Big picture: American students are no longer the tops in international competitions...
....smaller picture: cheating and corruption, rampant.
1. "Like Captain Renault in Casablanca , Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña is shocked, shocked to discover that theres lots of cheating in the citys public schools.
2. ....unnerved by the New York Posts recent reporting on this scandal ....: ditch the experts and save the citys beleaguered taxpayers the $5 million that the panel is expected to cost.
3. Fariña doesn’t need the experts because she already knows everything there is to know about the rampant culture of grade inflation and other forms of cheating ....
4. During her long career in the city schools, Fariña has seen it all: grade tampering, scrubbing of student test sheets, and the serial abuses of the “credit-recovery” system that allows many students to graduate despite not having passed all of the course work required by the state of New York.
5. Fariña served as a Brooklyn superintendent when a Regents cheating scandal erupted under her nose at the Cobble Hill High School for American Studies.
A few years later, Fariña was deputy chancellor for teaching and learning when PS 33, a poor elementary school in the South Bronx, seemed to have hit the jackpot on the state’s reading test. Over 83 percent of the school’s fourth-graders scored at or above proficiency (or grade level), up from 43 percent the previous year. The school’s miraculous test results were just four percentage points below the average for the state’s richest suburban districts.
But.... there was actually no education miracle at the school. It was just another case of test tampering that went unpunished because of a bungled investigation by the Department of Education.
6. ...she was fully aware that the push for higher test scores and graduation rates was pressuring educators to meet those benchmarks by any means necessary, legal or illegal.
7. ...massive cheating scandals had also been uncovered in urban school districts around the country, including Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia. With these events as context and background, it’s astonishing that Fariña did nothing to create tougher security protocols....
8. ....there’s a broader dimension to the current crisis that has largely gone unmentioned. Teachers are often tempted to cheat when they realize that their students haven’t mastered the academic content that would allow them to pass more stringent tests.
9. At that point, educators can either acknowledge their own failures in the classroom and consider the causes or they can tamper with the testing system to engineer “better” results."
The Cheating Goes On by Sol Stern City Journal August 11 2015
Oh....and did I mention that the same political party and worldview is responsible for the decay in both the schools and in the nation?
True story.
....smaller picture: cheating and corruption, rampant.
1. "Like Captain Renault in Casablanca , Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña is shocked, shocked to discover that theres lots of cheating in the citys public schools.
2. ....unnerved by the New York Posts recent reporting on this scandal ....: ditch the experts and save the citys beleaguered taxpayers the $5 million that the panel is expected to cost.
3. Fariña doesn’t need the experts because she already knows everything there is to know about the rampant culture of grade inflation and other forms of cheating ....
4. During her long career in the city schools, Fariña has seen it all: grade tampering, scrubbing of student test sheets, and the serial abuses of the “credit-recovery” system that allows many students to graduate despite not having passed all of the course work required by the state of New York.
5. Fariña served as a Brooklyn superintendent when a Regents cheating scandal erupted under her nose at the Cobble Hill High School for American Studies.
A few years later, Fariña was deputy chancellor for teaching and learning when PS 33, a poor elementary school in the South Bronx, seemed to have hit the jackpot on the state’s reading test. Over 83 percent of the school’s fourth-graders scored at or above proficiency (or grade level), up from 43 percent the previous year. The school’s miraculous test results were just four percentage points below the average for the state’s richest suburban districts.
But.... there was actually no education miracle at the school. It was just another case of test tampering that went unpunished because of a bungled investigation by the Department of Education.
6. ...she was fully aware that the push for higher test scores and graduation rates was pressuring educators to meet those benchmarks by any means necessary, legal or illegal.
7. ...massive cheating scandals had also been uncovered in urban school districts around the country, including Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia. With these events as context and background, it’s astonishing that Fariña did nothing to create tougher security protocols....
8. ....there’s a broader dimension to the current crisis that has largely gone unmentioned. Teachers are often tempted to cheat when they realize that their students haven’t mastered the academic content that would allow them to pass more stringent tests.
9. At that point, educators can either acknowledge their own failures in the classroom and consider the causes or they can tamper with the testing system to engineer “better” results."
The Cheating Goes On by Sol Stern City Journal August 11 2015
Oh....and did I mention that the same political party and worldview is responsible for the decay in both the schools and in the nation?
True story.
