That so-called report on the nation’s schools of education

Diane Ravitch has a worthwhile entry on the survey that’s in today’s news — the one from the self-named NCTQ (National Center for Teacher Quality).

That’s the report that gave most of the US teacher-training schools very low marks.

I read the report in the Post, twice, once online and once in the form of black marks on paper (remember those?).

I thought it strange that the authors of the NCTQ report had visited exactly none of the actual colleges or universities that they were supposedly surveying, nor talked to any of the professors, nor even to any of the students in those programs (past or current), nor made any effort to find out what fraction of their graduates were even still teaching after some number of years later.

Diane’s analysis explained why. And she in fact knows it quite well: she herself used to be on the board of that organization, back when she herself used to be a right-wing educational ideologue under the leadership of Rodney Page, George Bush and other, similar lying creeps. (We all should be amazed at the complete, 180-degree about-face Ravitch has undergone — not very often that anybody does that!)

As it is, she is performing a very valuable service, and has been doing so for a little more than a year IIRC.

I thought it worthwhile to repost her entire post. I don’t often do that. I’ve accentuated a small part of her piece.

Apparently, according to Diane, the only thing that the NCTQ was looking for was the fraction of course syllabi that mention or emphasize “Common Core”. Sheesh.

Here goes:

That NCTQ Report on Teacher Education: F by dianerav

The just-released NCTQ report on teacher education gives an F to the nation’s colleges of education. It was published in association with U.S. News & World Report.

But the report itself deserves an F.

To begin with, there are professional associations that rate the nation’s education schools, based on site visits and clear criteria.

NCTQ is not a professional association. It did not make site visits. It made its harsh judgments by reviewing course syllabi and catalogs. The criteria that it rated as most important was the institution’s fidelity to the Common Core standards.

As Rutgers’ Bruce Baker pointed out in his response, NCTQ boasts of its regard for teachers but its review of the nation’s teacher-training institutions says nothing about faculty. They don’t matter. They are irrelevant. All that matters is what is in the course catalog.

There are many reasons not to trust the NCTQ report on teacher education. Most important is that it lacks credibility. Not only is it not a professional association. it lacks independence. It has an agenda.

NCTQ was founded by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000 with the explicit purpose of harassing institutions of teacher education and urging alternative arrangements. I was on the board at the time. Initially, the new organization floundered but was saved by a $5 million grant from U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige. Just lucky.

So, knowing NCTQ’s history, and reading Mercedes Schneider’s posts about the organization, I conclude that NCTQ cannot be considered a fair, credible, independent judge of the quality of teacher training institutions.

I certainly agree that some such institutions are weak and inadequate, though I don’t think NCTQ’s superficial methodology identifies them.

I also agree with the report’s recommendation that teacher education institutions should have higher standards for admission.

But I don’t agree that the mark of a great education school is how many courses it offers on the Common Core standards or how attentive it is to raising test scores..

The great Robert Hutchins once wrote that the purpose of a professional school is to teach students to criticize the profession. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the profession would prepare them to make it stronger. The NCTQ report–looking at education schools from a mountain top–would have them conform to the status quo, to the conventional wisdom. This is not a prescription for the future, nor for the creation of a profession of strong teachers. It is a prescription for docility and conformity. Robert Hutchins would not approve.

dianerav | June 18, 2013 at 12:15 pm | Categories: Common Core, Corporate R

A close look at a speech from Michelle Rhee

It is useful to look at the lies coming out of the mouth of Michelle Rhee, one of the main proponents of destroying public education. I just took down, verbatim, what Rhee said at a panel discussion chaired by Henry Louis Gates at Martha’s Vineyard in 2011. (Diane Ravitch was also on the panel.) How many lies, prevarications, and half-truths can you spot?

