Cheating

We have seen much in the media in recent years about cheating scandals conducted by both students and educators.  Perhaps a 24-hour news cycle and its pressure to attract an audience with sensational stories is behind a perceived increase in such stories.  On the other hand, perhaps some changes in the world of education are contributing. 

In the last couple decades we have seen an expansion of the testing culture.  More and more kids are taking AP classes and exams, needing top scores to get into the college of their choice.  The SAT test has been revamped and both the ACT and SAT tests are perceived to be a larger and larger part of the college admissions process. 

Colleges and universities have used marketing to increase their applications without doing anything to expand their incoming classes, thereby lowering the percentage of students admitted and increasing their supposed prestige, exclusivity and status. 

We have told our high-performing students that they have to be number one to be successful, all the while knowing everyone cannot be number one.  We have put them under amazing pressure.

And with No Child Left Behind we have seen the testing culture expand into the lives of all students from early in grade school to high school, for students of all abilities.  As we have tied school funding and teacher evaluation to the test scores, we have put awesome pressure on all our students.

We have done the same to teachers.  As strictly limited, objective measures are used in teacher evaluations, teachers have done what they can to protect their livelihood.  Some might say that teachers simply have to teach their students more effectively, thereby helping them achieve higher test scores.  But teachers certainly don’t choose their careers so they can teach to a test.  As educators, they realize that there’s so much more to an education and to their students’ development than test performance.  Tests can only be one, limited, imperfect measure.

I certainly don’t support or encourage cheating.  It is simply wrong.  But imagine if your career is at stake.  Consider feeling as though anything short of admission to Harvard or Stanford was failure.  Consider believing that nothing short of fives on all 12 of your AP exams was failure.  Consider if your ability to put food on the table for your family were at stake as your students took a single exam. 

We need a more humane approach to student achievement.  We need a broader, more thoughtful approach to teacher evaluations.

I explain to my students that a test is a snapshot.  Nobody looks great in every picture.  No student is always at their best.  They will not, must not be judged by a single performance.  A teenager comes to school as a product of their family, community and experience.  Furthermore, teens are emotional roller coasters; we never know what we are going to get.  Their mother is running late, their clothes don’t feel right, they don’t like the way their boyfriend looked at them, they woke up late, they didn’t have a good breakfast or sleep well, it’s raining, …and all these things can impact their readiness and confidence when taking a test.  And then we want to judge them and the teachers based on this very singular snapshot?

So when the stakes are too high, whether it is Enron, Peter Stuyvesant High School, Harvard University or Atlanta Public Schools, cheating starts to looks like a viable option.  We must bring back some common sense, some reason, and some balance to the process and to raising our children.

Here’s some compelling reading on the subject:

Stuyvesant Students Describe the How and the Why of Cheating

Behind the Enron Scandal

America's biggest teacher and principal cheating scandal unfolds in Atlanta

Wal-Mart Heiress Accused of Cheating Gives Back USC Degree

More cheating scandals inevitable, as states can’t ensure test integrity

The 10 Biggest College Cheating Scandals

How to Ruin Teaching

Teaching is an art, not a science.  The same can be said of leadership.  While there may be elements of teaching and leadership that can be measured, most of the finer points, the points that truly are the mark of great teaching and leadership cannot be measured.  A great teacher has to be nurturing, engaging, empathetic, and energetic.  Do these qualities show up on student test scores?  Students come to our classrooms with the baggage of their homes and families, their past classes, and their moods.  Do these issues make an appearance on test scores?  Can and do teachers overcome these influences?  Can school leadership recognize great teaching outside of test scores?  

This article made me yell out in a most positive way.  Deborah Kenny says it so eloquently.  Want to ruin teaching?  Give Ratings.

