Is Your Local Public School Telling the Truth?

While schools should instill moral fortitude into their students, some educational institutions are "cheating" their systems. According to recent investigations, several public schools have been caught tampering with their schools' test score reports, graduation rates, and other performance-related statistics.

What Could Information be Falsified?

Under the No Child Left Behind Act, public school leaders are under incredible pressure to ensure their scores stay high while their graduation rates continue to soar. Public schools must publish data on campus violence, academic performance, and graduation rates. Adding to these focus areas, schools must publicly publish an annual "report card" of the school, allowing community members to ascertain how specific groups have performed throughout the year. The specific groups assessed in this report card are differentiated by:

• Ethnicity
• Disability
• Income (plus other potential related socio-economic factors)
• English language proficiency

In addition, all public schools must disclose their annual dropout rates, teacher qualification standards, and records, as well as other locally-mandated data.

This video is an example of test score manipulation in our schools.

The Pressure to Tamper With Public School Reports

While increased access to school records undoubtedly benefits the community, the transparency mandated by NCLB prompts some school leaders to falsify educational data.

Reason Magazine reveals, "While federal and state legislators congratulate themselves for their newfound focus on school accountability, scant attention is paid to the quality of the data they're using. Whether the topic is violence, test scores, or dropout rates, school officials have found myriad methods to paint a prettier picture of their performance."

In addition, the strong amount of emphasis placed on student performance may be encouraging some leaders to publish false claims about their school's achievements. After all, a portion of every public school's budget and national ranking is derived (in part) from student testing performance, graduation rates, and campus safety. Subsequently, some leaders have reported false data to boost their school's reputation and funding potential. For example, some leaders have chosen to report selectively school dangers and incidences of violence. Therefore, while recent statistics may show that overall violence in public schools has significantly declined, many experts question the validity of this data.

Veteran journalist Dan Rather offers an in-depth look at the Detroit Schools.

How Public Schools are Distorting Their Reports

Unethical public school leaders are utilizing a handful of tactics to manipulate their data, including:

• Relabeling or intentionally altering a dropout's attendance and/or transfer records
• Reporting a rise in honors and Advanced Placement enrollment without providing information on the number of students who failed or dropped these courses
• Shifting graduation requirements to reduce dropout rates
• Adjusting the school's grading scale to boost students' combined GPAs

For example, as the New York Times revealed in a 2003 report on public schools, one of Houston's largest public institutions, Sharpstown High School, reported zero dropouts for one annual school report card. When experts further investigated these claims, it was discovered that the Sharpstown school leaders adjusted the 9th-grade enrollment records to shift dropouts to new jurisdiction areas. As a result, a student who dropped out of Sharpstown High School may have been labeled as a "transfer" to a different public facility.

After this falsification was revealed, a state-wide investigation was conducted to assess the true dropout rates among 16 Houston area middle and high schools. Through extensive studies, state leaders found that more than half of the "transfer" students should have been legally defined as "dropouts."

In this video, teachers discuss what's wrong with schools.

While the NCLB act was intended to hold schools to greater accountability, not all campuses have upheld their standards of honesty. Accurate data reporting is critical to identifying struggling schools and creating effective plans for academic improvement. Although school leaders may be tempted to falsify information, misleading data can only serve to punish the school's students.

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