Last December, I reported on Harvard University professor Stephan Thernstrom's essay "Minorities in College — Good News, But...," on Minding the Campus, a website sponsored by the New York-based Manhattan Institute. He was commenting on the results of the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, saying that the scores "mean that black students aged 17 do not read with any greater facility than whites who are four years younger and still in junior high. ... Exactly the same glaring gaps appear in NAEP's tests of basic mathematics skills." Thernstrom asked, "If we put a randomly-selected group of 100 eighth-graders and another of 100 twelfth-graders in a typical college, would we expect the first group to perform as well as the second?" In other words, is it reasonable to expect a college freshman of any race who has the equivalent of an eighth-grade education to compete successfully with those having a 12th-grade education?
Maybe this huge gap in black/white academic achievement was in the paternalistic minds of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals justices who recently struck down Michigan's ban on the use of race and sex as criteria for college admissions. The court said that it burdens minorities and violates the U.S. Constitution. Given the black education disaster, racial preferences in college admissions will become a permanent feature, because given the status quo, blacks as a group will never make it into top colleges based upon academic merit.
The situation is worse than we thought. U.S. News & World Report (7/7/2011) came out with a story titled "Educators Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal," saying that "for 10 years, hundreds of Atlanta public school teachers and principals changed answers on state tests in one of the largest cheating scandals in U.S. history, according to a scathing 413-page investigative report released Tuesday by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal." The report says that more than three-quarters of the 56 Atlanta schools investigated cheated on the 2009 standardized National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Eighty-two teachers have confessed to erasing students' answers. A total of 178 educators, including 38 principals, many of whom are black, systematically fabricated test scores of struggling black students to cover up academic failure. The governor's report says that cheating orders came from the top and that widespread cheating has occurred since at least 2001. So far, no Atlanta educator has been criminally charged, even though some of the cheating was brazen, such as teachers pointing to correct answers while students were taking the tests, reading answers aloud during testing and seating low-achieving students next to high-achieving students to make cheating easier.
Teacher and principal exam cheating is not restricted to Atlanta; it's widespread. The Detroit Free Press and USA Today (3/8/2011) released an investigative report that found higher-than-average erasure rates on tests taken by students at 34 schools in and around Detroit in 2008 and 2009. Overall, their report "found 304 schools where experts say the gains on standardized tests in 2009-10 are so statistically improbable, they merit further investigation. Besides Michigan, the other states (where suspected cheating was found) were Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Florida and California." A Dallas Morning News investigation reported finding high rates of test erasures in Texas. Six teachers and two principals were dismissed after cheating was uncovered.
In 2007, Baltimore's George Washington Elementary School was named a Blue Ribbon School after the number of students who passed state reading tests shot from 32 percent to nearly 100 percent in just four years. Last year, The Baltimore Sun reported thousands of erasures on those tests. Susan Burgess, the school's principal, had her professional license revoked after an investigation by state and city school board officials.
Why is there widespread cheating by America's educators? According to Diane Ravitch, who is the research professor of education at New York University, it's not teachers and principals who are to blame; it's the mandates of the No Child Left Behind law, enacted during the George W. Bush administration. In other words, the devil made them do it.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM
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8 Comments | Post Comment
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The point of the No Child Left Behind was to make sure that children were taught the basics. So it's better to fudge the rest results than to teach the kids? Sounds like NCLB was needed. I do realize that onorous penalties to anything tend to increase resistance to compliance, but why shouldn't kids learn the basics?
Comment: #1
Posted by: partsmom
Mon Jul 18, 2011 9:54 AM
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It seems perfectly reasonable to me that 8th graders and 12th graders would perform about the same in first-year "college" courses. The vast majority of these courses are roughly equivalent to 9th-grade math, science, and English. The rest are introductory courses. Anyone who can write a reasonably well structured essay can expect to excel. Anyone who can write a paragraph (that is to say, perform at a 6th-grade writing level) can get by.
