Protections against institutional cheating in NYC schools

Spurred by reports of widespread cheating on standardized tests in Atlanta; Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Pennsylvania; and elsewhere, New York State Education Commissioner John King announced last week the creation of a “high level working group” to address "the integrity of our testing system.” The Bloomberg administration responded that this was "a knee-jerk reaction to cheating scandals in other states."

Unfortunately, the announcement was marred by the state’s failure to reveal who was appointed to this task force. As the NY Post noted,

“Oddly, the announcement came two weeks after the formation of the group, and department officials couldn't say who or how many people were on it other than Executive Deputy Commissioner Valerie Grey."

Indeed, there is a crying need for more systematic protections against cheating, which were eliminated when Bloomberg and Klein took office, as pointed out in our book, NYC Schools Under Bloomberg and Klein. Here is an excerpt from the chapter on "Institutional Cheating" by Sol Stern and Andy Wolf, showing how multiple procedures were in place previously – even before there was such huge emphasis placed on test scores:

Before test documents were destroyed, the Board [of Education] routinely conducted several levels of analyses to detect cheating. Robert Tobias, former director of testing and assessment for the BOE, provided us with the following summary of the board’s actions to screen for possible cheating:

“One was an erasure analysis that identified classes and schools with a high incidence of answers that were erased and changed from wrong to right. A second was a gains analysis that identified schools where students showed extremely high increases in test scores over the previous year. The third was an item analysis that detected unusual scoring patterns, such as large numbers of students who answered difficult questions correctly but easy questions incorrectly. In addition to these forensic analyses, we collected information on allegations of cheating from District Assessment Liaisons and other informants.

“When this information raised credible suspicion, we placed the respective test answer documents in secure storage, referred the matter to the Office of Special Investigations, and did not destroy the test documents until the investigation was completed. In other instances, we were directed to send the test documents to the State Education Department or the Special Investigator for the NYC Public Schools to facilitate investigations of cheating allegations referred directly to them. These procedures were in place when I retired from the public schools in Nov. 2001.”

It was also the practice of the old Board of Education to dispatch district administrators to each school on test days to oversee procedures. They would check on whether the tests were stored in a secure place in unopened cartons, observe the opening of the cartons and removal of the shrink wrap on the exams, and monitor the distribution and collection of the test materials. Finally they would oversee the delivery of the completed test papers to the district office.

All this was eliminated when Bloomberg and Klein took office. In a 2009 audit, the NYC Comptroller’s office concluded that the city Department of Education had “engaged in sloppy and unprofessional practices that encourage cheating and data manipulation.”

As to this new, rather mysterious state task force, one can hope that it will propose meaningful reforms, though there are many reasons to be doubtful. The NY State Education Department (NYSED) has in the past been known as the murky graveyard of whistleblower complaints, as ineffective as the endlessly inconclusive investigations of the NYC Department of Education, which tend to trail on for years, like a replay of “Waiting for Godot,” with little or no results.

Indeed, one might argue that having NYSED rely on an internal working group to guard against cheating is a little like Rupert Murdoch putting Joel Klein in charge of News Corp’s internal investigation into the phone hacking scandal: neither can be fully trusted to pursue this issue aggressively since they are fatally compromised by their institutional desire to look good; in this case, to show that schools are improving when there may be no actual gains.

Note the way in which NYSED and the Regents have just acceded to DOE’s demands to deregulate virtual (online) learning, with no attempt to provide any sort of oversight or quality control, and no requirement that students even attend classes to graduate.

Instead, the new regulations are a blank check, enabling DOE to continue and expand its fraudulent use of online credit recovery – deregulated by NYSED in 2009 --except that now, high school students won’t have to fail courses initially to gain enough credits to graduate through this substandard educational delivery system.

Jackie Bennett has analyzed how credit accumulation has soared in in recent years, just as it became one of the central components of DOE’s high-stakes accountability system, determining which schools will remain open and which will be closed:

In this city, the number of credits awarded to students in high schools truly is high stakes. It counts as nearly one third of each high school’s Progress Report grade, and the Progress Report counts for just about everything, including the removal of principals and the closing of schools. Since the Progress Reports were introduced in 2006-2007, the percent of students earning 10 or more credits each year has leapt a (truly) incredible 16 percentage points citywide. For schools with the highest concentration of high need students (the schools most likely to be threatened with closure) the jump is 18 points.

At the same time as credit accumulation and graduation rates have risen, the number of NYC high school graduates needing triple remediation (in reading, writing and math) at CUNY community colleges has doubled.

On this blog, we recently featured a post by a teacher revealing how credit recovery was used -- or misused -- in her school, after DOE coached her principal on how to implement it. See also here, and here, for even more cases of fraudulent online credit recovery -- which  flourish with the open encouragement of the educrats at Tweed.

Yet rather than attempt to put the brakes on this growing scam, last month the Regents and the NY State Education Department agreed to eliminate all controls on online learning, including any attendance requirements, allowing schools to give credits to students whether they come to school or not. There are no longer any class size limits as long as the course of study is undertaken under the general “supervision” of a teacher, who can “oversee” any number of students, according to the new regulations.

