It ain't necessarily so

Sure I LOVE Jay P. Greene, I love how he makes this up to fit his opinions. re: Education productivity index

Oh, and what about those teachers and administrators caught cheating on the TAKS?

Wow Allen, you found two or three instances of misappropriate behavior by teachers who happen to be over two hundred miles away from me.

Congratulations. Is that supposed to prove your point? BTW, the cheating occurred in schools where the principals got their jobs under the NCLB poster boy, Rod Paige. In fact, Paige held up one of the schools as an example for the whole country to follow.

As always you can ignore Utah, Conn. and the other states that have school districts currently sueing the federal govt. over NCLB. Good luck with that.

I understand things are going very well for Dubaya as he tries to ream middle and high schools with NCLB. Oh wait, it isn’t going all that well is it? About as well as his Social Secrity “reforms” where we’ll all pay a monthly fee to a company run by one of his friends to “manage” our money for us.

Mike in Texas wrote:

Wow Allen, you found two or three instances of misappropriate behavior by teachers who happen to be over two hundred miles away from me.

There’s that “distance” thing again. And it isn’t “two or three instances”. From the article:

The newspaper obtained raw testing data for 7,700 Texas public schools for 2003 and 2004. It found severe statistical anomalies in nearly 400 of them.

That’s 400 schools with “anomolies” so severe that the sort of investigation the newspaper conducted made them jump off the page. That’s about 5% of the schools cheating so blatently that they’re identifiable with the minimal effort that a newspaper can expend. What percentage had anomolies that weren’t severe? What percentage were a trifle more ept at concealing their fraud?

Was the cheating more common among schools in middle-class and wealthy areas? Or were the schools in low socio-economic areas more prone to “severe anomolies”?

And another thing. The article ran in December of 2004. Over a year and a half ago the evidence of wide-spread cheating on the TAKS was a matter of public record. These bums didn’t just cheat the taxpayers of Texas, they also cheated the kids in their charge.

I’m sure the TEA wouldn’t want the reputation of the profession besmirched by low-lifes like these cheats so they threw them out of the “association”, right? Right?