Our offer to bring more authors into the group yielded this:
Atlanta, New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Baltimore, El Paso.
What do these cities have in common (besides excessively high taxes)? Every city on that list has had it’s public schools immersed in a test cheating scandal. Actually, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, student high stakes test cheating cases has been found in 37 states. Cheating isn’t the norm yet, but it is getting that way.
Reading the local media, you would think that all of the local testing scandals were a series of isolated, unfortunate incidents, with carpetbaggers from Dallas and Houston coming in to cheat their way to education fame and fortune using our backwater districts as their personal playthings. In many ways they are correct, but not totally. Lorenzo Garcia (who was hired with only a single mandate “to raise test scores”) and his groupies did indeed game the system, got financial compensation for their efforts, and became, recognized for their “Bowie Miracle” shenanigans where students were allegedly placed into the wrong grade level so that would not have to take a test. Low scores meant loss of campus accreditation, and probably more to Garcia, loss of a juicy bonus at the end of the year.
Of course that was all bad.
Of course it was morally and legally reprehensible.
100% wrong wrong wrong. No one argues that.
The EPISD (and it’s taxpayers) is now paying the price of that illegal activity even though the bad guys, for the most part, have either slithered back to Houston or Dallas or to parts unknown, stripped of their certifications, or are in jail. The Texas Education Agency (TEA), which twice cleared EPISD of any wrongdoing, overreacted when they were exposed as unwitting accomplices in the scheme, by taking over the district, replacing the elected, and for many, incompetent, school board with a “Board of Managers” that for the most part represent the business community more than any other group in the city. The current board is working at the pleasure of the TEA and it’s commissioner, Michael Williams, a Perry appointee, who is better known as a semi-competent Texas Railroad Commissioner, failed US Senate candidate, and who has little or no education experience. (His “cred” in Austin is that he is a black man that is liked by the Texas Tea Party, and Perry needs all the help he can get with his next presidential run. “Look, I like black people” he can say, pointing to Williams. Williams has hitched his wagon to Perry’s star and like any lackey will pretty much roll over and do whatever the Guv asks him to do, expecting some juicy role in any Perry presidential administration. Can you say “Secretary of Education Williams?”)
However, like a small lesion on the skin that points to a much deeper malignancy, the cheating issues in El Paso, Canutillo, San Elizario, and maybe now Socorro are a symptom of a much larger, much deeper problem. Currently in Texas, over 80 school districts are under investigation for what TEA calls “testing irregularities.” Nationally, that investigation list is growing daily, as the federal emphasis on tests increases (even though there has never been a study that shows mandated tests actually improve student performance). States like Texas, under the still-alive No Child Left Behind (NCLB) federal law (a legacy of the George “W” administration) continue to run in lockstep with what NCLB requires: Testing, testing and more testing. Fail the test enough times and lose face, or funds, or accreditation, or more. “High stakes” indeed. Beyond determining the education path of students, these tests have mutated from simple diagnostic devices to now dictate such things as promotions, school closures, bonuses (called merit pay in many districts), and teacher placement. Whenever an adult’s livelihood is tied to a test score of a kid, it opens up the proverbial can of worms of cheating, and ends up hurting those that need the help the most: students that would probably fail the tests.
If El Paso ISD were an isolated case of a single bad apple ruining a district, then one could believe that idea that the person(s) was the problem. Over the years however, more school districts have been drawn into the spiders web of cheating on mandated tests as more and more money is tied to the outcome of the scores. There has to be something larger afoot; a more serious problem underlying the cheating. Something more malicious than just a bad guy or two trying to make some extra cash and make a name for himself. The cancer that the lesion points to is not the people (although the people are bad, I get that). It is the tests themselves.
Atlanta, New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Baltimore, El Paso. While it is easy for many to moralize from afar, when your livelihood is tied to the score of child’s test score, the situation is probably less black and white. Yes, there are morally bankrupt people who are in it for nefarious reasons and used their position to expand their power and name. To a single mom teacher living in the inner city of Chicago, living pay check to paycheck, whose pay raise or even job security is determined by whether her class of low performing fourth grade students all pass this year’s test, the issue becomes less black and white.
While local politicos climb all over themselves to get in front of a camera or a reporter’s outstretched microphone to proclaim how distraught they are about the cheating and how civil rights are being violated and organizing chancla-throwing meetings of indignation, not a single one of them during the entire three years or four years that this has been a story, has mentioned that perhaps the real threat to students might really be the tests themselves. While it is easy to beat up on the low hanging fruit of a school district that essentially is politically hamstrung and cannot fight back without looking pathetic, it is much harder for them to take on the much more difficult question of high stakes test reform. The local politicians feel good by putting a band-aid on the lesion by pontificating, completely ignoring the larger problem of testing in general. The forest it seems, is all but lost because of the trees.
While our newly minted congressman is quick to beat the dead horse and call on the US Department of Education to investigate EPISD even more, he is eerily silent about reforming the federal NCLB law that forces districts into high stakes testing to qualify for Federal Assistance, which makes up usually less than 10% of a district’s entire budget.
When our state legislators point proudly to “El Paso County Only” legislation that allows for school board recall elections, not a single one of them mentions that perhaps the emphasis on mandated testing could lead to cheating. Indeed, the only person of note that has even mentioned the idea has been the current President of the Canutillo ISD. And while hundreds of people signed an online petition and stormed school board meetings at the behest of the El Paso Times and a former state senator, demanding change and reform, one is hard pressed to find even one of those hundreds of them sitting at a school board meeting or even to question the excessive testing that led to the scandal to begin with. Apparently, for the local politicians and reformers, helping school districts only happens when cameras are present or reporters are recording their every utterance. For the media, school or testing reform is only important if political theater is involved. No shouting parents or crying chancla-throwing abuelas? Not worth covering. The folks living in smaller districts like Anthony are ignored all together by the media unless there is scandal. (Quick, can you name the new superintendent of Anthony ISD and where he was hired from? Chances are you missed that article in the local media, who go by the motto: “No scandal, no story.” Parents in small districts don’t count.Their taxes are not as important as the taxes paid by EPISD parents.)
School districts do what the politicians mandate and the politicians know that. The public, for the most part does not. School districts do not make the rules of testing, do not make the rules about curriculum, do not make the rules about what classes students should take or how many tests they are required to pass, or even the passing scores of the tests. The El Paso Times, which touted the anti-EPISD Political Action Committee never once asked our former state Senator and PAC founder, what he did while he was in office to help districts alleviate the crushing mandates of high stakes testing (probably because the answer was “nothing.”). Never once were the state legislators challenged to look at the big picture of mandated test reform. Subscribing to the mantra that “all politics are local” our politicians cannot seem to see beyond the borders of El Paso County. Never mind that mandated testing is mestastisizing public school districts from the inside across the country.
Jesse Jackson perhaps said it best when he said “When everyone cheats, you know something is wrong with the test. In fact, high-stakes testing –in which jobs and even the very existence of schools depends on the results of a standardized test–is a perverse way to evaluate teachers and schools.”
elpasospeak 