All posts in cheating

Beverly Hall, Cheating, and Ruling By Fear

Posted April 1st, 2013 by Bill

When Beverly Hall ran the Atlanta public school system, she oversaw gains on student test scores on standardized tests throughout the city. These gains resulted in her being named the 2009 Superintendent of the Year, and collecting $580,000 in performance bonuses over 10 years.

According to an indictment handed down on Friday, Beverly Hall and 35 other people within the Atlanta school system conspired to cheat. The cheating consisted of people changing student answers on standardized tests. The gains in Atlanta - based largely in improved test scores on standardized tests - are likely not real.

Beverly Hall and Arne Duncan at the White House

While the cheating in Atlanta - and the level of cheating - is horriffic, it's not new - and there are some indicators that it could be widespread. With that in mind, it's worthwhile to look at the conditions that existed under Dr. Hall's leadership that are cited in the indictment as contributing to the scandal.

The cheating scandal also has implications for the integrity of data collected on students. Given the push to collect more data, and to use that data more widely, the actual quality and accuracy of data needs to be unquestioned. Cheating scandals like this make that seem like an unreachable goal.

The quotations in A, B, and C are from the New York Times. The quotation in section D is from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A. Merit Pay, and Fear of Job Security

Teachers and principals whose students had high test scores received tenure and thousands of dollars in performance bonuses. Otherwise, as one teacher explained, it was “low score out the door.”

Ms. Parks, a 17-year veteran, said a reason she had kept silent so long was that as a single mother, she could not afford to lose her job.

B. No Excuses Mentality

Her (Hall's) focus on test scores made her a favorite of the national education reform movement, nearly as prominent as the schools chancellors Joel I. Klein of New York City and Michelle Rhee of Washington. Like them, she was a fearsome presence who would accept no excuses when it came to educating poor children. She held yearly rallies at the Georgia Dome, rewarding principals and teachers from schools with high test scores by seating them up front, close to her, while low scorers were shunted aside to the bleachers.

C. Ruling By Fear, and Job Security

Dr. Hall was known to rule by fear. She gave principals three years to meet their testing goals. Few did; in her decade as superintendent, she replaced 90 percent of the principals.

Teachers and principals whose students had high test scores received tenure and thousands of dollars in performance bonuses. Otherwise, as one teacher explained, it was “low score out the door.”

D. Retribution Against People Who Spoke Out

When a teacher at C.W. Hill Elementary complained about cheating by a colleague in 2005, Hall suspended the accused educator for 20 days. As for the whistle-blower, Hall fired her.

Closing Thoughts

Richard Hyde, one of the investigators whose work led to the indictment, made the following observation after listening to secretly taped recordings of the people cheating:

As he listened to the hours of secretly recorded conversations of cheating teachers and principals, he was surprised. “I heard them in unguarded moments,” Mr. Hyde said. “You listen, they’re good people. Their tone was of men and women who cared about kids.”

When we talk about improving our educational system, how do we ensure that the structure around teachers and students support and reward our best work? How many more cheating scandals do our students need to endure before we begin to look at - and jettison - the failed experiments of merit pay, no excuses, and ruling by fear?

Image Credit: Picture of Beverly Hall and Arne Duncan at the White House found at http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1866

Cheating Is Not A Test Security Issue

Posted March 25th, 2012 by Bill

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has done a review of cheating on tests in school districts across the country. The results aren't pretty.

A tainted and largely unpoliced universe of untrustworthy test results underlies bold changes in education policy, the findings show. The tougher teacher evaluations many states are rolling out, for instance, place more weight than ever on tests.

And, cue the folks who miss the point entirely:

Daria Hall, director of k-12 policy with the nonprofit The Education Trust, said education officials should take steps to ensure the validity of test results because of the critical role they play in policy and practice.

“If we are going to make important decisions based on test results — and we ought to be doing that — we have to make important decisions about how we are going to ensure their trustworthiness,” she said. “That means districts and states taking ownership of the test security issue in a way that they haven’t to date.”