Here is the passage, starting at 11:22 on this Youtube video where MR is speaking her platitudes:

We as educators have not created a great case for ourselves. We have more than doubled the amount of money that we are spending per child over the last two [few? gfb] decades, and the results have not gotten better. Now if we had doubled the expenditures and the results had doubled as well, then that would have made a very easy case for us to go to politicians and say “If you cut our budget by this much then this is what will suffer,” but we haven’t done that. And you have school districts like Washington, DC and Newark where they are spending $22,000 a year per child, and the results are absolutely in the bottom of this nation. So we’re, it, it, to me the first order of operation is less about more money because I think that more money into a broken system is not going to deliver a different result. I think we have to change the fundamentals of how this system is working. I think we have had lots of conversations today about how to try to do that. But I think we need a fundamentally different system first before we can go and make a case to the taxpayers and other people about putting more money into it.

In fact, as I have shown repeatedly, there are a number of areas in which achievement in public education has gotten way, way better over the past few decades. NAEP scores in general are way, way up: black students today are scoring above where white students were scoring back then. Also, if you look at the growth in passing Advanced Placement scores over the past few decades, well, yes, we have way more than doubled the numbers!

If you look at the PIRLS comparisons of American and international students, our kids did rather well, as I showed here.

Even DC NAEP scores have been going up pretty steadily for 20 years, as I showed in this post, and here, and elsewhere, but the black-white gap on those scores in DCPS got wider while Michelle Rhee was in charge.

Not a word of recognition that RHEE HERSELF WAS IN CHARGE OF DCPS while the black-white gap got to be #1 in the nation!!

Not a word of acknowledgement that Rhee, herself, rammed through all those enormous budget increases for central office 20-something failed ex-TFAers, for high-priced consultants, for a completely incomprehensible and untested Value-Added system for evaluating teachers, for poisoned bonuses for cheating teachers and principals, for lots more testing and fees to testing companies, and for other failed experiments like “Capital Gains”.

Things got politically hot in Washington DC for Rhee right before she gave this speech, since a majority of the population of DC thought that her ideas were toxic and counterproductive, so her benefactor (Fenty) lost, so she quit — to go on to make millions of dollars per year giving speeches at $50K per prattle, and through untraceable and unaccountable tax-exempt donations from the very tiny group of billionaires who are running public education today.

Those huge sums of money that Rhee wheedled out of politicians and billionaires didn’t go to students. They went to adults like Rhee!

Another point: I don’t think the main complaint is that schools and teachers aren’t getting enough money. The big problem is what we are doing with that cash: we are wasting it on paying huge sums of money to large corporations for idiotic and useless multiple-choice tests, on gimmicky and unproven high-tech schemes that make huge bucks for corporations, on consultants, and on high-priced experts and ‘coaches’. And on gimmicky charter schools that mostly do worse than the normal private schools. And on demonizing teachers.

Urban Home Composting

A report on progress with composting here in Brookland (DC)  in one of the city SuperCans:

A bit under 2 years ago, I decided to turn a somewhat-unused extra green DC supercan into a compost bin. I used a spade bit to drill a whole lot of 3/4″ diameter holes all over the sides and bottom of the plastic bin, and began tossing our food scraps, coffee grounds, yard waste, and even used kitty litter.

(More on that in a bit.)

At first I tried to layer things: a layer of grass clippings, then kitchen scraps, then cat poop & pee, then yard waste, then ashes from the grill, then more kitchen scraps, a little ordinary dirt (to add fungi, soil bacteria, nd so on to help decompose everything). More recently, we just throw in whatever we think will break down easily. We have too much yard waste to fit, and so do many of our neighbors, but we are lucky enough to know of a place not too far away where we can put large piles of weeds, etc, where it blends in to the wilds of the neighborhood, doesn’t attract vermin, and slowly breaks down into wonderful compost — eventually. Every week or so, one or more of us go through the area and pick out fast-food bags and wrappers and various cans and bottles of all sorts that local motorists throw there. There are different sorts of trash!

