The GAO Establishes Site for Citizens to Report "Potential State Testing Improprieties" when it Cheats Taxpayers for Lavish Conferences?

This federal worker is from the GAO, now charged to investigate school cheating....while the GAO has cheated taxpayers of millions of dollars with its own improprieties.

Teacher cheating scandals have been in the news the last few years.  Michelle Rhee, the darling of charter schools and school choice has had her issues with keeping those test scores up to support her educational reform.  From the Washington Post:

Nobody was particularly surprised when the D.C. Inspector General’s Office, after a 17-month investigation into allegations of widespread cheating on standardized tests in D.C. public schools, issued a new report which concluded that the suspicions were unfounded.

The probe was launched in 2011 in large response to a USA Today Kaya Henderson and Michelle Rhee (Ricky Carioti/WASHINGTON POST) investigation that focused on Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus, finding through documents and data an unusually high number of erasures where wrong answers had been erased and right answers then marked in. But the newspaper also noted that erasures on tests were flagged as outside the norm at 103 schools at least once since 2008.

Thus it isn’t exactly clear how Inspector General Charles J. Willoughby came to that conclusion.

Investigators only delved into cheating suspicions at Noyes, where big gains on scores were reported during the time that Michelle Rhee was schools chancellor and linked student test scores to the evaluations of some teachers. Willoughby’s team found that at least one teacher had cheated, and decided that because they found so little fire amid the smoke, there was no reason to look at any other schools, the report said.

Yes, that’s what they found after 17 months of work.

....Of course, there is a history in Washington, D.C., of cheating allegations — and less than a determined effort to get to the bottom of it. Back in 2009, my colleague Bill Turque wrote about an investigation into possible cheating at 26 public and public charter schools where reading and math scores had shot up in 2008. The suspicions were never thoroughly investigated by the Rhee administration.

With the increased pressure of  teacher evaluations based on student performance and "free market" principles applied to human capital assessments, there is evidence and concern that teachers and administrators will cheat to keep their jobs and school funding.

The Post continues:

Bob Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, or FairTest, says the only cases nationwide in which cheating has been fully documented are when truly independent investigators were brought in.  

The government's answer to "independent" investigators documenting potential test cheating has created new responsibilities for the General Accounting Office (GAO).  It has established a "whistle blowing " site where individuals can tip the Federal Government to potential cheating by teachers and administrators.  From https://tell.gao.gov/csa59/:

Potential State Testing Improprieties

U.S. Government Accountability Office

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has created this website for the purpose of gathering information on fraudulent behavior in state-administered standardized tests. The information submitted here will be used as part of an ongoing GAO investigation into cheating by school officials nationwide, and will be referred to the appropriate State Educational Agency, the U.S. Department of Education, or other agencies, as appropriate. 

Any information provided through this website will be encrypted through our secure server and handled only by authorized staff. GAO will not release any individually identifiable information provided through this website unless compelled by law or required to do so by Congress. Anonymous reports are also welcome. However, providing GAO with as much information as possible allows us to ensure that our investigation is as thorough and efficient as possible. Providing contact information is particularly important to enable clarification or requests for additional information regarding submitted reports. 

Click on the button below to begin.

This is yet another Federal bureaucratic layer on education.  This is also from the agency with lavish spending on conferences in Las Vegas and its own ethics violations.  This site, federalnewsradio.com, is an excellent source for many of the financial and ethical issues plaguing GAO, now charged with policing cheating in schools.  The GAO epitomizes the waste of federal dollars and now it is charge of investigating abuse in state/local schools?  You would think this idea is from The Onion, but unfortunately, it is a sad truth.

Aren't you delighted such a sterling federal agency is investigating potential educational cheating in schools?  What happened to districts and states policing themselves for improprieties in their schools?  What happened to districts and states crafting their own assessments for their students?  What do you think will happen when these  untested and unproven assessments are used to gauge teacher accountability?  

Do you think these assessments will reform education and provide the knowledge your student needs to become a self-directed individual or is this just another multimillion boondoggle from an agency that is under Congressional investigation?  Who/what is driving this educational nightmare of educational reform?

