Pay for performance promotes adult cheating for dollars and exploits children for money - Dallas ISD does not need another commission with a corporate reform bias

"We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Brown v. Board of Education (1954)"

 "We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "pay for performance" has no place. Pay for performance is inherently corrupting and exploits public school children for the financial benefit of adults."

Pay for performance tied to student test scores should have no place in the field of public education.  

I have voted against pay for performance. I will continue to vote against it for reasons that are obvious:

• It is a part of the corporate education reform model to privatize public education.
• It exploits children. 
• It corrupts adults. 
• It promotes cheating for dollars. 
• It creates competition - not collaboration. 
• It places a dollar sign on student test success.
• It does not work in public education.

The primary motivation for the cheating schemes of adults in Atlanta Public Schools was to obtain pay incentives all the way up to the Superintendent.

Research has suggested that pay for performance does little or nothing to improve student achievement.

The Debate over Teacher Merit Pay: A Freakonomics Quorum - Click Here

"There’s just one problem: educators almost universally hate merit pay, and have been adamantly opposed to it from day one. Simply, teachers say merit pay won’t work.

"In the last year, there’s been some pretty damning evidence proving them right; research showing that merit pay, in a variety of shapes and sizes, fails to raise student performance. In the worst of cases, such as the scandal in Atlanta, it’s contributed to flat-out cheating on the part of teachers and administrators. So, are we surprised that educators don’t respond to monetary incentives? Is that even the right conclusion to draw? 

 http://carlaranger.blogspot.com/search?q=freakonomics

Pay for performance in public education (K-12) appears to result in a corrupting benefit for a few adults - but does little for the success of all children.
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Former Atlanta schools superintendent reports to jail in cheating scandal

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/02/justice/georgia-cheating-scandal 

By CNN Staff

updated 10:00 AM EDT, Wed April 3, 2013 

(CNN) -- The former superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools was among the educators who surrendered to authorities Tuesday after being indicted by a grand jury in a cheating scandal that rocked the district and drew national attention.

Beverly Hall resigned from her position in 2011 after a state investigation into large, unexplained test score gains in some Atlanta schools. She has denied any role in the cheating scandal.

A Fulton County grand jury last week indicted 35 educators from the district, including principals, teachers and testing coordinators. They were ordered to turn themselves in by Tuesday, District Attorney Paul Howard said.

By 10:00 p.m., 27 of 35 educators had turned themselves in at the Fulton County Jail to face charges including racketeering, theft by taking and making false statements about their roles in an alleged plot to falsify students' standardized tests. Eight of them had been released on bond late Tuesday, the Fulton County Sheriff's office said.

In 2009, Hall was named the National Superintendent of the Year by the Schools Superintendents Association, which at the time said her "leadership has turned Atlanta into a model of urban school reform."

Grand jury indicts 35 in Georgia school cheating scandal

Cheating scandal hits Atlanta schools

First indicted educator turns self in

 

35 employees indicted in cheating scandal

But the indictment paints another picture of Hall, one of a superintendent with "a single-minded purpose, and that is to cheat," Howard told reporters last week.

According to the indictment, Hall placed unreasonable goals on educators and "protected and rewarded those who achieved targets by cheating." It also alleges she fired principals who failed to achieve goals and "ignored suspicious" test score gains throughout the school system.

Her bond was reduced from $7.5 million to $200,000, the Fulton County Sheriff's office reported.

Eugene Robinson gets it right on "the racket with standardized test scores"

Pulitzer prize winning opinion writer Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post recently got it right on the corrupting influence that high-stakes tests combined with merit pay-performance bonuses have become in American education. 

On April 1, 2013 he wrote about the most recent indictments of numerous officials of Atlanta Public Schools.

