
A Middle-School Cheating Scandal Raises Questions About No Child Left Behind - sizzle
http://newyorker.com/reporting/2014/07/21/140721fa_fact_aviv
======
bendoit
Our small town school district has very similar cheating going on with the
state tests. The teachers involved are fairly bold about it. The kids would
talk about getting advance copies of the final secured tests to bring home and
practice with. I made copies of these tests, contacted the state department of
education, and tried to report it. That was difficult and there was a lot of
runaround regarding who would accept reports. Technically parents and others
are not allowed to report cheating, it is to be done only by school staff.

I then contacted several local media reporters. They were surprisingly
uninterested, perhaps since nearly everyone around has family members that
work for schools in some capacity or another.

After contacting media though the state board must have heard what I was
trying to do because the person in charge of testing at the state level
personally contacted me, told me that although it might technically be
considered cheating it wasn't really cheating, and that there was nothing to
report.

Why is all this? Everyone is cheating, everyone knows they're cheating, and
they all think they are so clever cheating the system because it results
somehow in more federal funding via race to the top grants and the like.

I let my kids finish this school year. But that's the last year in that
system, and now we are going back to homeschooling where they can learn
something. Despite the advantages of cheating, the school has almost total
dedication to test preparation every day of the year and no time for real
academics. School is a tedious bore and the students are ignorant.

~~~
kdragon
"There's a reason education sucks, it's the same reason that it will never,
ever, ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better, don't look for it, be
happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that.
I'm talking about the real owners, now. The real owners, the big wealthy
business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there
to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no
choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the
important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since
bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls.
They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media
companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you
hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year
lobbying,­ lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they
want more for themselves and less for everybody else.

But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of
citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-
educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that.
That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people
who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly
they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years
ago.

You know what they want? Obedient workers,­ people who are just smart enough
to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively
accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer
hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that
disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your
Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back,
so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know
something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they
own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are
not in the big club." \- George Carlin

There's your answer to why.

The answer to how involves more details, but it basically has to do with
pacifying the concept of critical thinking from our education system and all
facets of american culture, and replacing it with rote learning. It's a lower
form of intelligence, which is great for passing arbitrary tests and producing
the obedient workers who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the
paperwork.

The best thing you can do for a child is teach them how to think and learn for
themselves. Grow their critical thinking skills and get them into programming
or engineering. Teach them empathy. Oh, and buy them a bitcoin.

~~~
Loughla
As someone inside the higher education machine and who is married to a long-
time teacher, that's false; there is no conspiracy to keep kids dumb in
schools.

The problem is that we're tasked with coming up with a universal system of
education for an unbelievably varied skill set presented by students. So, we
shoot for the middle (or just slightly below the middle when parents complain
that it's too hard). Combine that with apathy and burn-out among the aging
workforce in education, and you get the full picture.

There's no conspiracy, just an averaging out of student abilities and bitter,
resigned teachers who are tired of being told how to do their jobs by
politicians and loud-mouths in the media.

Whether or not critical thinking skills are being fostered in our current
system in all classrooms, that's another question. But, there is no
conspiracy.

As a side note; working in programming and engineering doesn't magically imbue
a person with more or better critical thinking skills than English literature
or art history.

~~~
danielweber
I feel for you. It seems that for each design decision, school systems are set
up to be _easy to administer_. Slots students and teachers into classes and
classes into periods and rotate them around.

But:

 _who are tired of being told how to do their jobs by politicians and loud-
mouths in the media_

If you are getting paid by the public, the public is going to have lots of
opinions on your job performance. Everyone has to answer to someone, whether
its bosses or customers or constituents, and no one is given a guarantee that
these people will only judge you based on the "correct" things.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Agreed.

People have a really bad problem of _analyzing_ what's wrong with schools.
Part of the reason why is that we always want to think in terms of us-versus-
them. It's very difficult to keep in your head a system where intelligent
people are all acting in good faith, yet the results are so poor. Much easier
to buy into some kind of slogan.

Public education is a service, and like with any service, the people writing
the check have certain expectations. With education, it's very simple:
secondary education should provide the student with the ability to have a
productive job and/or move on to higher education.

But there are a ton of confounding variables. Student populations are not the
same. Facilities differ. We all know the spiel. This stuff is difficult! Good
teachers require the ability to creatively match teaching style to students.

With difficult creative jobs, we know what works: as few rules as possible,
clear acceptance criteria, and diverse people working in small groups with
creative tension. This isn't a mystery.

Instead we've created overly-complex monstrosities of administration,
consultants as far as the eye can see, an institutional, assembly-line
metaphor for work, and stringent rules slathered on top. Then we add in
teacher's unions and school boards. Finally, some smart ass came up with the
idea "Just what are we doing, anyway? We need a test!"

I agree with the smart ass. We need a test. In fact, as a taxpayer without
acceptance criteria I'm not paying for it. But tacking a test on top of the
heaping pile of dog shit we currently have as an education system will not
make it work. It'll just point out how bad it is. That's fine with me, but be
prepared for a lot of fake "X raises questions" articles like this one as the
establishment twists itself into pretzels trying to deny that it's the
structure of the system itself that is at fault, not the tests.

So it's a tough situation. There are no good or bad guys, and that just makes
it worse.