The vast majority of mandatory courses for first-year students are "100-level" courses that were, up until ten years ago, considered remedial. Unfortunately, so many students were arriving at post-secondary institutions without even rudimentary math and language skills, the formerly remedial courses are now considered mandatory. Also, the remedial courses are cash cows. By forcing normal performers to effectively repeat three or four years' worth of math and English and charging university-level tuition rates to re-learn what they already know, schools can pad their pocketbooks while students inflate their grades.
Comment: #2
Posted by: R.A.
Mon Jul 18, 2011 10:14 AM
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Blaming NCLB is idiotic. NCLB simply documented what was (not) happening in the schools, viz, education. Quite by accident it also documented what the teachers were doing to make it look like they were doing what they were paid to do.
As an educator myself, I see the failure as what happens in the first three years of school, K-2. These years aren't measured by NCLB tests, yet it's here that kids get turned on -- or turned off -- to school. Too many teachers at these crucial grades have the credentials to teach but not the personality. Too many can't control their classes. Too many intimidate the kids into compliance, rather than motivating them into actually learning and advancing. By the time these kids reach third grade and get tested, it's almost too late to save them -- they already see school as jail and the teacher as the jailer. Seven years later, when they arrive at high school, they jaded beyond recall.
Teaching once was thought a calling, but for many in the profession it's a job. They teach because it's inside work with no heavy lifting, pretty decent pay, some prestige, and retirement at 55 or earlier. Hence we get the plethora of teachers involved in sexual scandals with students; teachers choking or hitting students; students beating teachers and vandalizing schools. Some of this obviously can be equally attributed to societal breakdown, but I hold that "societal breakdown" includes "school breakdown" because teachers, qualified by the credentialing system, are not qualified by personality to teach.
Bottom line: We have to find ways to check on the teachers in those first three years of school. That's one part of the fix. The second part is to find a way to get rid of incompetent teachers. The NEA and its counterparts at state level have made it virtually impossible to fire incompetent teachers who have "tenure," a concept that should never have been permitted into the primary and secondary systems.
Comment: #3
Posted by: SaguaroJack
Tue Jul 19, 2011 9:19 AM
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When I was in college in the 60's, just about everyone that wasn't smart enough to pass a science class became an elementary teacher, got a job,got tenure, and smoked a lot of dope. Now you wonder why our education system is so messed up?
The smarter slackers went on to become "higher education", still smoke dope and have tenure. "Nuff said!"
Comment: #4
Posted by: Charlie
Wed Jul 20, 2011 12:49 AM
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I find it heartbreaking that teachers would do this to students. The fact that the teachers only seem to care about themselves and not that they are passing a child who is still ignorant of what he should know and then thrown out into the world. How could teachers do this cheating and sleep at night. What is shocking and disheartening is that this is not an isolated incident of teachers cheating but seems to be widespread through out unionized teaching force within the US. It is really sickening and these teachers should be fired but I suppose the unions will protect them. If a student sues a local eduation department for not properly educating them, it would be the taxpayer on the hook for the lawsuit and not the teacher nor the unions. Our country is quickly sinking right before out eyes and no one really seems to care. Sad.
Comment: #5
Posted by: Mandy
Wed Jul 20, 2011 4:54 PM
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I received a copy of your commentary (The Oakland Press, June,19.2011) and it filled me with glee. The key points reflect my "oh my gosh" feelings in discussions and conversations I have had over many years. One in particular, the use of a vovel rather than a number in phone numbers is rampant and in my experience more so in the USA.
Grammar appears to be a lost art. The "me and my friend etc" is so common, it makes one wonder what the teachers are teaching.
Thank you for an entertaining column.
Comment: #6
Posted by: maureen peszat
Thu Jul 21, 2011 8:30 PM
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AMEN
Comment: #7
Posted by: Phil N
Fri Jul 22, 2011 2:16 AM
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As far as blaming NCLB for the cheating I would like to offer the following quote from Abraham Lincoln;
A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you'll be a murderer!”
Why not blame the people that did the wrong and punish them, for then we can begin to change and improve. The schools need discipline not cheaters.
Comment: #8
Posted by: Ed Boyle
Sat Jul 23, 2011 7:30 AM
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