<p>Good Lord, yes, I report my income taxes with 100% accuracy. And I have been spot audited two of the last three years and passed. Who gets away with not reporting income taxes with 100% accuracy and how do they do it?</p>
<p>Only the little people pay taxes, Granny.</p>
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<p>Soo … we shouldn’t punish anyone, for anything, is that what you’re saying? </p>
<p>It’s sad how most posting here e want to blame the system, NCLB, standardized testing, merit pay, bad parents, poor children, even *Bush<a href=“I%20thought%20we%20were%20done%20with%20that?”>/i</a>, and hardly anyone wants to find fault with the teachers and administrators, the ones who systematically cheated for their own benefit, not the kids’, by the way, this is of no benefit to them at all. It seems people want to blame everyone except the guilty. What’s up with that?</p>
<p>Whatever happened to “integrity?” (You know – what you do when no one’s looking?)</p>
<p>You know – banks have a lot of money just laying around, my neighbor has a pretty sweet tv, and stuff at the grocery store costs too much - so, I guess it’s ok if I steal this stuff, 'cause you know, I’m only human?</p>
<p>We’ve gone past situational ethics to non-existent ones.</p>
<p>[YouTube</a> - US teachers in cheating scandal](<a href=“US teachers in cheating scandal - YouTube”>US teachers in cheating scandal - YouTube)</p>
<p>It’s even on international news</p>
<p>The teachers have given up on the students. The middle schools said they had no choice - the kids have to make progress toward the “all kids at grade level” each year and, if you get a kid that has already been “cheated up” a few levels, you either perform a one-year miracle or you cheat or you get fired. I have great sympathy for the teachers and even more for the students on whom the teachers gave up.</p>
<p>Adopting the foreign model would likely be the best thing, along with some Americanized tweaks. What if every school got the same funding? Including that for sports and the like? And the money for any fundraiser for sports goes to all schools (alright, I’m not liking that one). So with funding, every school gets equal dollars, the best schools end up being the one with the best principals.</p>
<p>No, the best schools end up being those with the best students. In our school system, students are allowed to transfer from failing schools. One of our good schools went from 600 to 900 students with the addition being students from failing schools. After the transfer, the school failed to progress adequately toward all students being at grade level by 2014. Next, some of the 600 will move to private schools. You can guess what happens next. Nothing makes for good schools like good students.</p>
<p>someone on page 2 talked about “Freakanomics” exposing chicago… I’m not sure what movie that is/ what schools you’re talking about but chicago is a HUGELY academic place. they hold a lot of schools within the top 50 IL HS’s & I believe quite a few in US top schools. IMSA is in Chicago I believe which is the Illinois math and science academy. Its well known throughout the state as the school for parents who’s child already has a 4.0 at a top school, and has practically no social career because they’re too wrapped up being child prodigy’s. While I could see slum-like schools in Chicago doing that stuff, Chicago is populated with great students who wouldn’t need to cheat. My school competes with them every year to try and climb up on the rankings. I think through all of this everyone is lumping cities together. Like now ALL Atlanta is in on this issue. Not true. There are some greatly respected schools there. By grouping big cities together, that could potentially have problems, you’re shorting the students by implying everyone there cheats. Thats unfair.</p>
<p>Granny: Nothing makes for good schools like good students.</p>
<p>This is so true, the population in a class/school has a huge effect on what’s likely to get accomplished there. People tend to be in denial about this issue in public schools because there’s no easy way to fix it.</p>
<p>Before my kids were school age, I looked for a district with high scores and high parent involvement as measured by the percent who show up at parent teacher conferences; by and large, big surprise, these were districts with highly educated parents, with average incomes greater than mine. I didn’t believe there was anything that special about the teachers or facilities in those districts, it was more that they offered a chance to be surrounded by kids whose families cared deeply about academics (enough to turn off the TV, check homework, arrange for tutoring), and with fewer kids who were acting out due to horrific home lives. We ended up buying a very modest house in a well to do district in order to get that benefit. My kids have had some terrific teachers, no question, but they also benefitted greatly from being around so many students whose families had high expectations re: academic peformance.</p>