~~~
dragonwriter
> People have a really bad problem of analyzing what's wrong with schools.
> Part of the reason why is that we always want to think in terms of us-
> versus-them.

That's actually, IMO, not even close to the biggest problem. The main problem
with analyzing what is wrong with the schools is that no one can agree to
shared definition of the mission of the schools that admits to an easy
objective measurement, and, that this is complicated by lots of people selling
proposed metricsbased on their beliefs about what those metrics will be which
will justify the policy prescriptions they already prefer, which are often
based on prefered outcomes that are different than what the outcomes are
advertised as proxies for measuring (and often based on concealed ideological
or financial interest of the people selling them.)

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Meh, not so much.

Look at it this way: schools are political systems. Therefore, they exist and
will continue to exist entirely based on the perceived value the voters are
getting.

I seriously doubt voters sit down debating complicated metrics. Whatever the
criteria that causes voters to vote one way or another is, you can be assured
it is a simple one.

Sure, the nerdy, pointy-hat discussion is way down in the weeds, but that's
not how political systems operate -- unless you're just trying to blow smoke
up people's asses, in which case you can line up a dozen experts for and
against anything you want. It's back to clanning and politics. This ain't
engineering.

------
patio11
The reporting on this scandal has focused on NCLB as the evil outside
influence which corrupted the garden of Eden that was Atlanta public schools.
That is like blaming the coroner's office for a spate of murders.

Atlanta schools were ineffectual, corrupt money pits which failed
_generations_ of poor students, and that was not a problem until Washington
upset the apple cart and put a number on it.

~~~
samdk
NCLB tried to fix those "ineffectual, corrupt money pits" by giving enormous,
overriding importance to a small set of easily gamed statistics.

Creating a single performance metric that people Must Meet Or Else is an
exceedingly naive approach to performance problems. It creates perverse
incentives that reward cheating and short-term hacks over sustainable long-
term solutions, and it doesn't actually do anything to help solve the problem
at all.

I'm not, to be clear, saying that trying to use statistics as a tool to solve
problems in education is a bad idea, but laws like NCLB are comparable to non-
technical managers trying to measure software dev performance with metrics
like "lines of code produced" or "number of bug tickets closed". (And I don't
think I have to explain to anyone here why that's a bad idea.)

~~~
yummyfajitas
Please be concrete. How do you game standardized tests? Sample tests can be
found here, so make sure your proposed method would actually work.