In his opinion article "The racket with standardized test scores" Robinson states:

• " It is time to acknowledge that the fashionable theory of school reform — requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students’ standardized test scores — is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket."
• "I mean that literally. Beverly Hall, the former superintendent of the Atlanta public schools, was indicted on racketeering charges Friday for an alleged cheating scheme that won her more than $500,000 in performance bonuses."
•  “Principals and teachers were frequently told by Beverly Hall and her subordinates that excuses for not meeting targets would not be tolerated,”
• "The principal and teachers would get bonuses. Hall would get accolades, plus a much bigger bonus."
• "And students — duped into thinking they had mastered material that they hadn’t even begun to grasp — would get the shaft."
• "In the District of Columbia, for example, there are unanswered questions about an anomalous pattern of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets during the reign of famed schools reformer Michelle Rhee"
• "Standardized achievement tests are a vital tool, but treating test scores the way a corporation might treat sales targets is wrong. Students are not widgets."
• "But how does it help these students to have their performance on a one-size-fits-all standardized test determine their teachers’ compensation and job security?"
• "... even absent cheating, the blind obsession with test scores implies that teachers are interchangeable implements of information transfer, rather than caring professionals who know their students as individuals. It reduces students to the leavings of a No. 2 pencil."
• "School reform cannot be something that ostensibly smart, ostentatiously tough “superstar” superintendents do to a school system and the people who depend on it."

In other words, corruption is the inevitable result of this false approach to so-called school reform, and the result is always detrimental to students, parents and the public interest in public education.

The inevitable corruption of educators through high-stakes testing

35 educators indicted in Atlanta cheating scandal - Click Here

The Inevitable Corruption of Indicators and Educators Through High-Stakes Testing - Click Here

Press Release - Click Here

The Education Policy Studies Laboratory (EPSL) would like to call your attention to The Inevitable Corruption of Indicators and Educators Through High-Stakes Testing, released by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice

EAST LANSING, Mich. (Friday, March 18, 2005)— America’s public schools are setting goals and making harmful, irreversible decisions based on test results that in an increasing number of cases can’t be trusted, said an independent study from the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University.

The report, made possible by a grant from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, determined that the pressure of high-stakes tests is forcing school districts to take short cuts to avoid being labeled as failing for not meeting certain benchmarks. As a result, their scores are subject to corruption.

“Policy makers have oversold the public on the notion that high-stakes test scores are the best way to hold schools accountable,” said Teri Moblo, director of the Great Lakes Center. “Because of No Child Left Behind and other measures, school districts know that the results of one or two tests determine if they are considered successful. This creates enormous pressure on educators and their students, because long-term decisions are being made based on scores that can’t be trusted.”

David Berliner and Sharon Nichols, co-authors of the report, The Inevitable Corruption of Indicators and Educators Through High-Stakes Testing, point to examples of how unbridled pressure to reach unrealistic goals, whether in the boardroom, on the playing field, or in our own government, can inevitably lead to a “beat-the-system” mentality. 

“Now we see this kind of mentality seeping into our schools, where future generations are training merely to beat the system,” Berliner said. “Learning subject matter in depth is no longer the goal of schools in high-stakes states. We are witnessing proof of a well known social science law, which basically says the greater the pressure to perform at a certain level, the more likely people will find a way to distort and corrupt the system to achieve favorable results.”

Drs. Berliner and Nichols identified 10 trends that outline the consequences of high-stakes testing, which ultimately all negatively impact the quality of education for our nation’s children. The trends are:

• Administrator and Teacher Cheating
• Student Cheating
• Exclusion of Low-Performance Students from Testing
• Misrepresentation of Student Dropouts
• Teaching to the Test
• Narrowing the Curriculum
• Conflicting Accountability Ratings
• Questions about the Meaning of Proficiency
• Declining Teacher Morale
• Score Reporting Errors

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35 educators indicted in Atlanta cheating scandal

"Former Atlanta schools Superintendent Beverly Hall was the leader of a corrupt organization that used students’ test scores to earn bonuses if they rose, or intimidation and termination if they fell, according to a 65-count indictment returned Friday.

“If a school achieved 70 percent or more of its targets, all employees at the school received a bonus,” the indictment said. “Additionally, if certain system-wide targets were achieved, Beverly Hall herself received a substantial bonus.”