<p>It breaks my heart to hear about poor achievement of kids in the inner cities near me, but I never saw how NCLB could really transform those schools, as it can’t really change the density of kids in the classroom with homelife/neighborhood challenges, especially in upper grades where so much time has been lost. So many of the ideas for improvement at failing schools seem like bandaids to me, but then pushing families from successful districts to private schools (as in Granny’s district) can’t be the answer either. I’m not defending cheating in any way, but it does start to look as if NCLB was a naive approach. I wish I knew what the answer was.</p>
<p>[Pa</a>. wants 90 schools investigated for 2009 cheating | Philadelphia Public School Notebook](<a href=“http://www.thenotebook.org/blog/113881/pa-wants-90-schools-investigated-2009-cheating]Pa”>http://www.thenotebook.org/blog/113881/pa-wants-90-schools-investigated-2009-cheating)</p>
<p>There are now reports of potential cheating in PA schools. Personally I think testing is essential to ensure some way of comparing schools; it’s just that those who stand to gain by cheating shouldn’t have any role in administering the tests to avoid what’s happening.</p>
<p>If you have ever looked at these tests, they are pretty pure indicators of subject matter competency. Kids who are receiving a decent education coast through them. The fact that so many kids are failing is reflecting that they aren’t learning anything. And NCLB doesn’t have anything to do with it. These inner city schools are receiving MORE money per student than their successful suburban counterparts. The problem is the parents. Newt Gingrich said years ago that we needed an option for parents who couldn’t/didn’t want to raise kids. Orphanages. Places like Boys Town. Places run by people who care who raise kids. Put these kids in the hands of professionals at an early age, let them live in a stable environment where they aren’t bounced around from house to house and exposed to drugs, alcoholism and irresponsible lifestyles. In one of our nearby urban districts they discovered that only 25% of their students are typically in the same school from one semester to the next. Kids cannot be successfully educated without stability. Oh, yes. Another thing. The problem with the Atlantic public schools has nothing to do with the tests. It has to do with corrupt people willing to do anything but the RIGHT things necessary to improve results. It’s time we put the kids ahead of the irresponsible adults.</p>
<p>I’m worried about my child doing her own laundry in college, but now I have to worry about her passing her exam even though she’s a 4.0 students. Did you get or earned those “A’s”? We will see…</p>
<p>What has compulsory public school education come to these days?</p>
<p>Whoa! High school teachers and students who don’t give a crap about education? Cheating in school? And in the South of all places?!?</p>
<p>wow thats shocking but I guess its good they do these stings to make sure people stay fair.</p>
<p>What’s really terrible is that students who needed extra support did not receive it because they “passed”.</p>
<p>The level of cynicism in the educators involved is just foul.</p>
<p>this is insane, you would think stuff like this could never happen here.</p>
<p>One of the problems with systems that measure achievement based on one dimensional things like standardized tests is that it creates major opportunities to cheat, to game the system, and in the end may create the exact opposite of what was intended, to see if kids are learning. The NCLB testing was designed to find where kids were having trouble and help them, and despite cynicism in some quarters, I think their heart was in the right place. But because of the punitive aspects of it, the fact that schools that didn’t measure up on the tests would lose funding or worse, it created major incentive to cheat, and yes, with standardized tests, that can be done, or at least gamed. </p>
<p>At the least bad situation, you get ‘teaching to the tests’, where anything not on those tests is considered less worthy, which can leave out big chunks of useful learning skills because they are ‘teaching to the tests’. At worse,it encourages cheating to do anything to stop the school from being penalized. </p>
<p>This situation is not limited to failing inner city schools, mind you. In school districts with high achievers, there have been cases where school districts somehow managed to get that years SAT tests and prepped their students on it (there have been claims for years that well off prep schools routinely are able to obtain them, don’t know if it was ever proved). With all the weight often put on the SAT, there was a lot of pressure to cheat, to game it. And with standardized tests like the SAT, or even the AP’s and such, there is a whole industry for those who can pay for it to in effect teach kids to take the test; nothing illegal about that, but it gives an edge to those who can afford to send these kids to them (there are parents who literally send their kids to SAT and such prep courses from before high school years, to have them ‘prepared’ for the test).In fact, ratings of high schools are often based on the SAT scores, AP tests taken and so forth, so they have incentive to potentially try and game the rankings…</p>
<p>In societies where standardized testing is everything, in Asian countries for example, cheating is rampant, kids, their parents and teachers will do anything they can to improve the test scores, because literally everything rides on it, and academic cheating by every account is pretty rampant as well, because a 3.8 versus a 4.0 makes a big, big difference. </p>
