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Scandalous Schools

April 19, 2013

One of the bad features of the school reform movement that was cited in our posting of March 29 (“Hit Again”) is the obsession over standardized testing and the linkage between children’s scores and adults’ salaries.  The length to which some so-called educators have gone reached new highs (or perhaps lows) in Atlanta recently; but that’s far from the only school testing travesty we’ve seen, as Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post Writers Group reported on LSJ.com on April 4, 2013:

“It is time to acknowledge that the fashionable theory of school reform – requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students’ standardized test scores – is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket.

“I mean that literally.  Beverly Hall, the former superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools, was indicted on racketeering charges Friday for an alleged cheating scheme that won her more than $500,000 in performance bonuses.  Hall, who retired two years ago, has denied any wrongdoing.

“Also facing criminal charges are 34 teachers and principals who allegedly participated in the cheating, which involved simply erasing students’ wrong answers on test papers and filling in the correct answers.

“In 2009, the American Association of School Administrators named Hall ‘National Superintendent of the Year’ for improvement in student achievement.  For educators who worked for Hall, bonuses and promotions were based on test scores.  After a day of testing, teachers would allegedly be told to gather the students’ test sheets and change the answers.  Suddenly a failing school would become a model of education reform.  The principal and teachers would get bonuses.  Hall would get a much bigger bonus.

“State education officials became suspicious.  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote probing stories.  There seemed to be no way to legitimately explain the dramatic improvement in such a short time, or the statistically improbable number of erasures on answer sheets.

“Sonny Perdue was governor at the time, and in August 2010 he ordered a blue-ribbon investigation.  Hall resigned shortly before the release of the investigators’ report, which alleged that 178 teachers and principals cheated over nearly a decade.  Those findings laid the foundation for Friday’s Grand Jury indictment.

“My Washington Post colleague Valerie Strauss, a veteran education reporter and columnist, wrote Friday that there have been ‘dozens’ of alleged cheating episodes around the country, but only Atlanta’s has been aggressively and thoroughly investigated.

“Standardized achievement tests are a vital tool, but treating test scores the way a corporation might treat sales targets is wrong. Students are not widgets.  Even absent cheating, the blind obsession with test scores implies that teachers are interchangeable implements of information transfer, rather than caring professionals who know their students as individuals.

“School reform has to be something that is done with a community of teachers, students and parents – with honesty and, yes, a bit of old fashioned humility.”

Change of Pace

January 30, 2015

Michael Schwimer is little known to us in Michigan. He was a 6-8, 240-pound relief pitcher out of the University of Virginia who was drafted in the 10th round by the Philadelphia Phillies in 2008.

In his minor league career, Schwimer earned 20 wins against 10 losses with a respectable 2.51 ERA. He struck out an eye-popping 12 batters per nine innings.

When Schwimer made his Major League Baseball debut for the Phillies in August of 2011, he served up a game-tying home run to the first batter he faced. He was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays in February of 2013, and was released by the Blue Jays the following August. You might say Schwimer majored in the minors. That’s where he peaked as a professional baseball player.

As a player, Schwimer made few waves. He wasn’t a “game changer.” And yet, he may still be known as one who helped to change the game itself.

Schwimer is widely reported to be the first MLB player to use a glove that was made of synthetics, not leather (which weighs twice as much), and was made using a plaster cast of his hand. It was a custom-made, form-fitting glove.

The result looks almost like a toy glove, fit for T-ball; but MLB gave it a “thumbs up” in December of 2011. MLB players have been warming to the glove, although very slowly.

To which Schwimer responds: “It takes forever for any change to occur. But when change happens, it happens really fast.”

That almost sounds like something Yogi Berra would have said – like, “it takes forever for change to occur, and then it doesn’t.” But experience very often teaches us the truth of this sentiment.

As the MHSAA reprocesses two of its toughest topics ever – out-of-season coaching rules and 6th-graders’ roles in school sports and the MHSAA – it seems like there is no progress toward change. And no change is the possible outcome of both long journeys.

But it’s also possible that, for one or both topics, the time will come when wisdom and will combine to create constructive change, which then seems to be occurring almost overnight.

My hope is that we find that formula before a rash of problems causes a tipping point that results in a rush toward solutions that are poorly conceived and/or politically imposed by outside entities.