[https://www.georgiastandards.org/resources/Pages/Tools/Testi...](https://www.georgiastandards.org/resources/Pages/Tools/TestingResources.aspx)

~~~
dalke
I'll be concrete and define "game standardized tests" as "aspects which
influence the test results other than proficiency in the subject matter."

On the teacher side, one way to game them is via test prep. Quoting from
[http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2014/04/what-test-prep-
is...](http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2014/04/what-test-prep-is-not.html)
: "learning how to perform the specific cockamamie tasks favored by the
designers of the various state-level assessments"

That includes:

> We have covered "How To Spot the Fake Answers Put There To Fool You." We've
> discussed "Questions About Context Clues Mean You Must Ignore What You Think
> You Know." We've discussed how open-ended questions require counting skills
> (the answer to any question that includes "Give three reasons that..." just
> requires a full three reasons of anything at all, but give three). For
> lower-function students, we covered such basics as "Read All Four Answers
> Before You Pick One."

> We have pushed aside old literary forms like "short stories" and "novels" in
> favor of "reading selections"\-- one-page-sized chunks of boring contextless
> pablum which nobody reads in real life, but everybody reads on standardized
> tests. We have taught them to always use big words like "plethora" on their
> essay answers, and to always fill up the whole essay page, no matter what
> repetitive gibberish is requires. We have taught them to always rewrite the
> prompt as their topic sentence. In PA, we have taught them what sort of
> crazy possible meaning the test-writers might have assigned to the words
> "tone" and "mood."

This is gaming the system because had the test givers used a completely
different approach, say, of using open-ended questions instead of multiple-
choice answers, or "give persuasive reasons that..." instead of the more
easily tested "three", then this test prep would not work. Not that that
alternate testing form will happen in standardized tests, because it's a lot
more expensive to grade free-form tests. But teachers themselves _can_ ask
these sorts of questions, to help gauge proficiency.

Another way to game the test is on the test giver's side - they get to define
what the pass/fail thresholds are. For example, "a test question was
considered "hard" or "easy" not because it required a particular skill; its
difficulty was determined based on how many students got it correct." Quote
from [http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/08/scoring-ny-
tests-w...](http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/08/scoring-ny-tests-with-
triple-lindy.html) .

Since the thresholds can be determined after the fact, this means it's not
really judging proficiency but instead is making the test give a pre-defined
pass/fail curve.

~~~
yummyfajitas
"How to spot the fake answers put there to fool you" == "how to see when an
answer isn't even in the ballpark". That's a useful skill. That "context
clues" thing suggests teaching students how to solve the problem in front of
them, not the easy problem their mind wants to substitute for it [1].

From what this guy describes, "test prep" sounds like "educating students".

I agree that grading of essays is a disaster. It's not specific to
standardized tests, however - that's how all my essays were graded from grade
1 all the way to college.

 _Another way to game the test is on the test giver 's side - they get to
define what the pass/fail thresholds are._

This is why tests are standardized, not left up to the schools or teachers.

[1] A hard problem: "What is the optimal incarceration time to dissuade people
from pedophilia." An easy problem: "How angry do pedophiles make me feel?"
When most people hear the first question, which is hard, their mind
substitutes the second much easier question for it. See Kahneman's book
"Thinking Fast and Slow" for more on this.
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374533555/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374533555/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0374533555&linkCode=as2&tag=christuc-20&linkId=KWB55KZLPEI4OQCE)

~~~
sophacles
The thing you are blatantly ignoring is this: standardized tests also teach
children the lesson that there will be exactly one correct answer in all of
life's situations, and that there will be exactly one OK method for every
possible challenge faced. No exceptions.

Which is sometimes true sure. But it is frustrating working with academic
"stars" who internalize this once they come to the "real world". They are
focused so much on getting the "right answer" within some narrowly defined
context of right, that they can't see the better solution by reinterpreting
the problem or recasting the assumptions in a slightly different order. They
are unable to combine bits of knowledge from different buckets, because the
test questions are all neatly siloed.

For example, I've had this argument with fresh grads many, many times:

me: you need to limit your UDP packets to 512 bytes (or 8K depending on the
situation).

them: but my teachers told me UDP packet size is a 16 bit integer.

me: yeah, but many stacks cut off shorter, because there is a different
standard that says routers can drop packets bigger than their preferred size,
the only minimum is 512 bytes.

them: my teacher told me that the packet size is a 16 bit field. Why are you
talking about routers?

me: because you need to combine information to actually solve a problem?

them: whatever, I need to figure out what the bug in my code is causing these
packets to be dropped.

Or -

me: hey $intern, let's figure out a few ways to solve approach this problem.
_expounds on the problem, lays out a few things that might work_. The goal
here is to try a few different techniques so we can work them into the bigger
design. Any questions?

intern: no.

 _a few days later_

intern: Hey I think i solved the problem, is this one solution right?

me: it's one way. It has some good stuff and bad stuff, but we want to try a
few solutions to determine how to think about this.

intern: _looks like a lost puppy_ but is it right?

 _Following conversation about multiple solutions and exploring solutions
resembles "who's on first"_

The biggest problem with standardized testing is there is no room for the idea
that outside of school, it isn't always about doing the rote thing, the simple
siloed task in front of you, but rather incorporating various bits of
knowledge, about applying the bits of knowledge in ways that allow task
completion for tasks that aren't extremely well defined with a pre-arranged
solution.

In fact - the lack of a pre arranged solution is what defines most work
outside of menial jobs. The idea that there is more than one approach or
solution to something is antithetical to the core of standardized testing.

(keep in mind - that for the statistics to be meaningful, the tests can't
allow for grading criterial other than "one strictly correct answer" or you
end up with issues in the numbers as the result of graders being different.)

