Maybe Michelle Rhee wasn't a success after all....

**Crumbled_pavement** · March-27-11, 11:41 PM

This article is very depressing.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/educati...terstitialskip

**Detroitnerd** · March-28-11, 10:06 AM

It seems pretty clear there was some funny business going on there. This is a major problem with privatizing schools and introducing bonuses for test scores: The rewards are just too great to resist tampering with the actual scores, whether students are promoted, graduated, etc.

**Detroitnerd** · March-28-11, 10:09 AM

And it kind of reminds me of the way those police commanders would cook statistics on The Wire.

**East Detroit** · March-28-11, 10:29 AM

All in the game, yo. All in the game.

**firstandten** · March-28-11, 01:49 PM

This is not surprising, these school administrators are under pressure to produce results but there are too many factors that relate to higher test scores that are simply beyond their control. So you have the cheating as a result. No matter if the admininstrators changed the answers or they gave a wink and a nod to the kids and they changed the answers the stakes are too high for the teachers and administrators and the pressure is to bring huge gains in test scores when the testing is designed only for incremential increases.

My issue is Ms Rhee either knew or should have known that the increases were too high and something fishy was going on and she did nothing, and as a result she took a huge hit in the crediblity department in my book.

**Jimaz** · March-28-11, 02:03 PM

A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.'s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes' classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.

That reminded me of a stunt I pulled off in school.

A kid sitting next to me obviously intended to copy my answers during a test. I knew I'd get 100% but I didn't appreciate being used. So I deliberately marked all the answers wrong and let him copy. At the last minute I covered the paper and quickly ran through the test correcting everything.

He got a perfect 0% score.

Sometimes I can be so devious.

**canuck** · March-28-11, 06:15 PM

Originally Posted by Jimaz

That reminded me of a stunt I pulled off in school.

A kid sitting next to me obviously intended to copy my answers during a test. I knew I'd get 100% but I didn't appreciate being used. So I deliberately marked all the answers wrong and let him copy. At the last minute I covered the paper and quickly ran through the test correcting everything.

He got a perfect 0% score.

Sometimes I can be so devious.

Is that legal?

**Jimaz** · March-28-11, 06:32 PM

Originally Posted by canuck

Is that legal?

LOL! Even if it weren't it was still worth it. Come to think of it, I probably taught him a valuable life lesson.

**canuck** · March-31-11, 08:18 PM

Originally Posted by Jimaz

LOL! Even if it weren't it was still worth it. Come to think of it, I probably taught him a valuable life lesson.

Yup, if you ever see him panhandling, give him a bill for it!

**oladub** · March-31-11, 08:47 PM

Enough of all this testing. President Obama says too much testing makes education boring. He proposes that instead of testing kids in boring things like math, that they be evaluated instead on things like attendance. This will prepare them for the real world where they have to compete with Asians who usually come to work too. He did admit, though, that his daughters are tested at the Sidwell Friends School for things other than attendance. Maybe he is hoping that they will receive a better education there, tests and all, than the bored public school kids are receiving. Maybe the answer is to provide public school administrators with better erasers.