Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

I received two articles this morning from the NYTimes education alert about students who missed standardized tests. One article described a large group of low performing El Paso, TX students who disappeared from the school’s attendance rolls when the state tests were administered. Their absence from the tests resulted in the school district receiving high test scores which, in turn, resulted in Lorenzo Garcia, their $280,000/year Superintendent receiving performance bonuses in excess of $50,000 over that time period. The second article described the efforts of Change the Stakes, a group of New York City parent activists who are encouraging parents to keep their children home when standardized tests are being administered.

What was interesting about the articles was the official response in each case. In El Paso, the scheme worked like this:

Students identified as low-performing were transferred to charter schools, discouraged from enrolling in school or were visited at home by truant officers and told not to go to school on the test day. For some, credits were deleted from transcripts or grades were changed from passing to failing or from failing to passing so they could be reclassified as freshmen or juniors.

Others intentionally held back were allowed to catch up before graduation with “turbo-mesters,” in which students earned a semester’s worth of credit for a few hours of computer work. A former high school principal said in an interview and in court that one student earned two semester credits in three hours on the last day of school. Still other students who transferred to the district from Mexico were automatically put in the ninth grade, even if they had earned credits for the 10th grade, to keep them from taking the test.

The article then described how these “disappearances” played out in one particular school, during 2007 and 2008:

State education data showed that 381 students were enrolled as freshmen at Bowie in the fall of 2007. The following fall, the sophomore class was 170 students. Dozens of the missing students had “disappeared” through Mr. Garcia’s program, said Eliot Shapleigh, a lawyer and former state senator who began his own investigation into testing misconduct and was credited with bringing the case to light. Mr. Shapleigh said he believed that hundreds of students were affected and that district leaders had failed to do enough to locate and help them.

When the Texas Education Association (the State Department of Education) and the local School Board investigated this practice in 2010, “…the Texas Education Agency issued letters clearing Mr. Garcia of wrongdoing, finding insufficient evidence on accusations of “disappeared” students and testing misconduct.”  It took a determined attorney to push for an investigation by the FBI,  the United States attorney for the Western District of Texas, and a follow-up investigation by the Texas Education Agency to establish that Mr. Garcia was willfully manipulating data for his own benefit.

Meanwhile, in New York City, a group of parents have taken a stand against high stakes testing by urging parents to keep their children home when the school is administering 40 minute field tests that are used to develop the high stakes tests that will ultimately be used to determine if their children are promoted from one grade to another and to determine whether their child’s teacher will be retained. Part of their reasoning is that IF the stakes on the tests are high, practices like those in El Paso will likely spread across the country. These parent activists, though, are finding that if their child boycotts the actual State tests on principle, the officials in the New York hierarchy will not be happy:

…Andrea Mata’s son opted out of the third-grade English-language exam in the spring. His advancement to the next grade hinged on a portfolio of his work gathered by his teacher that demonstrated skills tested on the state exam, including examples of reading accuracy, comprehension and writing. In addition, he had to take an exam that was much shorter than the state standardized test and included written responses and multiple-choice questions. Ms. Mata said his teacher recommended he be allowed to move on to fourth grade, but the community superintendent disagreed. The Matas were told that he had two options: go through a month of preparatory work and then take the standardized tests when they were re-offered in July, or appeal. They appealed. Their principal advocated on their behalf, and in August, Ms. Mata’s son was promoted. (emphasis added)

I will be interested to see how this Principal’s principles are rewarded by his superiors. I would be very surprised to see him or her earn a promotion in rank anytime soon and would not be surprised to see them placed on some sort of action plan.

So here’s the moral when these two stories are examined under one microscope: officials at the district and State levels will blindly support high-stakes testing no matter what the consequences are and correcting abuse will only occur if someone makes a federal case out of it… and parents better not get in the way!

What are the consequences of all this? Parents and the public will increasingly lose confidence in public schools and those parents who can will opt out leaving the children of indifferent and powerless parents behind. Public education as we know it is disappearing before our eyes.