No. This is not about test security (read: another unfunded mandate for schools to enforce a system of assessment that has never worked all that well, even before it was pushed front and center into education policy. Read: another "growth opportunity" for "educational services providers" who will supply a that guarantees your tests are completely, totally secure).

This is about designing assessment that can't be cheated, and about not tying pay - for both teachers and administrators - to performance on flawed, oversimplified assessments. Portfolios come to mind as an option that would reflect the experience of learners within their class, provide a clear and accurate representation of growth and learning.

However, the argument against portfolios would have us believe that they are just too expensive and time consuming.

But what's more expensive? Running a good portfolio system that works, or paying for tests that are imprecise measures of a small subset of what people actually learn.

What's more time consuming? Running a good portfolio system that works, or dedicating class time to teaching the test, taking the test, and trying to catch the cheaters after the fact.

To all the people who get a lot of attention for saying that our educational system is broken: please stop, and consider that our assessment system is broken, and is getting in the way of student learning.

You're not saving money or time when what you buy is broken. You're not assessing more efficiently when people can sidestep your efficiency measures. You're not measuring good performance when people cheat their way to the top.

Image Credit: "What the hell is a cheater pen anyway?" taken by DigitalCellulose, published under an Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license.

Academic Honesty and Technology

Posted August 29th, 2010 by Bill

Because I'm old, I still participate in that old person's technology, the listserv. On one of these lists, the question of if/how technology supports cheating came up. I've seen this question in various forms over the years; in this specific instance, it came up in response to a pilot program with Google Docs.

There are lots of excellent reasons not to use Google docs in your school, but cheating isn't one of them.

As people were responding within the list, some people recommended using TurnItIn.com as a deterrent to cheating.

And given that using TurnItIn.com is really bad advice, I felt compelled to offer some alternatives.

Teach writing as a process

Teach writing as a process. If all you see from a student is a final draft, you will have a hard time knowing how that final draft came to be, and you will be less effective at helping a writer improve. If you teach writing as a process, and see pieces of work from initial conception (this is my thesis), through notes, through a first draft, a second (and subsequent) drafts, through to the "final" paper, you will be able to give more targeted feedback. Using a working portfolio (aka, a blog) is a great tool for teaching process.

Students are honest

Approach your subject from the perspective that your students are honest. I know, crazy talk here. But people will generally rise to the expectations you set for them. Nothing says "you are not worthy of trust" better than using a system like TurnItIn.

Know style, and teach style

Know style, and teach style. People should know how to spot (and when to use) active verbs and passive verbs. People should know that a simple technique like scanning a paper for overuse of "to be" verbs will do wonders for their sentence structure.

People should know the different sentence structures, and when a simple sentence is a better choice than a compound-complex sentence. They should know how to analyze their own writing for variability within sentence types, and the effects it has on pacing. They should be able to spot repetitive patterns within their paragraphs, and either fix it or use it to their best rhetorical advantage.

People should know to examine their word choice, and the advantages and disadvantages of using words that are latinate versus anglo-saxon in origin. They should know to look for average sentence length, average paragraph length, and the average word length within a representative section of their writing.

Every writer has a distinct style. When you begin looking at writing and analyzing style, words written on a page become as distinct as the sound of a person's voice.

Technology Does Not Have Agency

Making the claim that using Google Docs (or a word processor, or a typewriter, or a printing press, or a hired scribe) makes it more likely that students will cheat misses the point. You know who is doing work by talking with them about that work. The technology is a means to getting work done; imbuing it with the agency to support cheating is a profound misunderstanding of both technology, and of what motivates people to do their best work.

Using a system like turnitin.com is a great way to tell your students "I don't trust you, and I'm not willing to take the time to know how you think."

Cheating is not a technological issue. To minimize incidents of cheating:

Provide challenging, stimulating assignments;
Check and provide feedback on in-progress milestones;
Talk with your students;
Teach style; and
Be clear with your guidelines and your expectations. The more direct and clear you are with your students, the more direct and clear they will be with you.