In the end, however, even if the state was really committed to preventing cheating, nothing is likely to work as long as our high-stakes accountability system remains in force. Campbell’s Law (which Steve Koss wrote about in our book, and as far back as 2007 on our blog) predicts that the more high-stakes testing is used for decision-making, the more cheating and gaming of the system is inevitable. As Bob Tobias pointed out in a recent interview,

“the current emphasis on high-stakes accountability …encourages some people to do the wrong thing. So as you kick the stakes up, people are going to focus on the metrics that will be used to determine their fate. They’ll be looking for ways to elevate those metrics, and some people will try to take a short route.”

Yong Zhao, eminent professor at the University of Oregon, has explored the numerous ways in which the growing overemphasis on standardized exams is undermining our public schools. He used the proliferation of school cheating scandals as the jumping-off point for a brilliant five-part series on his blog, concluding that the nation’s public schools must “ditch testing.” In an interview with Education Week, he suggested that as an alternative, the country should move to a portfolio-based assessment system:

“You can’t fix this by changing internal security,” Mr. Zhao said. “If the stakes are so high that the teachers don’t even believe the measurement itself, they’re going to try to cheat.”

The lack of charter school accountability -- and does competition actually improve public education?

Today, the Daily News runs both an editorial and an oped, excoriating the State Comptroller for auditing charter schools, and supporting the charter schools' lawsuit in trying to block further audits. Here’s an excerpt from the editorial:

“Charter schools are more accountable than most parts of government. They answer to two layers of state regulation, and they must shut down if they don't meet educational goals within five years - a standard we'd love to see applied to the rest of the educational establishment.”

I would bet fewer charter schools have been closed down in NYC in recent years than regular public schools – and not because they’ve all been successful. In reality, they operate with very little supervision.

I recommend that if people took a look at the Comptroller’s Sept. audit, they’d realize how unaccountable many charter schools have been – and how lax both SED and DOE have been in terms of oversight. Amazing to me that any major media outlet would oppose strict accountability in the use of taxpayer funds in this way.

Despite the fact that all charter schools are required to report annually on their progress towards meeting the educational goals established when they were founded, and DOE is supposed to closely monitor their progress in achieving these goals, according to the audit, none of this has occurred.

The original goals and any information about progress made towards meeting these goals are supposed to be included on in the schools’ annual reports. Yet the DOE could provide only 10 of the 23 annual reports of the charter schools under its purview, and the Comptroller’s office obtained one more report from SED.

Of these 11, not one of them contained all the information required by state law, and more than half either omitted certain goals, misstated them, or did not discuss the progress made towards them. The audit found that the DOE had no formal process for reviewing these reports, no written records of the same, and no records of their decision-making process in approving the original applications of charter schools or calling for their renewals.

Nor were there any procedures or plans in place to call for improvements in their performance, or a corrective plan if there was failure. DOE also kept no records of the visits made to charter schools before approving the renewal of their charters. Not surprisingly, DOE recommended the renewal of all the charters in every case, for the maximum period of five years.

It sure doesn’t sound that there was real accountability here – as the Daily News editorial insists – or any evidence that any of these charter schools were “shut down if they don't meet educational goals within five years" – especially as DOE appeared to be ignorant of what their goals were.

Instead of criticizing the audit, if the editors of the Daily News really cared about accountability, they would be applauding the state Comptroller and criticizing the charter schools for suing to block them.

But there has long been a double-standard when it comes to charter schools; see the response of Chester Finn, for example, to the other recent audit which found KIPP using funds to send teachers on junkets to the Caribbean:

"I think they should be able to fly around the world in first class if administrators think that will keep up the good results."

Meanwhile, according to today's NY Sun, Sol Stern and some other conservatives are moving away from the idea that market incentives and competition (like more charter schools) will solve all the problems of public education– perhaps in part influenced by the failures here in NYC, where this administration has adopted this sort of market-driven ideology with a vengeance.

“There's a growing consensus that a market approach alone is not enough," the president of the Albany-based Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability, Tom Carroll, said. He added: "There's a need for a moment of reflection."

It was never clear to me why competition would be expected to work to improve the public school system. Here in NYC, there has always been a healthy system of competition from parochial and private schools, and rather than improving the public schools, it has been a way for the business and opinion elite and many members of the middle class to escape sending their kids to public schools, which has considerably diminished political pressure towards improving them.

If Bloomberg, Klein et al and their cronies on Wall St, as well as the editors of the NY Times and the Daily News, had children who actually attended NYC public schools, I’m convinced there would have been smaller classes years ago.

Bloomberg Record on Education Attacked by Manhattan Institute Scholar

Last month we highlighted a long article critical of the Bloomberg record on education that ran in the progressive magazine The Nation. This month, City Journal, the journal of the right-leaning Manhattan Institute published an essay by scholar Sol Stern, also highly critical of Michael Bloomberg's record.

