Everybody Does It / Academic cheating is at an all-time high. Can anything be done to stop it?

It used to be that cheating was done by the few, and most often they were the weaker students who couldn’t get good grades on their own. There was fear of reprisal and shame if apprehended. Today, there is no stigma left. It is accepted as a normal part of school life, and is more likely to be done by the good students, who are fully capable of getting high marks without cheating. “It’s not the dumb kids who cheat,” one Bay Area prep school student told me. “It’s the kids with a 4.6 grade-point average who are under so much pressure to keep their grades up and get into the best colleges. They’re the ones who are smart enough to figure out how to cheat without getting caught.”

This sounds a lot like the kids at the schools the our former TEA commissioner, Dr. Neeley, said wouldn’t have to cheat to get good TAKS scores.

Money makes you honest « Texas Ed: Comments on Education from Texas

Dr. Neeley said the wealthy districts on the list – including many considering self-investigations – are unlikely to cheat.

“You look at Highland Park, Richardson, Eanes,” she said, naming some of the state’s wealthiest districts in the Dallas and Austin areas. “Do they have to cheat to have good scores? I gave a talk in Eanes not long ago and said, ‘Do you people think Westlake High School had to cheat to get good scores?’ “

But I’m sure things are different in Texas, right?

Technorati Tags: cheating, TEA, Caveon, TAKS, Shirely Neeley

Our Mission Statement

The mission of the Pleasanton ISD as an educational community is to ensure a quality public education through learning, unity, and pride, fully preparing all students for the future.

So does the district accomplish it’s mission by having students do well on the TAKS? The reason I ask is because it seems that the Pleasanton Junior High will no longer offer Algebra I so that students to do better on the 9th grade TAKS exam. See, if you take Algebra I in eighth grade then you take Geometry in 9th and the 9th grade math TAKS exam focuses on Algebra I.

Talk about teaching to the test.

So now the only way students can make it to Calculus by the end of high school is by doubling up on math classes for one year. Think about it, in order for high school students to do better on the TAKS exam, the district is willing to reduce the number of students able to take Calculus.

Does anyone else see a problem here? Will Pleasanton ISD still be the school of choice for Toyota workers?

Technorati Tags: Pleasanton ISD, Frank Persyn, Blasa Chapa, Danny Brown, Claude Aaron, Frank Tudyk, Gerald Guerra, John Eric Rutherford, Pleasanton, high stakes testing, TAKS, teaching to the test

School separates races for TAKS talk | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle:

Administrators at a Katy school are facing criticism from parents after holding separate assemblies for black, white and Hispanic students to address low scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test.

The assemblies at Mayde Creek High were held for ninth- and 10th-grade students of different ethnicities to discuss steps to boost scores on the state-required test, said district spokesman Steve Stanford. He said only students at risk because of their scores were called to the meetings, and that no negative message was intended.

Ultimately, he has a point.

School separates races for TAKS talk | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle:

Stanford said students were segregated because that’s how the state looks at and reports achievement.

Not surprisingly, the Bush administration is supporting the plaintiffs’ arguments that the use of such racial criteria is unconstitutional. It was no doubt delighted to hear Justice Anthony Kennedy say during oral arguments that “characterizing each student by reason of the color of his or her skin should only be, if ever allowed, allowed as a last resort.”

But Bush officials are being inconsistent. They don’t apply that standard to their own public education policies. It’s time they embraced the premise of their own student testing rules – race matters – and support efforts to promote access and diversity in schools.

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, is remarkable because it deals with racial issues in a manner at odds with nearly every other policy advocated by the Bush administration – including its current argument to the Supreme Court that school desegregation plans must be “race neutral.” NCLB requires that schools show adequate progress in each of 10 “subgroups” of students. These subgroups include nonracial categories such as disabled, poor, and limited English proficient students, as well as racial and ethnic categories such as blacks, Hispanics, Asians, native Americans, and whites.

So schools are free to say, “sorry, you’re black and don’t have high enough scores to be admitted to this college program” but can penalize a school for not meeting AYP for a sub-group of black students?

I suppose that you can make the argument that these “failures” should have been addressed by the time a student leaves the public school system and that is exactly what NCLB is trying to do. But that does bring up the problem with proposed vouchers solutions, why can a public school lose money because it doesn’t meet accountability standards but a private school can accept vouchers without meeting the same standards?

Then there are the implications for a NCLB system for colleges that is being proposed at both the state and federal level. Will colleges be evaluated on the performance of “sub-groups?” This would probably encourage schools not to make “modifications” or “exceptions” to admission standards so that they can reduce the number of students admitted that would need extra help. (Wow, what would happen to college football and basketball?)