At one point I even spent about $30-$40 for a shipment of worms to help break things down. Result: total failure. Proposed reason: wrong species of worms, and bin too dry and/or cold during the winter.

A few conclusions:

1. Make sure any yard waste is broken or cut up into small pieces. Branches that are more than a centimeter thick (say, 1/2″) will take a very long time to decompose.

2. Don’t bother with worms. Unless you really analyze the needs of the many species of worm, they will die out and burn a hole in your wallet. (Silly me! I thought there were  only a few species of earthworm – nooo!)

3. Add local topsoil every so often, especially at the beginning. Much like with sourdough bread, you have to acquire the right mix of microbes to do their digestive and fermentatory wonders on your compost. Your local topsoil is probably the best and cheapest place to find it.

4. Don’t put in cat pee chunks of kitty litter. While cat poop decomposes quite quickly, the clumping kitty-litter which holds vast quantities of cat urine does NOT. It stays as a little nasty ball almost forever. Obviously your call on whether you want to add pet feces at all. I’m not going to do so any more. I say that composting cat waste smells less bad than said cat waste in reused plastic grocery or newspaper bags, sitting in the ordinary supercan. My wife argues the opposite.

5. Keep the mix moist enough to break down (using a hose), but not wet enough to be waterlogged (that’s why you need holes at the very bottom of the bin).

6. If it’s waterlogged, then anaerobic bacteria & fungi take over, and they tend to stink really badly. Aerobic stuff doesn’t smell bad. If the mix is just right, then it will be warm to the touch and will smell sweet. (But then again, I was in fact raised near a cow barn and chicken shed in far Montgomery County, so my opinion probably doesn’t count.)

7. Every 6 months or so, you dump it out and sort it. I made a screen much like the one you see interns using on archaeology or anthropology digs, with 1/2-inch diameter ‘hardware cloth’ and some two-by-fours, screws, staples, reinforcements, and thin plywood scraps. Without a screen like that, it’s not a pleasant job. With the screen, it’s slightly satisfying. Whatever goes through the screen gets added to a garden. Whatever doesn’t, goes back into the bin or elsewhere.

8. Does it save money? Heck, no. A couple of bags of LeafGro compost from Montgomery County cost less than $10, but it is satisfying to know that most of my kitchen waste is eventually going onto our gardens instead of a ‘transfer station’ and dump.

9. Does it cut down on the trash flow to the municipal dump? Certainly, at least from my household.

10. Do I recommend it for everybody? Again, no. On the other hand, it would make sense for DC to do like Oakland CA does: there is a THIRD set of trash cans to collect stuff that will decompose — i.e., yard waste and kitchen scraps, even paper wrappers. There in CA they sell the stuff to farmers in the Central Valley. Here in DC, instead, we simply put all such waste, along with mattresses, building materials, plastic bags, and so on into a ‘sanitary landfill’ where it is preserved for future archeaologists and miners to sift through. I hope our descendants appreciate all the care we took in fossilizing our kitchen scraps, tree stumps, pet poop, and raked-up leaves so they could examine our private habits in the year 2345!

Guy Brandenburg, Washington, DC 

http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/


http://home.earthlink.net/~gfbranden/GFB_Home_Page.html

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Protests in Philadelphia also:

Philadelphia Teachers, Students Protest ‘Doomsday’ Budget Cuts

By Jackie Zubrzycki on May 17, 2013 11:50 AM

UPDATED
Staff and students in Philadelphia are protesting a Draconian budget proposal that would leave many schools without arts or music, without secretaries or aides, and without libraries in the 2013-14 school year. Dozens of teachers gathered near a high school this morning to protest, according to NBC Philadelphia, and students in the 138,000-student district are planning a walkout for later today.

More than 1,000 students were expected to walk out of school at noon, said Beth Patel, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Student Union. Students plan to meet at the school district and walk to City Hall, where Philadelphia’s city council is hearing testimony on the impact of the proposed budget cuts, she said.