What was refreshing in Stern's article was the discussion of "accountability". Public school parents have come to realize that the mayor and chancellor use this word to simply mean more tests for our kids. But what of the accountability of the mayor to answer to the public?

Stirring public unease is the realization that what Bloomberg really meant by accountability was one election, one time. If you didn’t like the way that mayoral control was working under Bloomberg, you could vote for Democrat Freddy Ferrer in the 2005 mayoral election (Bloomberg’s last, because of term limits). But what could you do after that election? Bloomberg’s suggestion: “Boo me at parades.”

The arrogance of that response demonstrates how little Bloomberg really seems to care about accountability. In fact, his Department of Education routinely undermines accountability with a public-relations juggernaut that deflects legitimate criticism of his education policies, dominates the mainstream press, uses the schools as campaign props, and, most ominously, distorts student test-score data. Without transparency, real accountability doesn’t exist.

The article goes on to point out specifically how Chancellor Joel Klein's bloated public relations staff spins test score results. In this passage picking up on arguments made by Diane Ravitch in posts on our blog and the Huffington Post, Stern points out how the Bloomberg administration has deliberately embellished its own record by appropriating test score increases stemming from earlier reforms:

Consider: Bloomberg took office on January 1, 2002, but he didn’t win control of the schools until June 12 of that year. Klein wasn’t appointed until August, and then he spent the rest of the year studying the system and appointing task forces to advise the administration on how to restructure the schools. By the time the chancellor finished studying, students were taking the 2003 fourth-grade reading test. The system was, in effect, operating on autopilot during the year that the students recorded the healthy 5.9 percentage-point improvement.

At the time, Klein knew that he couldn’t convincingly claim credit for the 2003 test scores, and he didn’t even hold a press conference to celebrate them. Four years later, the fourth-grade reading scores have inched up by another 7 percentage points, only half the average yearly increase achieved under the tenures of Chancellors Levy and Rudy Crew. But to avoid that invidious comparison, the mayor and the chancellor simply take the 2003 result and add it to their own column.

While the story may not get covered in the mainstream daily press, this City Journal article, like the earlier one in The Nation, reveal how much of what constitutes news about education in New York City is merely the narrative scripted by the administration's press office. An office that Stern claims has 29 people (DOE says no, only 14). Either way, that's enough people to staff an elementary school, which would certainly be a better use of our tax dollars.

Why CFE funds must be used to reduce class size and student load

Despite what Michael Rebell and Sol Stern may have said at the Century meeting, as recounted below, class size reduction is one of only four evidence-based education reforms that have been shown to work, according to the federal government.

The others? One-on-one tutoring for at-risk readers in grades 1-3, Life-Skills Training for junior high students, and phonics instruction for early readers. Teacher training is not on the list.

Moreover, both Stern and Rebell have been inconsistent in their remarks on class size.

A few months ago, Stern suggested to me that if I wrote an open letter to the Mayor in support of class size reduction in addition to phonics instruction, he would sign onto it.

Rebell was the chief attorney in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit. The CFE case provided expert testimony and evidence showing that smaller classes were closely linked to student success, and that class sizes were too high in NYC schools in all grades to be able to provide a sound basic education.

The Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, concluded that there was “a meaningful correlation between the large classes in City schools and the outputs…of poor academic achievement and high dropout rates” and that NYC students were deprived of their constitutional right to an adequate education because of excessive class sizes in all grades.

Rebell was recently quoted as saying that our schools should be provided with "the professional development, the quality teachers, the smaller class sizes, and the other things that they need. "

Yet the main problem here in NYC in terms of quality teaching is neither a lack of sufficient teacher training or the availability of qualified candidates. It is the rapid turnover of teachers -- with about 25% leaving our schools each year. The number one reason for this high rate of attrition is poor working conditions, and most prominently, the excessive class sizes and teaching loads, which are nearly twice as high than the state and/or national average.

Here is what William Ouchi has recently said about these issues. (Ouchi is a UCLA Professor of Management, who first proposed weighted student funding .)

"The most important single indicator of a school's quality is a metric you've never heard of: total student load. It's the number of classes a teacher teaches times the number of students per class. In New York City, by union contract, a teacher may teach up to five classes, and a class may have up to 32 students, for a total load of 160. ... Then visit an elite private school, like those where many of your readers send their children. The total load is 55 to 60."

Clearly, Ouichi is referring to both class size and student load. The load at the private schools Bloomberg and Klein sent their children to is about four classes of 15 students or less. Nationally, the average student load for middle and high school teachers is 89.

Yet the administration has done nothing to improve this situation in six years. In fact, with the 37 1/2 extra minutes, the student load has significantly grown for most NYC public school teachers.

I have calculated that for the average middle or high school teacher, simply spending five minutes per week correcting each student's homework, and spending another five minutes with each of them after class would take about 40 hours per week. This is a whole second job, and as a result, it doesn't happen. No teacher, no matter how experienced or well trained, can reach all students with the sort of class sizes we have in our schools.

Only by reducing class sizes, which will also lower teaching loads, can we ensure that NYC students get the attention and help they need, and the effective -- and experienced -- teachers they deserve.