Manny Fernandez wrote this article
on October 13, 2012. In El Paso is sounds like normal school scandals: School
admistators who want to me state and federal standards, secretly raise
students’ test scores on crucial tests. This cheating scandal has “shaken the 64,000-student
school district in this border city, administrators manipulated more than
numbers. They are accused of keeping low-performing students out of classrooms
altogether by improperly holding some back, accelerating others and preventing
many from showing up for the tests or enrolling in school at all.” (Fernandez,
“Scandal”). The federal courthouse landed Lorenzo Garcia in jail for this
scandal. “Federal prosecutors charged Mr. Garcia, 57, with devising an
elaborate program to inflate test scores to improve the performance of
struggling schools under the federal No Child Left Behind
Act and to allow him to collect annual bonuses for meeting district goals. The scheme, elements of
which were carried out for most of Mr. Garcia’s nearly six-year tenure,
centered on a state-mandated test taken by sophomores. Known as the Texas
Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, it measures performance in reading,
mathematics and other subjects. The scheme’s objective was to keep
low-performing students out of the classroom so they would not take the test
and drag scores down, according to prosecutors, former principals and school
advocates. Students identified as low-performing were transferred to charter schools, discouraged
from enrolling in school or were visited at home by truant officers and told
not to go to school on the test day. For some, credits were deleted from
transcripts or grades were changed from passing to failing or from failing to
passing so they could be reclassified as freshmen or juniors. Others
intentionally held back were allowed to catch up before graduation with “turbo-masters,”
in which students earned a semester’s worth of credit for a few hours of
computer work. A former high school principal said in an interview and in court
that one student earned two semester credits in three hours on the last day of
school. Still other students who transferred to the district from Mexico were
automatically put in the ninth grade, even if they had earned credits for the
10th grade, to keep them from taking the test.” (Fernandez, “Scandal”). He
basically did this so that he could get bonus’s from the government when they
saw how “well” the students performed on the state tests. A lot of students
that got bumped out of high school from not performing well are jobless,
refusing to further their education, and have a very negative outlook on life.
Lorenzo basically got in a lot of trouble from it and is now in jail because of
it.
This
article made me feel sick. How can a school administrator do this to students,
but then again it happens all the time, even in the United States. For example,
in my high school, there was an Algebra 2 exam that I did not do so well on but
she bumped my grade on that test by at least 20 points so that I would receive
a D on it so that she could get her bonus on it. I don’t know whether a bonus
is a good or bad thing for teachers, but it caused me to pass her class. A lot
of students like me aren’t good test takers. That should be a required class in
high school because that would be way more beneficial for students like me,
rather than Algebra 2.
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