~~~
wisty
There's pretty strong evidence suggesting this isn't a problem. Or if it's a
problem, it's not one that schools can solve.

Teaching "critical thinking" is basically a waste of time. You can't do it. It
would be nice if you could, but you can't. "Critical thinking" simply doesn't
transfer. (Well, they do a tiny bit, if they are done right, but there's more
fine print than Facebook's ToS to any claim that you can teach students how to
_think_.)

Let's say you took all those "creative thinking" skills you learnt in
networking, did a course on photography, then got a job with a really good
photographer. Guess what - you might have decent communication skills, but
you'd still come off as a clueless idiot who can't "think creatively" or
"solve problems", because you don't have the domain skills and knowledge.

If they've got a solid core of domain skills and knowledge, they can actually
think for themselves. If they don't, they'll be clueless, and just try to
memorise answers.

Anyone who can tie their own shoelaces knows "there's more than one way to
solve a problem". Kids can actually think for themselves, if and only if they
understand the domain.

Now, maybe the schools are teaching really badly, and the tests are geared
towards forcing students to answer questions rather than solve problem -
that's a problem. As in machine learning, getting students to memorise
training data just leads to brittle learning. That might be the real problem -
the blind are leading the blind, and some teacher who can't network is telling
kids to memorise whatever was in the book, because no-one in the class has a
clue. That's a recipe for incompetence.

And we know that high stakes tests with rewards for "good" teachers are like
paying programmers per LoC. But that's not a problem with standardised tests
anymore than code metrics are a problem. Idiots in management can cause
issues, though.

~~~
sophacles
I disagree completely with "you must already have domain knowledge to be able
to apply basic learning skills within that domain". I've seen people enter new
domains and do well, and other enter new domains and do poorly. The difference
seems to be the ability to ask "how do the things I do already know
interrelate?"

It is a matter of metacognition (thinking about what I know and how it
applies) and not being paralyzed by fear of "getting the wrong answer". The
former can be taught, and there are teaching methods that show success around
the concept. The latter is something that is hard to overcome when people
spend 16 formative years being punished when they don't "find the exact,
single, and exclusive" answer and not being rewarded for "learning a few
ways". (although research also shows that tests that are not binary - that is
all points or no points - do a good job of helping with the fear e.g. multiple
choice tests that have "wrong" answers that suggest conceptual understanding
even if there is a calculation error.)

------
billyhoffman
I was born and raised in Atlanta, Marietta specifically. It is a wealthy area
with some of the best public schools in Georgia. I went to Dickerson Middle
School. The vast majority of my peers had 2 parent homes. Both parents worked
and could afford a babysitter/nanny, or one parent's income was enough for the
other to stay home. The area is incredibly safe. I rode my bike to school.

At Parks, as this article says, the majority of students have a single parent
household, with drug abuse problems, and extreme poverty. 2 of Parks middle
school students were raped in a single school year.

Comparing Dickerson's test scores to Parks's test scores is insane. Should
Parks, and schools like it, be held to certain standards? Yes. Absolutely. But
excellence in education is affected by far more factors than the quality of
the school and its teachers. The article discusses how Lewis, a teacher, was
operating almost as a social worker for many of these kids (doing laundry,
driving them home at night, etc).

The solution isn't "throw more money at the school" or "hold them to a
standard test metric." Its more complicated than you think. Education, crime,
employment, these things are linked. We can't address these in isolation.

~~~
jseliger
_Education, crime, employment, these things are linked._

For an alternate perspective:
[http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2014/06/25/smartest-
kids-...](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2014/06/25/smartest-kids-in-the-
world-finland/) . The book is worth reading too.

Also: [http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2014/05/17/why-cant-we-
solve-p...](http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2014/05/17/why-cant-we-solve-
poverty-or-solve-it-through-schools/) .

------
jonah
I had an conversation with a just-retired teacher this weekend. In addition to
the days (a week?) of testing the students at her school had to endure, they
were a site for testing a new test and so were subjected to another week of
testing.

It's possible for students to opt-out of standardized testing but of course
the school is required to have a very high participation rate (90+%?) or else
they'll be penalized. One of the teachers had been informing students of their
right to opt-out and making the necessary forms available to them.

