It now seems that more than one school district in the area was involved in manipulating student grade levels to avoid state and federal sanctions. Other local districts are conducting investigations to see if they too were involved.
At the high school level the technique seems to have been to reduce the number of children from the 10th grade whose English language skills were deemed to have been substandard. Evidently some students were placed in the 9th grade for a while and then promoted to the 11th grade. According to news reports some were sent away (taken out of school).
It appears that the testing occurred in the 10th grade. I guess that we don’t have enough money to check to see that all of our grade levels are performing to standard.
Without for a minute trying to defend the people who manipulated the system, some questions come to mind:
How should a school be evaluated when a foreign language student enrolls in the school without having attended the first through the 9th grades in the school district? Has the student had time to learn English?
Are there special tests for students arriving from foreign countries?
Should grade level placement of the student be decided by the administrators based upon the individual student’s capabilities?
At what point does self preservation (keeping your job by doing what your boss asks you to do even when you disagree) kick in?
On the other hand, the situation shows us how government employees (not just educators) get together to learn strategies from each other that help to subvert the intent of the rules. The El Paso Independent School District not releasing the draft report of the cheating audit was probably the result of an administrator or lawyer learning from some other agency how to avoid releasing the document by calling it a “draft”.
I have to wonder how many other schools around the country have been involved in similar efforts to “bend the rules”.
Too often I get the feeling that it is government employees versus the “crazies”.
Eternal vigilance is the cost of liberty.
Cato
elpasospeak 
I have long been against the way the state allocates money to the school districts based on the results of these standardized tests. Whenever money is involved, there is a potential to cheat (for lack of a better word) to try to get more, especially when the recipient of the money (in this case, the El Paso Independent School District) is already on the lower end of the scale when compared to school districts across the state.
It seems to me that we need to address two areas here. It should be obvious by now that the current system of funding does not work. There are holes in the process whereby the cheating can happen. I’m sure it’s not just in El Paso. So why don’t we look at other ways to let the state know that yes, our educators CAN do their jobs, and actually educate our youngsters, if we just let them do it? It seems now that the teachers teach the standardized test. Period. This gets in the way of teaching our kids things like how to divide decimal numbers, or how to correctly write an essay, or, even, how to spell! Perhaps funding should be based on, say, the number of students in a school, or, the socio-economic level of the area the school supports. There’s got to be a better way to distribute the money.
The second area is that of accountability. If the school board members were doing their job, this scheme would never have gotten off the ground. What purpose does the board hold if not to make sure that the administrators at the schools are doing their jobs? Board members are responsible for governing the district. What have they been doing for the last few years?
Personally, I believe all board members should be immediately relieved of their duties. They should not be making decisions at this point, because they haven’t been doing their jobs. Their actions look like a last ditch effort to convince the TEA NOT to replace them. The state should temporarily take over governance, until such time that the public can elect other representatives to fill the board seats.
The answer is to figure out how the cheating was allowed in the first place, and stop the bleeding. Then we can address the individuals at each school. Until the board is replaced, the potential remains.
LikeLike