No, this isn't about the federal government shuffling statistics to make things look better - although that would not be surprising. This is about a report in USAToday about the District of Columbia Public Schools having some very questionable results on standardized tests. Now, if a district can help students improve their scores, that's great. The problem is that some of these "gains" are looking very suspect now.
Maybe one of the first red flags should have been when one school went from 10% of its students scoring at the "proficient" or "advanced" levels in math on standardized tests to 58% in only two years. It would be nice to think the students could improve this much this fast, but realistically it is unlikely to happen. But then, when district scores dropped by an average of 4% the scores in this one school dropped over 20% in the same period. The school showed what the article calls a "roller coaster" ride from 2006 to 2010.
The biggest red flag, however, is a report from the testing company that many of the DC schools have much higher than expected numbers of erasures on tests - as many as 80% of classrooms. And these were not just erasures, they were what is called "wrong-to-right" erasures where an incorrect answer is changed to correct. It makes you wonder just what might have been going on. And this was not the only district school that showed alarmingly high erasure rates.
To top it all off, the chancellor of the district gave big bonuses to teachers and the principal at the school for their "success." As the article points out, when you tie big bonuses in to test scores, you increase the chances of cheating. And how is the district handling all this controversy? It's DC, so you figure that one out.
Read the entire article at USAToday.
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