The student union supports but did not plan the walkout, Ms. Patel said. Students coordinated the event over social media and via word of mouth.

The city’s schools are bracing for the “catastrophic” budget laid out by Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. last month. The district is also planning to close more than 20 schools.

Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter has proposed a tax increase on liquor and cigarettes in order to raise money for public schools, including charters, in the city, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. The district is also hoping for more state funding to help close its $304 million budget gap.

Students in the district staged a different walkout earlier this month. NBC Philadelphia profiled a few of those student activists.

In other notable news from Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Public School Notebook reports that more than 50 of the district’s 218 schools will have new principals this year, due to a combination of hirings, firings, retirements, and charter conversions.

Philadelphia is not the only city that’s seen large student and teacher protests this year. In Chicago,students refused to take state tests in April in order to protest massive school closings. Last month, in Newark, students walked out of school to protest proposed budget cuts there. And earlier this month in Raleigh, students protested state funding proposals for public schools in North Carolina.

Update:
In Philadelphia, NBC is reporting that more than 2,000 students showed up to protest the budget. The Philadelphia Public School Notebook has a Storify about the protests.

Meanwhile, in Dallas, students at Madison High are protesting a new principal evaluation systemthat could lead to as many as 50 new principals in the district—and the layoffs of some much-loved school leaders, the Dallas News reports. My colleague Alyssa Morones reported on some of thepushback on the superintendent’s plan earlier this week.

Chicago Protests Continue for 3rd Day

From education week:

======================================

Chicago School Closure Protests Head Into Third Day

By Lesli A. Maxwell on May 20, 2013 7:45 AM

After two straight days of organized protests around Chicago, teachers, parents, and students are expected to continue marching today against the city school system’s plans to shutter up to 53 elementary schools at the end of the academic year.

The Chicago Teachers’ Union and other activists helped organize the three days of protests against the closures, which the city board of education is set to vote on this Wednesday. The union has been stridently against any of the slated closures, and last week it filed two federal lawsuits on behalf of parents alleging the district’s plan discriminates against black students and special education students.

That news came on the heels of recommendations from hearing officers—who were hired by the school district—that 13 of the schools on the closure list not be shut down because the receiving schools for those students are no better. Local polls have also found a majority of city residents oppose the plan—which would amount to the single largest shuttering of public schools in a major U.S. city.

And the school district took another big blow over the weekend in a Chicago Tribune story that revealed that district officials may have selectively used data to justify their closure decisions.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has said that closing the schools is necessary to address a $1 billion deficit.

How to Earn Gigabucks Through Charter Schools

A very interesting article in Alternet on how hedge fund managers and other millionaires and billionaires are making enormously profitable investments in the charter-school bubble.

Here are two paragraphs from a long article:

…David Brain, head of large real-estate investment firm Entertainment Properties Trust, [...] appeared on CNBC in 2012 to tell audiences just how profitable charter school investment has become. He explained, “Well I think it’s a very stable business, very recession-resistant. It’s a very high-demand product.” Asked about the most profitable sector in real estate investment, Brain said, “Well, probably the charter school business. We said it’s our highest growth and most appealing sector right now of the portfolio. It’s the most high in demand, it’s the most recession-resistant. And a great opportunity set with 500 schools starting every year. It’s a two and a half billion dollar opportunity set in rough measure annually.”

Real-estate developers have a particularly interesting stake in the business of charter school development. Yes, they receive the standard huge tax breaks. But they can also help charter schools acquire properties in large cities like Philadelphia, Chicago or New York, where prices are high and there isn’t much room for new buildings. In places where acquiring space can involve fierce bidding wars and eminent domain conflicts, well-off real-estate developers profit from charter school growth since they will help new schools get established for a price. Eminent Properties Trust boasts, “Our investment portfolio of nearly $3 billion includes megaplex movie theatres and adjacent retail, public charter schools, and other destination recreational and specialty investments. This portfolio includes over 160 locations spread across 34 states with over 200 tenants.” When real estate developers acquire these charter school properties, they charge charter schools for rent payments, which are not price-capped.