<p>Even in business, oh holy sage Jack Welch, he of the famous “either be 1st or second or get out of the business” figured out that it wasn’t a good thing, when he found out that this gave managers the incentive to cheat, to warp the figures to show they were 1 or 2 which caused more damage then if it was okay to be #3, as long as the division was making money. </p>
<p>Academic achievement depends on a lot of factors, you put kids from good family backgrounds in bad schools and they can suffer, and schools that do a good job with kids in the middle in good area don’t do so well for kids at either end of the bell curve…likewise, you take kids from crappy backgrounds and the greatest schools in the world may not be able to help them. With inner city schools part of the problem is you are dealing with kids facing all kinds of ills and often a school system that has basically thrown up their hands and said “we do what we can do”, which often isn’t enough. Success in schools requires parents at the very least to show interest in what the kid is doing and be able to follow through with the kids, it isn’t whether the parents are educated (think about the legions of immigrants, past and present, who were uneducated themselves and saw their kids become college graduates and more), and in many cases these kids don’t have that. One of the reasons charter schools succeed is because they put the demands on the kids that regular schools will not/cannot do and they fill the role of the interested parent, which is one of the reasons charters have long school days.It also gives kids an environment where excellence is demanded and rewarded and that culture drives all the kids. </p>
<p>In a typical public school, you have a lot of kids who have grown up in environments where not only are people not educated, doing well in school is considered selling out or worse (common expression for the kids who do well in school? Maggot is one of them, and if you don’t believe me, do a search for some of Stanley Crouch’s writings on the subject,what he calls the knucklehead mentality in large parts of certain communities). Even if the kid has a decent family, it is very hard to buck the broader culture. They just had a case in NYC of a girl, who had gone on a full scholarship to one of the top prep school in the city, was headed towards an elite college probably, who was arrested for being part of a drug gang (her boyfriend was part of the gang)…</p>
<p>The problem with NCLB, vouchers and so forth is they are ‘simple’ solutions to complex problems. Money itself is a classic case of this; the top districts in this country tend to be some of the wealthiest as well (Chevy Chase, MD, Scarsdale, NY, etc) and they spend a lot on their kids, but they also have kids from well off homes with educated parents and expectations on them and the extra spending bolsters what the kids already have. Yet there are urban districts, places like Hoboken, NJ that had some of the highest property tax rates and school spending in the state, and the schools were on the state’s list of failing schools every year. On the other hand, without certain levels of spending, even kids from good family background and such don’t do well, the states with the lowest spending on schools in the country are also down at the bottom of the achievement grid (Texas, for example,is in the lower levels of per student spending and last I checked was ranked 49th in educational achievement), so there is some correlation on spending and achievement, but it is not a simple formula. Those who think the answer is more spending alone are as delusional as those that think you can spend little on education, teach the 3r’s, and still produce educated children <em>shrug</em>.</p>
<p>One of the ironies is that the big city education systems, with all the tales of failing to educate their students, is that many of them contain programs that turn out some of the best and brightest. NYC, despite problems with many schools, has a lot of gifted programs, whereas the suburban school districts in the region have little or no gifted education, and cities have public high schools that are some of the highest rated in the world (places like Bronx Science and Stuyvesent in NYC and myriad of other programs in other cities) that most suburban districts could only dream of having, the big problem is that they tend to have some really high highs and a lot of really low lows with very little in the middle, whereas suburban schools tend to be all in the middle with little at the low low and less at the high high level.</p>
<p>I went to school at Atlanta Public Schools from 2007-2010, high school from 2008-2010. Part of my school had pretty stupid students (sorry, but it’s true), but then the IB program gave us some legitimate credibility, and I was on my way to start the program as a junior, but then I moved. After I moved, my friends posted all over Facebook of how APS was losing its accreditation, and now this. They say that it affects their chances of getting into college. It’s pretty sad 
cause a lot of the people I was in class with are hard workers who don’t deserve to have to deal with this.</p>