"A More Misleading Article on Education Would be Hard to Write". Money Quote on Ed Reformer Article.

Still waiting for a breeze of common sense in education reform.

It was 108 degrees in St. Louis on Friday.  Our heat wave has been unbearable as it has in many parts of the country.  Intense heat creates short fuses in those who read articles containing education reform talking points rolled out by Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee and Bill Gates.  These talking points are long on spin and short on common sense and fact.

I came across an article about how both candidates should agree on educational reform plans.  It is an example of the spin vs fact model.  If heatstroke wasn't giving me a headache, the article written by Richard Whitmire entitled To the Presidential Contenders: Why Not Agree on Education? certainly would.  The original link I was going to use was from Education Views but trying to access it now gives a 404 error code.  It must have given the editors there a headache as well.  I was able to track in down through the Huffington Post:

When Romney was governor of Massachusetts, that state distinguished itself by dramatically raising standards and making sure more students moved to a richer curriculum. Romney didn’t launch those reforms, but he made sure they enjoyed a steady tailwind. Credit due to Romney.

Obama tacked right with Race to the Top, which offered financial carrots to states that designed real teacher evaluations and opened their doors for innovative charter schools. Defying the wishes of the unions is not easy for a Democratic president. Credit due to Obama.

There is a huge difference about these educational reforms not noted in the article: 

• Massachusetts state standards were set by Massachusetts.  
• Race to the Top mandates are federally driven in which teacher evaluations are tied to test scores based on private consortia standards, not state created. 

As to Whitmire praising Obama for standing up to the teachers' unions?

Susan Ohanian writes about how "defying the teachers unions" isn't so difficult for a Democratic president since AFT will be investing $10 Million into the educational reform movement controlled by the educational corporatists.  Apparently the teachers' unions are hitching their stars to the administration's plan.  Obama has union support (since he is a Democrat) and the unions will profit from the corporate takeover of education, just like Rhee and Gates.  That's considered some feat by Obama?

Gee, what does Obama need to do to have the unions not support him? These reforms which have been declared onerous in terms of teacher evaluations don't cause union leadership to blink much.  Read about the NEA's  summer convention in Washington DC and its support of this administration (Republican teachers uneasy at Obama-themed union convention):

NEA leaders have been urging members to hold house parties to educate their friends about why Obama, who addressed the convention Thursday by telephone to thank teachers for their support, deserves a second term. So it wasn't really a surprise that the union showed its support for Obama so overtly at the convention. After all, 72 percent of delegates at last year's NEA convention voted to endorse Obama for re-election -- the earliest the group has ever endorsed in a presidential election cycle. 

Obama supports Race to the Top.  (I hope he is remembered for RTTT as George Bush is for NCLB...not fondly).  Unlike Romney's educational support of state standards, RTTT was devised by the National Governor's Association and the Common Core State Standards Initiative to centralize education and develop a national curriculum.  Think of it as No Child Left Behind on steroids.  It's the expansion of federal control into state and local control of schools.

Several of the Huffington Post readers had the same reaction to Whitmire's article:

A more misleading article on education would be hard to write.
There's some good stuff there. Obviously, higher standards are a good thing. So is less remediation in college.

But then there are some prescriptions for making things worse. You praise RTTT? It's made teacher evaluations less accurate and introduced other impediments to education into schools. Charter schools? They're less effective than traditional public schools. We should be getting rid of the ones we've got, not creating more. Raise teacher quality? Probably not necessary, but we certainly wouldn't manage that with TFA "teachers"; when you allow someone who's only really qualified to be a sub or a classroom aide to pose as a teacher, that represents a LOWERING of standards.

