people who can't do any better in life
- people who love teaching so much that they are willing to forgo much more lucrative careers
Not only is this pool rather small, it also selects poorly for talent. This places the poor black kids (as you put it) at an even greater disadvantage, since their teachers lack either the talent or the inclination to pull them forward.
http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_be...
tl;dr: it's not thankless, but it's not exactly an awesomely compensated profession either - there's lots of hidden shit teachers have to do/provide that should count against their compensation.
I'm often asked how we can possibly spend that much money on her class and it's a little bit complicated. While maybe $500 goes towards supplies such as pens, pencils, paper, notebooks, recorders and other basic implements we also spend money directly on the students. My wife typically buys every student a book for Christmas, we supply everything to holiday parties etc. Each year my wife spends another $500 or so on new wall hangings, new books for her library, teaching aids, resource books and more. The majority of the money however is spent taking care of the students in the most need. 100% of the schools students are on the free and reduced lunch program and the school is classified as Title II which means a dinner program is also provided to the neighborhood. Each winter we end up buying a large number of warm jackets, boots, gloves etc. In a neighborhood with 85% of the families living at or below the poverty level you wouldn't believe how much of a difference small amounts of help like that mean to the students and their families. My wife once had a student break down in tears when he received a winter coat. He told her that now his mom didn't have to worry about it and could pay the power bill. At Christmas we buy gifts (clothes) for the students that aren't included in the district wide program for the "underprivileged".
We certainly don't have to spend any of that money however my wife is there for the children and not for the money.
As for whether the summer is paid or not, so what? Your wife earns $54k/year, she just doesn't work all year.
Your quoted salary also completely ignores the fact that teachers in most states get benefits (e.g., defined benefit retirement at age 55, gold plated health care) which are vastly better than average. Teachers get more fringe benefits but less wages. Cry me a river.
Every salary'd job that requires a degree that I'm aware of gets benefits, and the benefits most school systems have are NOT better than average anymore. I pay less for health care, and have better retirement options at my private employer than any of the local school districts. We don't have a pension/retirement benefit (other than 401k), but school districts around here are laying teachers off and not hiring new ones because they don't have the money to pay them in the first place.
On top of that, most other professions don't require you to provide your own work supplies (ie: you get a paper to print reports on, pens/pencils and notepads, etc.), while teachers must purchase all of their non-textbook, non-furniture educational materials. Library of books, reams and reams of paper for work packets, colored paper, art supplies, science project materials (we've spent hundreds on various plants, moths, butterflies, etc. for life sciences experiments). Buying even paper and pencils for 72 kids over the course of a full school year is a non-negligble expense, especially at the salary being paid.
The TUS is a random sampling of Americans, the report in particular is the same data restricted to teachers. But I'm sure you can do a better job of sampling by asking your wife and her friends than the BLS can by calling randomly selected people.
Regarding benefits, it varies from state to state. You may be unlucky and live in one of the few states where teachers can't retire at 55 (i.e., retirement benefits which are 2.8x better than those of normal employees, ignoring completely the costs of defined benefits). Most states, however, give ridiculously good fringe benefits to state employees at the cost of some wages.
Also, many professions involve purchasing various goods and services. Doctors often purchase medical supplies, consultants purchase equipment (laptop, etc), I purchase books, most people in banking purchase expensive signaling clothes (can't get promoted if you don't look the part). Really nothing unique here.
In the case of a programmer, the number of lines of code output, or the number of functions written, or the number of bugs detected and fixed, can all be achieved with less "true value output" (whatever that means). The measurement can be gamed.
Teachers in the UK have been accused of "teaching to the test" rather than "teaching for understanding" - but what more can be expected? When exams test for understanding rather than rote skills, only then will understanding be the aim of the teachers looking for the easy way out.
Let me add that I know many dedicated teachers who do the right thing regardless of the threats posed. They encourage and enthuse their students, ranging widely over their subject to get the students engaged and interested. They know that this serves them better, and will, mostly, improve the test scores, even if not as much as "teaching to the test" would. They know they're doing the right thing, but come under enormous pressure to work more obviously towards improving test scores.
I'm not surprised that many of them buckle under the strain and take less honorable courses.