Here is some more:

Even though most of the details remain hidden, we do know that privatization in education is a lucrative business. In January, a firm called Capital Roundtable – which touts itself as “America’s leading conference company for the middle-market private equity community” – held a Master Class called “Private Equity Investing in For-Profit Education Companies.” The conference website noted, “For-profit education is one of the largest U.S. investment markets, currently topping $1.3 trillion in value.” The event was hosted by Harold Levy, a former chancellor of the New York City Schools System who promoted charter proliferation during his tenure. Now he manages Connecticut investment company Palm Ventures. One of the major focuses of the firm involves funneling individual investments into for-profit charter-school related companies.  As a former finance lawyer for Citigroup, Kaplan and Saloman Brothers, Levy is quite the expert on getting rich this way.

A Hedge Fund Speculator Tells Politicians How to Fix Education

{tongue_in_cheek ON}

Ever hear of a tremendous classroom teacher, with great student teams and classroom activities to his credit, and who has lots of contributions in the field of excellent teaching techniques and strategies, named Whitney Tilson?

Who is so celebrated as a teacher that Tilson has won every teaching award and now gives seminars to teachers on how to have great, active, participatory activities in their classroom, at level X through Z in multiple subjects?

No?

You never heard of the excellent teacher Whitney Tilson, who is Nationally Board Certified in two different subjects, also the Connecticut, California and New York State Teacher of the Year three years running, and coach of the national champion state teams in It’s Academic, MathCounts, soccer and basketball?

No?

{/tongue_in_cheek OFF}

That’s because he’s never taught school, ever.

There is another Whitney Tilson. He’s a hedge fund billionaire or multi-millionaire, and he thinks he knows all about education and can tell politicians how to DEform the public education sector. He claims to have helped Wendy Kopp found Teach For Awhile, and “Democrats” for Education Deform.

With no actual grounding in any classroom, mind you. He has never taught. He has made a ton of money gambling with other people’s money in hedge funds and such.

But he “knows” that most of us teachers, particularly those who are members of unions, are a bunch of lazy, incompetent slobs that skip work and need to be fired. The cheating that goes on surrounding the NCLB testing? it’s only these incompetent teachers doing it, not administrators having erasure parties after the kids go home, according to him.

And he also knows exactly how to “fix” education.

He claims to know that DC public schools are way better off after having Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson in charge for 6 years now.

(If you want to see how much progress there has been on the NAEP in Washington DC since the advent of mayoral control and the educational DEformers, just use the search box on my blog, in the upper right-hand corner of this screen, and enter the words “NAEP gap”. You will see lots of data showing that there has been, in fact, NO miracle of the kind that their Excellencies, Whitney Tilson, Wendy Kopp, and Michelle Rhee promised.)

Tilson is a snake, and his creations, DFER and TFA, are dangerous.

Why One Boston Teacher Quit

Diane Ravitch posted a letter from a 15-year teaching veteran who just quit. The person wrote, among other things:

There is not a teacher in America who SUPPORTS this corporate reform. Individually, we all vehemently oppose it; our blood boils because of it; we know it’s toxic. Collectively, however, we DO support it. We support it each & every day, no matter how it contradicts our entire pedagogy. No matter how much it sucks to live life like that…going against the core of who we are, we obey the rules. WHY? WHY ARE WE CONTINUING TO BE EVER-SO-OBEDIENT?

I spent over 2 years desperately seeking that answer to that very question; only to become more & more unable to – & that’s why i resigned.

Mathematical Hubris, or Simply an Author Who Doesn’t Understand Statistics?

My brother, who works in urban planning, called and told me I should read the article “X And The City” in the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

I did, and was quite disappointed. Here are my thoughts:

———————-

Hi, <brother>,

Thanks for pointing out to me the article on urban math in the current, May 2013 Smithsonian.