Obama and Romney do seem to agree greatly on public education. Both of them seem eager to degrade or destroy it. And most of your recommendations would be an effective way to go about doing that. 

and

The main problem in educational policy today is that we're pursuing failed ideas from the past, on steroids:

1) Make kids memorize more faster, call it "rigor," and claim that prepares kids for the 21st century. 2) Use carrots and sticks to push students and teachers, despite ample evidence that this is a second rate approach.
3) Make high-stakes tests the centerpiece of it all, despite its longtime failures.
4) Keep claiming that market-based policies will create widespread excellence in something as complex as education, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Heavens, McDonald's can't even reliably deliver hot and crispy french fries!

Whitmire lauds TFA and charter schools, despite no evidence that either improves learning in real apples-to-apples comparisons. Scale up either approach and quality likely goes down noticeably while further de-stabilizing public education. I posted a longer piece today at EdWeek Online, on why dramatically scaling up charters will hurt more than it helps. The public sector simply does some things better than the private sector does, including educating the masses.

So, what we really need is vigorous disagreement about the continuation of failed policies such as NCLB and RttT.

P.S. When you control for poverty, American kids in 0-10% poverty schools would have been #1 in the world on the 2009 PISA reading test, outperforming all other nations. American schools are actually performing very well, considering the much harsher conditions they face. Thus, there is no reason for radical policy changes. 

(You can read more about Whitmire here and his approval of reformers like Rhee and charter schools).

The jig is up.  Taxpayers are tired of education reform talking points (from both presidential candidates) making little sense, creating more debt for more mandates (RTTT/Common Core) which are worse than the original mandates (NCLB), and requiring the tracking of student/family personal data that has NOTHING to do with education.  I hope this heatwave breaks soon and we can breathe in the air of common sense.  These reforms and less than factual ed reform articles are oppressive just like our current temperatures.

Are Arne Duncan's Educational Reform Plans from a Republican Playbook?

Check out then Conference Chair of the Republican Party Lamar Alexander talking about educational reform at a governor's conference in 1989.  Do some of these Republican reforms sound like Arne Duncan's Race to the Top reforms?

 



From the youtube description:

Lamar Alexander lays out the plan to restructure education at the 11-2-1989 Governors Conference on Education in Wichita, Kansas. The Conference title was "Schools, Goals and the 1990s". As George Bush, Sr's Secretary of Education, he implemented education restructuring as America 2000 that specified creation of the New American Schools Development Corporation. He is currently senior Senator from Tennessee and Conference Chair of the Republican Party.

Transcript of Speech

1989 Governors Conference-Lamar Alexander


.... As far as I know, this is the first state summit following the President's summit, and I think that's a great credit to your governor of the State of Kansas, to be doing that. At least your timing is good!

I would suggest three things:

Number 1: Find out what's really going on because I don't think most people know---- what's going on in schools, how children are growing up, what's really going on in the world.

Number 2: I want to suggest that you create, in Kansas, a brand New American School. Brand New American School.

Number 3: I want to suggest that when you do that, you help that new school develop some new goals and new report cards for itself.

I would go down to the maternity ward of the local hospital, or whatever you call the part of the hospital where the nurses are who are there when the babies are born. Find out how many babies are born out of wedlock, how many babies are born with single parents. Just so you know that!

I would think the Brand New American School would be year-round, open from 6:00 to 6:00.

A second characteristic might be that these schools will serve children from age 3 months old to age 18. That may be a shocking thought to you; but, if you were to do an inventory of every baby in your community and think about what the needs of those babies were for the next four or five years, you might see that those needs might not be served any other way. They have to be served in some way and maybe around the school. Or, if you study a little more, you might go back and think the school might have to serve the pregnant mother of the baby in terms of prenatal healthcare....

...teams of teachers. Albert Shanker suggested that maybe there ought to be a team of teachers attached to a child from the day that child arrives in the school to stay with that child all the way to the 8th grade.

All this would mean there would have to be a very professional corps of teachers, wouldn't it? They'd have to be very, very good because they would have to be dealing with lots of volunteers. We have a big national service feeling in America today. Why aren't those people working in schools? Well, one reason is it's hard to handle volunteers!

So, this team of highly trained principals and teachers would have to have career ladders. They would have to be master teachers. They would be paid $50,000-$60,000-$70,000 a year to create a Brand New American School in every state capital.