That's part of the tragedy - the destruction of otherwise excellent teachers.
Don't get me wrong, I think that if there are poor teachers then they should be dealt with, but I think that these standardised tests of kids across the board are not the way to go about it. I'm thinking maybe something like a "peer review" type system could be put in place that takes more into account than just the output of the kids on one test (the results of continuous assessment across the whole year, for example; teaching reviews, etc.). Of course this would come with its own issues, but it would certainly cut down on the pressure that comes from that one test!
The tragedy is that teachers who don't teach to the test and provide an excellent education that is tailored to the children they have are starting to worry about the security of their jobs, whereas poor teachers who have no real ability except to regurgitate the texts and drill the kids on process and recitation are relatively safe.
Evidence for this empirical statement? I have my doubts about this, because the best teachers I had in childhood (too few, but more than one) were able both to engage the pupils from the dullest to the brightest with deep, thoughtful questions and able to cover the fundamental facts of the lessons with efficiency.
This is all they talk about after school...
1) Have schools partner with each other, where each school is matched to another school of similar size.
2) Extend the testing into twice as long periods (e.g., if it was a 1-day test, now the test period is 2 days).
3) Have partner schools test on opposite period halves.
4) Have partner schools give students the day(s) off on the non-test half.
5) Have schools send their teachers to their partner schools to monitor all the tests.
Now, this isn't fool-proof. It's possible that teachers across multiple schools could collude. It would be crucial to mix teacher pairs up so that if A monitors B then B does not monitor A, thus requiring a multi-way collusion that involves many participants.
In Norfolk (one of the cities in the NYT article), the 'SOL' annual standardized test is a sole determining factor in pupil promotion. If you come out of 4th grade with a 100% average, but you fail your SOL for whatever reason (you're nervous and didn't do well, you were sick that day, etc.) - YOU FAIL 4TH GRADE. That seems ridiculous.
This isn't what teachers want, this is what teachers are forced to do by their states in order to achieve the largest number of passing schools and keep federal funding levels high.
When are we (loosely speaking) going to realize that we're not teaching in the right medium.
In the world we actually live in, you'll have a union rep testify as to how dedicated of a teacher you are, and you'll probably not miss a day of class.
If you're a bank teller, your whole job is to manage the flow of money and information to and from customers of the bank, the ultimate goal being to make more money for the bank. If you take $3k out of the drawer, then you have failed at your immediate task (money has gone to the wrong place) and worked against the overall purpose of your job (the bank has less money, rather than more).
If you're a teacher, the heart of your job is (or should be) teaching your pupils: enabling them to know more and think better and so forth. A secondary purpose (the real purpose, according to some cynics) is to keep them out of their parents' hair and off the streets for a few hours every day. Another (subsidiary to the first, in an ideal world) is enabling them to do as well as possible in whatever external examinations they take, in the hope that it'll help them in later life. Arranging for your pupils' standardized test scores not to be too high comes very low down that list -- and if you get away with it, it benefits your pupils and your school. (While harming other pupils and other schools and other people generally, by making the test results less useful. Tragedy of the commons.)
That's not to say that it's not very bad for teachers to cheat to get better test results for their pupils. But it's bad in a different way from a bank teller's embezzlement: peripheral to their job rather than central, and immediately beneficial rather than harmful to the people you're supposed to be working for.
A better analogy (though perhaps an overdramatic one, given recent economic events) would be a mortgage salesperson, working for a mortgage broker, who sells people mortgages they are too likely to default on. When that happens, the salesperson gets more commission; his employer, the broker, gets more commission; the person who buys the mortgage gets a mortgage they want and otherwise couldn't have had (and, let's say, does manage to keep up the payments in 90% of cases, fails to do so but not so badly that they lose their home in 5% of cases, and crashes hard in 5% of cases -- which is probably kinda parallel to the outcomes for pupils whose test scores are inflated); other people, less directly connected with the broker, are the ones who get screwed.
Anyone expect mortgage salespeople who sell a bit too enthusiastically to get kicked out of their profession en masse? ... No, nor me.
> In the world we actually live in ... you'll probably not miss a day of class.
That doesn't appear to be what happened in the cases in the NYT article.