.

I was fully expecting to be quite enlightened and entertained, as I am by most Smithsonian articles, but I have to report that I was quite disappointed by it, and thought that the author was being naive. A lot of the conclusions seemed to me to be contrived or invalid.

.

I felt strongly enough to write this letter to compose my thoughts carefully.

.

The author does write, correctly, that “Cities are particular: You would never mistake a favela in Rio for downtown LA” and that many large cities will be surrounded by what they call ‘slums’ and others call shantytowns — developments put up informally and outside of any bureaucratic or official network of laws or public services of any sort at all, and which often exhibit a lot of negative behaviors and outcomes for their residents as a result.

Some of those bad effects are lack of public schools, no safe drinking water, no urban sanitation system, no safe and corruption-free police system, no public health facilities of any sort, no safe and reliable and dependable transportation system, no reliable electrical or postal delivery system, no zoning or building safety regulations that mean anything, and no real defense of the private property or land-ownership rights for those who have only small amounts of them. (Defense of private property only goes to the very rich and powerful. Matthew, you know.)

.

As the article correctly notes, we have very little dependable data on most of those shanty-town dwellers: neither how many people nor how much they earn or spend in the underground economy. A recent article I read indicates that cash payments are quite common in the US as well; so much of what is written about GDP per capita, anywhere in the world, is guesswork at best.

.

You know the saying about computer systems: Garbage IN, Garbage OUT.

.

Maybe I missed something, but I don’t see anything in this article that would allow any individual or group to use any of this data to do anything that would concretely help anyone in any significant manner.

.

One specific quibble concerns building heights. “…the equation H=134+0.5G where H is the height of the tallest building in meters and G is the Gross Regional Product in billions of dollars”… but previously, the author says the relationship isn’t strong. Well, how strong is it? It’s not clear at all. This page shows very different metrics, and rather different conclusions.  When I look up the so-called ‘Zipf Law’ I find that a number of people think it’s a trivial and unimportant correlation that one will find in almost any distribution of random-sized objects.

.

I did amuse myself by making this log-log graph with standings of population sizes of cities in the US.

This reminds me very much of graphs I used to see at the Naval Research Lab’s gamma-ray astronomy section, where they would have the logs of the energy of various gamma=rays that hit the Compton gamma-ray telescope on the left hand side, and the count of how many such photons on the bottom axis. Only the graph of the line of best fit went up to the right, not down to the right.

.

And those gamma rays were just about random, coming from anywhere in the universe. Weaker ones were much more common than strong ones.

A couple of minutes of work on a table from Wikipedia giving the masses of the largest solar system bodies and I get this graph:

Also apparently works for usage of words in ordinary language. Some are used very very often (like “the”, “is”, “of” and so on) and others hardly ever (“disestablishment”, “cornucopia”, “prolix”). You get a power law distribution. Not so special with cities, then.

.

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I like the part where one of the people interviewed said “it’s just a coincidence” about correlation angle of sunrise and street numbers….

.

Only 50-60 years ago, New York City had the world’s tallest buildings, and had the record for a long time. Until a few city promoters/corporate idiots in Dubai and Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong decided they would blow a few billions of dollars in building essentially useless tallest-in-the-world status symbols.

.

That being said, the data on heartbeats of and life expectancies of mammals do apparently fit a nice logarithmic line. That’s real data that anyone can measure — but now that I think about it, animal life expectancies very much depend on conditions, and critters living in zoos or labs are quite different from those in the wild… so I wonder how good even this data is… And are those resting heartbeats, or what?

.

In another case discussed in the article on making a decision whether to drive or take the subway to a Yankees or Mets game in NYC, or just to go home and watch it on TV if the traffic is bad enough as measured by Twitter or GPS on cell phones — I am skeptical, though I know that our smartphones have traffic-reading capabilities that do a fair, but not perfect job of showing you why you are stuck in traffic.  Seems to me that the decision on whether to go to a major-league sporting event is only partly based on traffic, and a lot on other value judgements that are not even considered.