The great advantage of that is there wouldn't be all these arguments of whether to do this program, or that program, or which one to do first. You wouldn't do any of them! You would create just one school and you'd give the responsibility to one person who would form one team. You give them one year or so, and if they succeeded, then all the rest of us would want to be in that school, too! Wouldn't we?

Senator Alexander advocated for:

• Tracking students from birth
• Community schools providing various services other than academics
• School open year round
• 12-hour school days

These ideas from 1989  have been incorporated into Arne Duncan's Race to the Top mandates. Later postings will provide information on how educational policies presented at this 1989 Governor's Conference foreshadowed the elitist takeover of education we currently find ourselves.  

You can thank George Bush Sr. for arranging this conference.  

When Republicans Sound Like Democrats and Democrats Sound Like Republicans. It's True!

This should be an interesting session in the Legislature. Here is a quite informative article from the Missouri News Horizon quoting Republican and Democratic lawmakers on the subject of educational reform.

Here is the Republican stance:

Rep. Scott Dieckhaus, R-Washington, chairs the House's Elementary and Secondary Education Committee. He said he wants his committee to be aggressive when considering reforms to the state's education system.

"Everything is on the table," Dieckhaus said. "Whether it's tenure, whether it's making sure we're not sneaking kids through the system by social promotion, whether it's...vouchers and open enrollment, and all the things that have been pulled off the table in past legislative sessions, I want to have a true dialogue on those issues this session."

That sounds on its face exciting and visionary. Some of it is. Some of it isn't so wonderful. Open enrollment will kill local school district autonomy for setting their student make-up. Open enrollment will cause deficits to schools as reimbursement will not cover the full amount necessary to educate the child at the district's set rate. Who will pay for the additional resources necessary for an influx of students? The district? The state? How can a district set a realistic budget? Charters weren't mentioned, but they are a big item in Educated Citizenry 2020. If a true dialogue is desired by the lawmakers, perhaps taxpayers should understand they may very well be under the same mandates as public schools having to adhere to common core standards.

Robyn Wright-Jones, Democrat from St. Louis said this:

But one of the Senate's leaders on public education, Sen. Robyn Wright-Jones, D-St. Louis, warns that moving too fast on controversial topics such as open enrollment and tenure reform takes the focus away from a root cause of educational deficiency in the urban core -- the lack of economic opportunity for parents of school children.

"When we have a decent wage in every household, and we have our parents working, they can do a traditional family plan, where there's money to do the things they need to do, then test scores will improve," Wright-Jones said.

She said open enrollment is not the answer to educational inability. She favors keeping students close to home.

"We need to put our neighborhood schools back on the block, down the street from where our children live," Wright-Jones said. "You send a very bad signal to a kid when you put him on a bus at five in the morning and take them off at seven (at night) and tell them they just got a better education."


She's right. She sounds like a traditional Republican (jobs, jobs, jobs and traditional family) and fostering community pride. The Republicans sound like traditional Democrats (curriculum mandates, increased spending and unfunded mandates created by common core standards).

House Speaker Tilley said:

...the status quo is not good enough anymore.

"Every year, people who are opposed to educational reform say 'No, this isn't a good idea, this isn't a good idea...' Tilley said. But they don't come up with alternative solutions and we continue to shuffle thousands of kids through schools that just aren't doing their jobs."

We have our ideas on educational reform. Return the majority of educational decisions to the state and reduce our dependency on the federal government for funding. Could it be we are in trouble because we are going broke trying to fulfill the endless mandates coming out of Washington? After all, for every dollar we send to the Department of Education, we get back 80 cents. That doesn't seem like a very good investment for taxpayers and students.

Cutting our strings to Washington would be a good first start. Isn't that what the Health Care Freedom Act was all about? How about we start an Educational Freedom Act? We don't like the health mandates OR the educational mandates. There is no difference in the amount of control in either healthcare or education. Decrease federal control and spending. Sounds like a good plan to me.