As soon as the administration saw a number of students opting out, they
brought them in one-by-one and interrogated them as to which of their teachers
was doing this. He was admonished (or worse).

The whole system of criteria and incentives are so broken. This is analytics
and big-data gone awry. "You can't improve what you don't measure," sure, but
the wrong things are being measured and the incentives are wrong and the
consequences backwards. Sigh.

~~~
bostik
> _" You can't improve what you don't measure," sure, but the wrong things are
> being measured and the incentives are wrong and the consequences backwards._

A direct corollary: you get what you measure. Nothing more, and nothing less.

In education and humans therein lies the problem. When all effort is expended
towards hitting metrics, _only_ the chosen metrics will be improved.
Everything else is left to degrade. If you add the incentives to punish for
not hitting the targets, _of course_ you get cheating. A little at first, but
when the improved goals are now set based on false data, you encourage a more
systematic cheating.

One aspect of problem has been already witnessed in Finland, the country of
supposedly superior education system. University staff are well aware of this
but can do nothing about it. If I had to guess, I would say that the
administators are simply divorced from reality.

I don't know if there is much cheating going on. We may not be that far down
in the drain; what we do have, is a constant pressure to over-achieve. There
are teachers and professors who all say same the same thing.

I wonder what happens when the researchers and teachers will get punished for
not meeting their >100% performance targets year-over-year.

~~~
VLM
"I wonder what happens when the researchers and teachers will get punished for
not meeting their >100% performance targets year-over-year."

This is not considered a bug in the system, if we graduate more of them than
we need, and as seen in the article cronyism and gang/mafia mentality is
rampant.

So in a system built on cheating, the "cooperative" will have their
performance targets fixed, and the "non-team players" will be removed.

Superficially the goal of standardized testing is to produce a populace thats
real good at taking standardized tests, which is of course a totally useless
goal, but its easy to measure. Slightly deeper, the goal of standardized
testing is to remove autonomy from teachers as a punishment by forcing them to
teach to the test. A bit deeper and the purpose of standardized testing is to
encourage corruption. If one party has a political goal of fighting the
teachers union, what better long term plan than to force them all to become
thugs or leave? The other party likes it also, because who doesn't want an
army of thugs?

Nobody wants the kids to learn anything, unfortunately. Sometimes it happens
accidentally, but it doesn't matter.

------
frozenport
Should be titled:

 _A Middle-School Cheating Scandal Raises Questions About the Effectiveness of
Schools_

It appears that there was nothing teachers could do to raise students to the
level of standardize tests. With schools that are unable to perform their
education task, one wonders why we have them in the first place.

One potential solution to these problems is to aggressively segment students
into winning and loosing groups based on academic performance. Although doing
so has often been met with accusation of racism.

~~~
VLM
We segment our students by real estate into winning and losing groups based on
the assumption that parental income = academic performance. The primary result
of NCLB is proving this has a rather intense correlation.

Locally our housing is hyper segregated (despite not being in the South) so
naturally our schools are also racially segregated, as are our test results.

Racial income inequality is not likely to be solved by metric data worship,
although that does act as an effective distractor from the root cause(s).

~~~
frozenport
Big cities are an exception to this as it is not possible to segment further.
Examples, such as Chicago or Buffalo New York come to mind where some of the
best and worst schools in America exist in the same school district. Opening
the avenues between these schools is often met with strong opposition, often
from the underprivileged minority groups that would most benefit. Programs
that reach out to the community as a whole but fail to represent that
community's racial statistics are such targets.

When I was a kid our school admissions was on a lottery system where 70% of
the school was admitted, but due to low parent involvement African Americans
were made up a few dozen percentage points lower in neighboring schools. They
made a majority although not a super-majority. I wondered what the so-called
'community leaders' that would protest this state of affairs hand in mind for
the 40% of their skin color.

------
jeffdavis
This is a complicated issue, of course, but here are a few basics to guide the
conversation:

1\. When passing out tax dollars, the tax payers want the recipients to be
accountable. That's true even if the accountability is misguided, partial,
biased, creates some bad incentives, etc. Saying "we want tax dollars to
educate children, but we don't want any responsibility to show you results" is
just not a sustainable situation.

2\. The more remote the taxpayers are, the more they will rely on cold,
objective numbers to satisfy the accountability. A local community knows more
about how its students are doing and whether the school is accomplishing its
goals and will rely less on the numbers. Federal dollars being sent thousands
of miles away will come along with standardized tests, because the taxpayers
have no other way to judge whether their money is accomplishing anything.

