Children Become Risky Assets as Business Practices Come to Education
A report from the El Paso Times revealed last week that school administrators in that city may have engaged in some questionable practices to make their all-important data appear better than it ought to have been. The key element in the District's data portfolio is the 10th grade standardized test. Administrators apparently went to great lengths to prevent students likely to score poorly from taking this test. These steps included:
Placing students entering the country into the 9th grade, regardless of where their transcripts indicated they should be.
Allowing schools to reclassify students to a higher grade, without requiring they take the test - essentially skipping them over the test.
Former El Paso schools superintendent Lorenzo Garcia recently pled guilty to cheating federal accountability systems through these maneuvers. The fate of those who worked with him to implement this scheme is unclear.
This scandal echoes the patterns of manipulations associated with the "Texas Miracle" more than a decade ago, when schools in Houston reported zero dropouts. In Houston, principals who failed to hit their data goals were terminated. So they held students back, or covered up their drop-outs in other ways. This "miracle" was used to prove that educators elsewhere should be expected to produce similar results -- and thus was born No Child Left Behind.
more . . . http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/06/children_become_risky_assets_a.html?cmp=SOC-SHR-FB
= new reply since forum marked as read
as part of our plan to regain accreditation.
The sticky point, of course is WHAT KIND of test we can plan to give every 30 days that will satisfy DESE. 
