WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Michael Madigan

"We are telling people who have worked for governments, and who have been told for years how much their pension would be, that the number is going to change." -- Ward Room

 Geri Armitage,  Naperville North High School teacher

“The state has not paid their portion — we have paid our dues — and now they are attacking us from every which way saying it’s our fault when, in reality, this is their obligation to us.” -- Daily Eastern News

Charles Blow

As [Michelle] Alexander confirmed to me Friday: “Today there are more African-American adults under correctional control — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.” -- NYT

Michelle Rhee's Test Cheating 

“My speculation: They didn’t want to hear what I had to say."  -- Former D.C. Principal Adell Cothorne on Frontline 

Norm Fruchter 

So counter to the mayor and the former chancellor’s assertions, ZIP code, race or ethnicity and income still strongly determine students’ academic outcomes across the city’s classrooms. -- "Demography & Destiny: College Readiness in New York"

 Charles Krauthammer

Larger Sandy Relief Bill Was "Rape Of The Treasury" -- Huffington

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Friday's failed pension grab

“We all look like idiots. I’ll say it again: We all — not the governor, not the other side, not our side — we all look like idiots.” -- Daniel Biss, Evanston Democrat 

L.A. charter cheating scandal

"Here I had been going around bragging about how awesome our school is, and now I wonder: Are we cheaters?" --Former L.A. Charter School teacher Lisa Sims. 

Racist voter suppression in Ohio

“I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine.” Doug Preisse, chairman of the county Republican Party and elections board member 

Murdoch thrilled

Amplify, focused on digital teaching and assessment tools, is run by Joel I. Klein, the former New York City schools chancellor. Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corporation, has said he would be “thrilled” if education were to account for 10 percent of its revenue five years from now. -- N.Y. Times, "Media Companies, Seeing Profit Slip, Push Into Education"

Weekend Quotables

"Privatopia"

David Segal

With public employee unions under attack in states like Wisconsin, and with cities across the country looking to trim budgets, behold a town built almost entirely on a series of public-private partnerships — a system that leaders around here refer to, simply, as “the model.” -- "A Georgia Town Takes the People’s Business Private."

Natalie Hopkinson

Today, as the quality of life improves, there is a subtext to change, that in order to make progress, black people must be pushed out of the way. They had it for 50 years! -- "Farewell to Chocolate City."

Charles Blow

The Republican-Democratic divide is increasingly becoming an all-white/multicultural divide, a male/female divide, and a more religious/less religious divide — the formers the traditional power classes, and the latters the emerging ones. -- "Bullies on the Bus"

Jay Mathews

I have been a reporter for 45 years. I have seen many cover-ups. This looks like one to me, and to many educators I have spoken to. D.C. officials have never investigated in any depth the wrong-to-right erasures that the District’s testing company began reporting in 2008. -- "D.C. keeps ignoring its test erasure scandal"

Will test-cheating students become America's new prison population?

Schooling in the Ownership Society

If they are going to start jailing students for cheating on standardized tests, our prison system will soon swell well beyond its world-leading 2-million inmate population. Since they've made the standardized test score the single most important gateway to college and hoped for financial success, a.k.a the American dream, cheating scandals and become pandemic across the country.

Previous scandals have been reported primarily in urban districts like New York, Atlanta and D.C. The school leaders who have been found at least largely responsible for systemic cheating in their schools have certainly not been arrested. Atlanta former superintendent, Beverly Hall was fired and I have no idea what happened to the 58 principals implicated in the scandal, but none that I know off are in prison. The same could be said about N.Y. Mayor Bloomberg and his crony former chancellor Joel Klein (now working for perhaps the world's greatest cheater, Rupert Murdoch) or of former D.C. school boss, Michelle "Erasurehead" Rhee.

But yesterday it was reported that at least 20 students and former students in upscale Great Neck, N.Y. have been arrested in a SAT/ACT test-taking for hire scandal. Forty students are also being investigated. Makes you wonder how many rich kids have been taking college spots away from students who couldn't afford to hire proxy test takers? And how about those wealthy suburban schools that have no trouble making AYP?

The Sun-Times reports another suburban cheating arrest in Antioch, IL where a special-ed teacher and wife of the high school’s head football coach, charged with computer tampering for allegedly changing the grades of several students, most of whom where athletes.

And on and on it goes. So far the response has been to tighten security around the tests. This sounds like a job for the marines returning from Iraq. They could be put to work either as security guards at test-taking centers or hired as prison guards for hundreds of new student prisoners.

Or we could consider getting rid of the testing madness that turns schools into sorting and tracking machines and  precipitates cheating, and start moving towards more authentic ways of assessing how kids are learning.

Reported test cheating tripled under Bloomberg

Annual allegations of test-tampering and grade-changing by educators have more than tripled since Mayor Bloomberg took control of New York City’s school system. Top bureaucrats, Wolcott and Polakow-Suransky go into spin mode.

“People are reporting things, that’s fine; we want people to report things,” Mr. Walcott said. But, he added, “people could be reporting for real and not necessarily real reasons.” -- N.Y. Times

That doesn't sound like it's "fine." Does it?

Loyola Law School prof, Kimberly West-Faulcon has written a strong piece on The Real Cheating Scandal of Standardized Tests, at Miller-McCune.

The truth is that the greater the stakes imposed on standardized test scores, the greater the pressure on educators to do whatever it takes to juice up the scores even if it degrades educational quality. By expressing his dismay and urging schools to increase test scores, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is evading the very important elephant-in-the-room question: “Are American public schools moving in the wrong direction by increasing emphasis on standardized test scores?”