3\. Some subjects are more easily tested objectively than others, e.g.
arithmetic tests are more accurate than creative writing tests.

4\. People tend to optimize more for things that can be objectively measured,
e.g. money over happiness; or math over painting; or horsepower over interior
comforts.

5\. Tests are most effective when they don't directly influence the test-
takers. For instance, a street survey about who can name the 9 justices on the
Supreme Court might tell us quite a bit about the knowledge of average
citizens about government. But if we keep asking the same question again and
again all over the place, people will learn the answer to that single
question, making the results look better. But the citizen's knowledge about
government hasn't really changed much.

------
sizzle
@dang/mods could you update the url with full page view:

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/07/21/140721fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/07/21/140721fa_fact_aviv?currentPage=all)

Thanks.

------
NoMoreNicksLeft
As a father of two young children, the decision to homeschool looks better
every day.

~~~
macspoofing
The issues in this article go for beyond NCLB and some cheating. Parks was in
a district in which students came from incredibly difficult home situations.
No school or teacher or test was going to change that. That may not be your
situation. Most likely, it ISN'T your situation.

There are probably other reasons why you chose homeschool (there are some very
bad reasons people choose to homeschool their kids, and few good ones), but
you shouldn't use this one.

~~~
NoMoreNicksLeft
No, the implication is that people like me are supposed to school-shop by
being rich enough to get jobs and homes in a "good" school district.

They'll still teach to the same tests (don't want to lose status). It's just
that the children are mostly untraumatized enough to pass those for them, and
past that any educational efforts are superficial and shallow.

That sounds like just as bad an outcome to me as if they were rotting in some
inner city hellhole.

~~~
jonah
I'm surprised there's anti-homeschool sentiment here on HN were we
(supposedly) value learning to think for ourselves, doing what we're
passionate about, having side-projects, and thinking differently.

~~~
macspoofing
I personally am not against anti-homeschool in principle. However, there are
some people that choose homeschool for very bad reasons, usually rooted in
certain religious beliefs and fear of exposing children to 'corrupting' ideas.
This segment makes up a significant portion of the homeschooling population
(or roughly ~40%). Some of my friends went through it. It's not pretty.

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davidgerard
The essential problem is the frankly insane practice of funding schools from
_local property taxes_. Then being surprised when the poor schools are
terrible. Then attempting to fix it with NCLB and Common Core and berating
teachers and so forth, as if desperately trying to avoid the root cause of the
problem.

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
Money is irrelevant. Many of the worst schools in America are the most
lavishly funded.

~~~
ejstronge
I find this very hard to believe - are there data available on the correlation
between funding and school performance? Also, how long has this correlation
occurred?

~~~
Glide
Living in NOVA it's hard to ignore the issues of DC public schools. A quick
search gives this:
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/23/t...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/23/the-
dramatic-inequality-of-public-school-spending-in-america/)

And googling "DC public school spending" gives a figure closer to 29K per
student.

~~~
ejstronge
The article you link indeed shows there's surprising spending levels in some
states but this doesn't quite link spending to school performance.

I'm only making this statement because it's sometimes easy to cite a
correlation to support a point when there's no causal relationship. Thus,
irrespective of how much a school spends per-pupil, it's critical to relate
spending to educational outcomes. You could imagine a case, for example, where
schools on the East Coast necessarily spend more than schools on the West
Coast to maintain old buildings (I'm not saying this is the case, of course).

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tn13
Questions about "No Child Left Behind" exist irrespective of cheating
scandals.

------
axus
One thing the SAT gets right, you have to go to an independent location for
the testing.

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mschuster91
Shifting the blame for low scores onto the teachers SUCKS.

Teachers are in no position at all to help their students when their parents
are too damn poor or high to ensure an environment in which their children can
actually learn.

~~~
veritas20
Ok, so what is your suggestion for making the parents less poor or less high?
General and baseless comments like these do not contribute positively to the
collective conversation.

~~~
mschuster91
Choose another metric to compare schools/teachers (next to impossible), or
factor in the "poorness" of the students/their parents. E.g. a rich, clean
white hood gets higher thresholds for A than a poor black hood filled with
junkies and violence.

This is not perfect either, but a rich/poor offset allows for a far better
comparison.

~~~
yummyfajitas
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-
added_modeling](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling)

------
edwhitesell
Sweet! An article from the future.