Teaching Ate Me Alive

The title of this linked article, Teaching Ate Me Alive, caught my eye.  As I read it I was reminded of my college advisor’s book, 900 Shows a Year (Stuart Palonsky).   I read it as a college junior and loved it.  It is an ethnography of Dr. Palonsky’s year teaching in a school in New York.  As a college student I was inspired by it.  He made teaching sound like a blast – never boring, filled with humor and challenge, engaging intellectual possibilities, and non-stop action.  While I had classmates who read it and promptly chose other career paths, I found myself only more excited about getting in the classroom.  Then I got my first job in a very challenging inner-city high school, and in a few short years found myself actively seeking work outside of schools.  As my search ramped up a school recruited me to move to a much better environment.  Almost 20 years later, I am still a teacher.  About 5 years ago I re-read Dr. Palonsky’s book.  I found myself thinking like some of those classmates from college.  What was I thinking?  What sort of career have I chosen?  This job is nuts!  I realized that I was wonderfully fortunate to work in a great school in a great community with the best colleagues a teacher could ask for.  

As I read Hirzel’s article today I wonder just how crazy a proposition it is to be a great teacher.  It is a great career.  It is truly never boring.  The humor and the challenges are awesome.  The intellectual engagement required really does keep me sharp.  But the responsibility and expectations are huge with relatively little reward.  The turn-over rate illustrates this in communities across America.  This is a phenomenally hard job.  Hirzel’s article captures in gory detail the challenges many teachers face.  We have a lot of work to do to make teaching a more attractive career for our best and brightest.  But we must.  Our nation depends on it.   

Changes in AP Curriculum

The College Board is revamping all their Advanced Placement curricula.  Those who teach the courses are well aware of this, but the general public likely knows little of this.  As we see many poor examples of standardized tests and curricula, I think the changes the College Board is making ought to be quite welcome.  They are moving away from vast, expansive curricula that required incredible speed, little depth, and far too much memorization of facts without context.  But now we will begin to see more analysis and critical thinking.  And it is not only the College Board from which we will see these changes.  The Common Care State Standards, adopted by almost all 50 states, will be promoting the same sort of changes.  While educators may welcome this shift, many top students will see a difficult adjustment best summed up at the end of an article from US News and World Report (http://www.usnews.com/education/high-schools/articles/2012/09/17/high-school-students-need-to-think-not-memorize?page=2 ).

“Many teachers, like Hollinger, look forward to digging deeper, though she suspects that many of today's "best" students who do well on recall and standardized tests might have some trouble adjusting. This new style of learning, says Philip Ballinger, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Washington in Seattle, will definitely be better college prep.”

Finally, I think it worth pointing out that, at least in the case of the College Board, this is what can happen when educators are involved in the process.

Teachers Are Not The Problem

My last post referred to a book by Paul Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.  This essay summarizes his work and traces some important trends in private/charter choice.  We have lost sight of one of the central issues in improving the lives our youth.  Yes, education is as basic as it gets, but we must be addressing poverty and the economic issues at work in our cities or our efforts will come to nothing.  What we need is a coordinated, community-wide effort where all the agencies sit at the same table and recognize that they all have similar goals.  Consider this:

“But we could design an entirely different system for children who are dealing with deep and pervasive adversity at home. It might start at a comprehensive pediatric wellness center, like the one that the pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris is now working to construct in Bayview−Hunters Point, with trauma-focused care and social-service support woven into every medical visit. It might continue with parenting interventions that increase the chance of secure attachment, like Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up, or ABC, a program developed at the University of Delaware. In prekindergarten, it might involve a program like Tools of the Mind that promotes executive-function skills and self-regulation in young children. We’d want to make sure these students were in good schools, of course, not ones that track them into remedial classes but ones that challenge them to do high-level work. And whatever academic help they were getting in the classroom would need to be supplemented by social and psychological and character-building interventions outside the classroom, like the ones that principal Elizabeth Dozier has brought to Fenger High School in Chicago or the ones that a group called Turnaround for Children provides in several low-income schools in New York City and Washington, D.C. In high school, these students would benefit from some combination of what college-persistence programs like OneGoal and KIPP Through College provide — a program that directs them toward higher education and tries to prepare them for college not only academically but also emotionally and psychologically.

A coordinated system like that, targeted at the 10 to 15 percent of students at the highest risk of failure, would be expensive, there’s no doubt. But it would almost certainly be cheaper than the ad hoc system we have in place now. It would save not only lives but money, and not just in the long run, but right away.”

Read the article for more explanation – well worth your time.

(http://www.salon.com/2012/09/05/teachers_arent_the_problem/)