Confession of a cheating teacher

http://www.thenotebook.org/blog/113913/c...ng-teacher

Article is about an anonymous Philedelphia school teacher who helped her students cheat on standardized testing. Sort of related to the Alabama cases of widespread cheating by teachers.
WARNING OPINION AHEAD:

Kinda wanna hear people's thoughts on this. What i gathered from the article (blog/interview/whichever it is) was that the teacher cheated because she felt bad that the standardized tests weren't very fitting for her students and that it was not good for their self esteem (i don't see the correlation considering that by cheating she will inevitably set her students up for further disappointment in Life outside of school when they get rejected from a job simply because they don't read too good). Also that she was kind of compelled to cheat because her superiors threatened her with the loss of a job if their school didn't meet expectations.

And some of the comments are quite a bit too... radical. The comments range from "ZOMG TESTING BLACK PEOPLE ON WHITE PEOPLE STUFF IS RACIST" and "POLITICANS SUCKS AND THEY SHOULD MAKE STUFF BETTER FOR MINORITIES" and "wtp is with you people? What about the Children?!"

Please try to be respectful of other people's opinions in this thread

This cheating is not the same as the cheating you're thinking of. While what she did is technically illegal, it's not the worst thing in the world. She wasn't feeding them answers... she was TEACHING THEM.

Almost always, says Schaeffer, those involved say they broke the rules because they felt pressured to generate unrealistic test score gains and avoid sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

My point in a nutshell. Teachers feel pressured and I don't blame them.

My entire 7th grade year, I got fed the line "We are doing things this way because this is how they're done on the MAP test." (MAP is our state assessment test) I honestly felt that the only reason I was doing anything was to do well on the MAP test. I mean really, state assessments do nothing for the students directly. I could have bombed the entire thing if I felt like it, and guess what? Not a single repercussion on my grade. It does affect funding which you could argue would have an impact, but meh.

They need to do away with testing and observe students themselves. Testing just doesn't work.

Almost always, says Schaeffer, those involved say they broke the rules because they felt pressured to generate unrealistic test score gains and avoid sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

My point in a nutshell. Teachers feel pressured and I don't blame them.

My entire 7th grade year, I got fed the line "We are doing things this way because this is how they're done on the MAP test." (MAP is our state assessment test) I honestly felt that the only reason I was doing anything was to do well on the MAP test. I mean really, state assessments do nothing for the students directly. I could have bombed the entire thing if I felt like it, and guess what? Not a single repercussion on my grade. It does affect funding which you could argue would have an impact, but meh.

They need to do away with testing and observe students themselves. Testing just doesn't work.

All i remember in Cali was that we'd get a test at a certain time of the school year and it would be a free day off after we were done with it. That and the fact that like a week prior to the exam, my teachers would sarcastically tell us to "memorize" the student standards of learning. Kinda felt like it was being drilled in my head, but i guess we never really gave a damn.

The low test scores would also explain why my public high school probably doesn't get as much funding as the rest of the schools. In my district, the lowest preforming schools get more money to make better infrastructure to "facilitate" learning better, which doesn't make sense to me at all why the teachers wouldn't then ask everyone to flunk (unless of course it reflected their teaching ability). Testing works in the sense that you get a non-biased data sample, but like all experiments, you can't always account for every variable imaginable (like the argument that garden planting stories had no relevance to an urban school).

This is how both NC and TX public schools worked, from what I experienced. "You're going to learn this, this way, because some suit said so, so you can pass the EOG/EOC/TAKS and we can keep our jobs and continue this cycle."

This cheating is not the same as the cheating you're thinking of. While what she did is technically illegal, it's not the worst thing in the world. She wasn't feeding them answers... she was TEACHING THEM.

On a few occasions, she said, she even pointed them to the correct answers on difficult questions.

Yes this is definitely not feeding them answers or cheating at all

Didn't read much, just woke up but... huh, south park much?

This is how both NC and TX public schools worked, from what I experienced. "You're going to learn this, this way, because some suit said so, so you can pass the EOG/EOC/TAKS and we can keep our jobs and continue this cycle."

This so much. So glad I took mostly AP classes during HS because if you didn't, you spent the whole year learning how to pass the stupidly easy TAKS test.