I can see where advocates for minority populations will be outraged and do everything possible to prevent such actions. However, there would be another side to this. What happens when the minority students admitted under “the equal” criteria start failing at a higher rate than the general student population? Wouldn’t that prove that there is something about the college environment that hinders success among these minority students? Wouldn’t schools have to spend more money on these students to prevent them from showing up as a failing sub-group on whatever evaluation system is being used?

It seems to me society recognizes that it is important for our schools to succeed at educating “minority” students given that they will be a majority in a generation or two is some of our largest states, Texas included. But why should colleges and private schools get off the hook at having to admit applicants and avoid struggling “sub-groups” while public schools are punished for failing them? If we acknowledge that it’s essential for society to educate these students then what are we doing to assist schools in this task? How many private schools would be for a voucher system if they had to take any student that applied and potentially loose their ability to have any other students funded if some should fail?

The principled interpretation of NCLB is that race shouldn’t matter, therefore schools will be evaluated to make sure that they succeed at educating all students so we look at racial categories to make sure no group is being ignored. However, if the data show that race still matters in the public schools, why shouldn’t colleges develop programs to help address those deficiencies so that these students can succeed in college? Are we saying that even though we acknowledge that the public schools have failed certain groups that anything done to address that failure outside the public schools is discrimination?

Bush’s double standard on race in schools | csmonitor.com:

Yet NCLB is a tacit admission that race matters. How can the Bush administration force primary and secondary schools to pay specific attention to test scores of students of particular racial groups while arguing that similar racial attention should be illegal for admission to the same public schools being tested? Even conservative opponents of affirmative action have called this approach “schizophrenic” and unprincipled.

Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, a longtime member of the House Public Education Committee, is not optimistic lawmakers will significantly improve public education.”We’ll probably talk about facility funds, but when you talk about facility funding, you’re talking about money, and who’s going to put more money into public education?” Dutton said.

MySA.com: Metro | State:

Lawmakers won’t do much beyond “talking around the edges of improving public education,” Dutton said, “and at the end of the day, we’ll pat ourselves on the back and talk about what a good job we did.”

If you want to get beyond solutions like “4 by 4,” it will take something called “leadership.”

An Open Letter to Margaret Spellings and Congress:

“Human history,” said H. G. Wells, is “a race between education and catastrophe.” If we stay the course with No Child Left Behind, catastrophe is a sure bet. You’ll soon be deciding the fate of this well-meant but appallingly simplistic piece of legislation. Continued failure to answer the legitimate questions of those you expect to carry out your mandates will further erode trust in your leadership.

Tivy High received a preliminary unacceptable rating from the Texas Education Agency. The rating did not reflect the performance of Tivy High School students, but was given as a result of completion rates at Kerr County Juvenile Facility.

MySA.com: KENS 5: Education:

For example, Northside’s Pease Middle School was flagged for gains in eighth-grade math. But districts don’t know which individual student scores stood out. “If they gave us the data files, we could link it back to a ton of things our schools did,” said Sandra Poth, Northside’s testing director. At Pease, the district doubled the time eighth-grade students were in math class from the 2003-04 school year to the 2004-05 year. Students went from 45 minutes of math each day to 90.

But then again, there are those who can’t really point to any reason for gains in test scores:

MySA.com: KENS 5: Education:

North East Superintendent Richard Middleton said it’s nearly impossible to police a system that tests millions of students each year. North East had one school flagged — Bush Middle School — for gains in sixth-grade math.

Maybe it’s time to start looking beyond just numbers for both schools and students. Tests are a valuable tool, but they aren’t the complete answer.

In other words, a student who moved to Dallas in June and attended a local school the entire school year would still not be counted in that school’s scores the following spring.

Does this mean that the students who move away from Dallas will be counted in the school’s scores for the next year as well?

“Take out your classes’ latest benchmark scores,” the consultant told them, “and divide your students into three groups. Color the ‘safe cases,’ or kids who will definitely pass, green. Now, here’s the most important part: identify the kids who are ‘suitable cases for treatment.’ Those are the ones who can pass with a little extra help. Color them yellow. Then, color the kids who have no chance of passing this year and the kids that don’t count — the ‘hopeless cases’ — red. You should focus your attention on the yellow kids, the bubble kids. They’ll give you the biggest return on your investment.”

Do you know which category your child falls under? The first year Texas started requiring 3rd graders to pass the TAKS, I was contacted by several parents who were told that their child didn’t have a chance of passing so they weren’t going to spend their time on them. Some parents were really surprised because their children received good grades on the report cards.