.

Anybody who lets the folks in charge of technology decide for you how to spend an afternoon and evening needs to think again.

John Merrow on the Rhee-Henderson-Caveon Whitewash

John Merrow has a hard-hitting article on the multiple lies uttered by Michelle Rhee and her best friend, Kaya Henderson, and the whitewash they hired Caveon to perform. Here is a quote:

……………….

At the April 18th hearing Chairman Catania alluded to what he called Caveon’s ‘positive’ role in helping expose the Atlanta cheating.  That is an overstatement, to put it mildly. Prior to its work for DCPS, Caveon had been hired by the (so-called) “Blue Ribbon Committee” established to look into allegations of cheating in Atlanta.  Caveon looked–and reported finding nothing wrong in what turned out to be the epicenter of cheating by adults on standardized tests. [8] Dr. Fremer told me that while he ‘knew’ there was widespread cheating going on, that was not mentioned in his final report. “We did not try to find out who was cheating,” he said.  “Our purpose was to rank order the schools beginning with those with the most obvious problems (of unbelievably dramatic score increases), in order to make the task of investigating more manageable.”   In other words, Caveon produced a list!

Dr. Fremer admitted that he knew some Atlanta teachers were lying to him, but he said his hands were tied because he didn’t have subpoena power.

Georgia’s investigators are contemptuous of Caveon’s efforts, labelling it a ‘so-called investigation.’  Richard Hyde, one of the three leaders of the investigation, told me that “either by coincidence or design, it was certain to fail.”  Mr. Hyde denied that Caveon needed subpoena power because its investigators were representing a governmental agency, and under Georgia law it is a felony to lie to someone representing the government.  What’s more, Mr. Hyde said, Caveon had a fundamental conflict of interest–it was investigating its employer, at least indirectly, because the “Blue Ribbon Commission” (which Mr. Hyde dismisses as “The Whitewash Commission”) included a deputy superintendent of schools.

Robert Wilson, another leader of the Georgia investigation, is even blunter. Of course Caveon didn’t find cheating because “Caveon couldn’t find its own ass with either hand,” he scoffed.  Why anyone would hire Caveon was, he said, beyond him–unless they didn’t want to find out anything.

……………

3. Just how weak was Mr. Willoughby’s effort?  As we reported on Frontline in January, the Inspector General’s investigation is remarkable for what it did not investigate. He chose not to investigate 2008, the year with the most erasures. He chose not to investigate Aiton, the school Dr. Sanford had singled out for special attention because of its high wrong to right erasures. He did not examine the test answer sheets or perform an electronic analysis. And he did not investigate J.O Wilson – a school with excessive WTR erasures in 100% of its classrooms – simply because Chancellor Henderson had assured him that it was a good school.

Although more than half of DC’s schools had been implicated, he focused only on Noyes Education Campus, the school that USA Today had made the centerpiece of its investigation. Over the course of the next 17 months, his team interviewed just 60 administrators, teachers, parents and teachers, all from Noyes Education Campus. (Atlanta investigators interviewed over 2,000 people and reviewed 800,000 documents). Rather than seek outside experts (as Atlanta investigators had), he relied heavily on information from Caveon, which had been, of course, in the employ of DCPS. He did not ask to perform erasure analysis but relied on interviews–sometimes conducted over the phone.

Without the power to put people under oath, he told City Council member McDuffie in February that he just asked them if they had cheated. If they said they hadn’t, that was the end of it, because, he explained, he “wasn’t conducting a fishing expedition.” Test monitors sent by the central office to patrol Noyes for the 2010 test told Mr. Willoughby that they had been barred from entering classrooms. School officials denied that charge–and Mr. Willoughby believed them, not the monitors.