When I wrote a column critical of the Board of Education last
March, I was overwhelmed by responses I received from teachers.
All of them wished to remain anonymous because they feared
reprisals from school officials. One woman urged me to dig
further into what's going on at Livingston Street, where the
Board of Education has its headquarters. She wrote, "If you
could expose the corruption there, you'd get a Pulitzer."
"No," I wrote back, "that prize is reserved for
journalists exposing our critical classified government wartime
secrets."
I'm sure there are qualified reporters who are good at ferreting
out any nefarious activities at the Board of Education and who
have the ambition to win coveted journalism prizes. That's not
me. However, one story that came to me from a retired professor
disturbed me the most. I'm sharing it because it needs to be
aired for the sake of our schoolchildren.
This professor was assigned as an evaluator at one of the city's
top-ranked schools. She was puzzled about why this school needed
to be evaluated when it was clearly performing so well - or so
she thought. It soon became apparent that the teaching staff was
below par and some teachers were, she said, "dumb as
posts."
She then gave the students proficiency tests and was baffled at
their poor results. When she asked a colleague how this could be,
he winked at her and shrugged his shoulders. He later said the
principal would doctor the standardized testing results. Why? she
asked.
"Look around at these million-dollar homes," he
answered. "Would anybody buy them unless they were in the
best school district?"
Last summer, a similar scandal erupted at Susan B. Wagner High
School in Staten Island after 17 teachers disclosed that the test
scores of the June Regents exams had been tampered with. Sources
told WCBS-TV that a school official had informed the teachers who
alleged impropriety that he intended to make them "pay"
for coming forward.
Another concerned teacher I met teaches sixth grade. She told me
that she's had problems teaching math to students who performed
well on tests in the fifth grade yet clearly do not know the
work.
It was only recently that she was told by a student that the
fifth-grade teacher would go around the room during the test and
give out the answers. Meanwhile, the dedicated teacher I spoke to
gets flak for the low but accurate scores her own class gets.
The problem of teachers and principals manipulating test scores
is a fairly recent phenomenon that can probably be traced to the
advent of the No Child Left Behind program. This is a
well-meaning endeavor, but only in a perfect world where school
administrators are honest and genuinely concerned about the
education of children. Unfortunately, it is operated by the
Department of Education of our federal government, which does not
belong in the education business. That's the province of the
cities and states.
When an agency threatens to take away funding from poorly
performing schools on the basis of test scores, then voilą -
test scores improve whether children learn anything or not.
Unless testing is accompanied by strict monitoring, the scores
are subject to exploitation by self-serving educators.
Taxpayers have been spending billions of dollars on education,
and yet the nation just keeps dumbing down.
In his book "One Nation, One Standard," Herman Badillo
takes the Hispanic community to task for not getting involved
enough in their children's education, but this neglect spans all
ethnicities. We are all guilty of supplying the iPods, plasma
TVs, cell phones, Xboxes, and other distractions to our youth
while our libraries are populated not by school-age readers but
by those logging onto Internet porn.
If the public schools were more aggressive about teaching the
three "Rs" instead of how many mommies and daddies
Heather has, test scores might improve without any need for
cheating.