The audit found students (above age 17 as required to declare an NYC dropout)who not only missed 20 consequetive days, but missed almost every day of the Spring semester. But because the school didn’t do the outreach and document it, they could not be declared dropouts. I’d think an accountability advocate would want the school to follow procedures, do the interventions, follow the legal rules, and then do the recovery efforts and document them.

Even if there is a rationale for awarding five credits in a short summer school, why award two credits in a timely basis and then retroactively add three more? And when you graduate students who are absent 1/3rd of the time, what does that say about your school’s Value Addded?

We know what’s happening, but why lie about it? Every year I pass on students who haven’t met standards. Without professional courtesy, how do struggling schools survive? If a caring adult who knows a students’ problems ask me to cut a deal, I have to ask why my instincts are better; I’m not God. I hold the line on truancy whenever possible. But if the kid is on an IEP and the parent is angry, I’m not going to hang my principal out to dry.

Occassionally I see a simple issue, but that’s very rare. In most cases there is more than enough blame to go around. My complaint is reformers like Joel Klein who have no direct understand of the classroom who wants to hold all of us accuntable, but not his own system.

“We also found that for the most part, the schools that we visited complied with the State guidelines and the guidelines outlined in the Handbook. Our own review of the data and documentation collected by DOE for the 2007-2008 ELA and Math tests and our observations conducted at the sampled schools on the day of testing did not reveal any instances of cheating. However, as more fully explained in the audit report, we cannot be assured that cheating did not occur.”

The recommendations are useful advice but the audit itself came off as a bit silly as I read it. The recommendations suggest making the documentation process for monitors more formal, suggesting that since the monitors marked “Yes” to questions such as, “Students have been reminded to bring #2 pencils to class” even when the monitors might not have been in the room to observe such actions, their motives might be questionable.

That opened testing materials are left at a school site is not evidence for cheating, but rather a logistical decision to keep data from being manipulated or mixed up with others.

That teachers weren’t specifically warned of the consequences of cheating on a state standardized test through a formal document does not mean teachers don’t understand it is an important test you shouldn’t defraud, and like all tests that we give, cheating is inappropriate and could get you in trouble.

Frankly, there is a level of decency that I think most teachers understand: as a role model for your students, you don’t cheat. And if you do cheat, you better hope that everyone in your circle of colleagues support the act of cheating, since they will soon learn about it, either from student rumors or parents calling in.

Following this, that an entire school might be (or soon become) knowledgeable of incidences of cheating and simply accept it without seeking outside intervention seems ludicrous to me.

David Cantor brought the error to my attention. check it out. As often happens, I see his strenuous defense of the NYC DOE as more evidence that something is seriously wrong in Klein central office.

It sticks in my craw that Duncan would praise NYC when the recent audit by Ernst and Young documented so many abuses of data. But resentment gets you nowhere.

Duncan and Obama don’t have time to read the Ernst and Young audit, but their staff does. How could you actually read their independent evaluation of NYC data and then argue that linking teachers evaluations and tenure to data like that isn’t dangerous?

When we read the audit, we see it in a certain frame of mine. I bet most if not all teachers have seen games like “annualization” in order to pass on students. But how would we react to the opposite? How would we react if those transparent tricks were being used to drive students out of school?

Behind closed doors, it shouldn’t be hard to devise regs to keep systems from abusing test scores to drive teachers out of the profession.