Parent-activist warns parents, educators in Sumter

Forewarned is forearmed, and long-time parent-activist Ceresta Smith, now of Charleston, rang the alarm in Sumter on Tuesday -- and her remarks were covered by the Sumter Item.

Is the "public" being taken out of public schools?

That was the topic of a public talk given Tuesday in Sumter, sponsored by the South Carolina Education Association and the Sumter Education Task Force.

Ceresta Smith, a longtime educator now in Charleston and activist from Florida's Miami-Dade County School District, told an audience of about 50 at the North HOPE Center that moves across the nation to require more standardized testing in schools limit the curriculum and hurt students, and ultimately will result in schools in poorer, largely minority neighborhoods being shut down and replaced with privately run, profit-seeking charter schools with no accountability to the community. It's up to parents, students and teachers, Smith said, to resist test-based curricula.

"Our children are being robbed, slowly, of a free, quality public education," Smith said.

Somebody say Amen.

ESC has been ringing this bell for more than a year now, and the clapper is worn and bent. What a joy to see what's blooming in Sumter, with parents and classroom educators collaborating to create progress.

To watch the video of Smith's presentation, click here.

Smith's talk was co-sponsored by the Sumter Education Task Force, a community-based group that supports public education in Sumter County.

"We're a vast, diverse district that is awash with different talents," said Task Force member Nickie Williams. "Some of us have kids in schools, some of us do not. Some of us are educators, and some are retired from education. But what we all have in common is that we feel we should support public education."

"It's not just about my three children in the school district," said Parrish Rabon, the Task Force's vice president. "There's no profession I have more respect for than a public school teacher."

When someone accuses Smith of being a troublemaker, even her bosses in the school district, she responds, "I'm a parent, and I pay taxes."

"What makes a democracy a democracy is that everybody has a voice," Smith said.

Democracy is inconvenient that way. Sure, it would be much simpler if the evolving aristocracy had total control and told us all what we would do, and where, and for whom, and why, and for how long. Thankfully, however, that's not America.

And thankfully, Sumter is illustrating what can happen when parents join forces with classroom educators.

Smith's background is in Miami-Dade County, Florida, and she shared with Sumter parents and educators news of what occurred during her time there.

Smith told of teaching at a high-performing Florida school in a high-income area where "students applied themselves, and we had the educators and facilities to work with the students who didn't." When she was moved to a low-performing school to help turn it around, she said she was "shocked at the inequity."

Teachers were required to follow a tightly scripted curriculum, usually with outdated and below grade-level materials. The curriculum, she said, gave students little choice in their courses and no chance to exercise critical thinking, problem-solving skills or collaboration, because "these are the courses being tested."

At the time, Florida schools were operating under the A+ Plan introduced by Gov. Jeb Bush, with similar requirements to those later introduced nationally by No Child Left Behind. The plan, Smith said, introduced constant testing - a baseline test at the beginning of the year, an interim test, a winter test, a spring test, even a post-test assessment. Teachers spent weeks of class time just preparing students for the next test.

"These kids were going to college ill-prepared,because they'd never done any writing or challenging reading," Smith said. "They were taught test-taking, and that's about it."

Smith thinks the push for standardized testing and test-based assessments is being pushed by the publishers of testing materials and others who want to undermine public education.

Absolutely so. Billions of dollars are spent now on "supplemental educational services," the term of art invented by the Bush administration in the so-called "No Child Left Behind," which means that those corporate giants who produce these "services" and products are reaping billions of dollars in profit -- on the backs of children enrolled in public schools.

Tests are not only used to evaluate students, but also their teachers and entire schools.

Hear that, South Carolina educators? That's what's coming. Our state superintendent just filed an application for a waiver from NCLB last month, and this very principle is the bedrock of his waiver application: Using test scores to give letter grades to teachers and schools.

At one point, Florida legislators wanted to increase the rigor of testing by requiring 25 percent of students, including special-needs and English-as-a-second-language students, to achieve a top grade. Otherwise, the school would be graded as "failing" and face sanctions, including the possibility of parents voting to shut the school down and replace it with a privately managed charter.

This little scheme is called, cleverly, "parent trigger." Watch for it -- it's coming to South Carolina, too. And you'll get to see a big Hollywood film about it this fall, too, presently titled "Won't Back Down."

Powerful stuff, isn't it?

Billions of dollars are diverted from public schools, weakening their foundation. Budget cuts leave thousands of teachers out of work, and classrooms packed, raising parents' doubts and fears about the quality of education available there. Emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing leaves creativity and critical thinking by the wayside. Thanks to these cuts and diversions, school quality is eroded, and the hardline new grading system labels schools "failing" year after year after year, until finally, parents can pull the "parent trigger" and turn that "failing" school into a charter school, directly dependent on the same profit-making, corporate supplemental service providers who pad lawmakers' re-election chances.

And, before you can say Oscar, there's a big Hollywood production about the failure of America's public schools.

The plan was all the more galling, Smith said, because, even though high-performing schools also struggled to meet standards, the worst performing schools are located in low-income minority communities.

"We've been told that poverty doesn't matter when it comes to education, that a compromised ability to eat well doesn't matter," she said. "But it turns out the schools with the most low-income students are always the ones with the worst teachers."

Ceresta Smith and Sumter Education Task Force, meet Steve Morrison and Abbeville v. South Carolina. I think y'all are already well-acquainted and may not have known it.

This time, communities protested the proposed changes. Parents, teachers and administrators traveled to the state capital in Tallahassee to lobby against the measure. Activists managed to get the "parents empowerment" provision dropped and changed underperforming schools from an automatic F to a one letter-grade drop.

Now Smith wants to see more community activism to reverse the course of the country's schools. She's co-founded the United Opt Out National, a movement that encourages parents to opt their children out of punitive testing, as Smith has done with her own daughter. From March 30 to April 2, she will participate in an education march on Washington that will seek to occupy the headquarters of the federal Department of Education.

Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna.

Thank you to Ceresta Smith, to Nicole Williams and Parrish Rabon, to the Sumter Education Task Force and the South Carolina Education Association. When what you've accomplished in several months is replicated in the counties surrounding Sumter, and the next ring of counties, and the next, we'll see change finally come to South Carolina.

I'm proud to see it.

Richland's Ford disapproves Zais's labels proposal

Superintendent Mick Zais's alternative to No Child Left Behind -- a waiver application that includes a proposal to label schools A through F for performance -- isn't collecting many supporters among veteran educators. In Richland County, school board member Vince Ford has become the latest to question the Zais model.

Richland One School Board member Vince Ford explains: "It's really about taking an adverse population of children black, white, male, female, those with special needs, those who speak a different language and every year you want to see those children make adequate yearly progress."

South Carolina's elementary and secondary education waiver basically outlines four principles for student achievement: All students must be college and career ready; there needs to be accountability for student success; effective instruction through teacher evaluations and reducing unnecessary duplication and paperwork.

"It's attainable," says Ford. "Some of the measures are tough but we all want a rigorous system."

Ford agrees that students should be held to higher standards. But he disagrees with how State Superintendent Mick Zais would label each school. They would be assigned grades A through F based on performance.

"If a community is labeled 'F' what is that going to for the children in that school?" questions Ford. "What is it going to do for housing prices? What is it going to do to try to recruit teachers to try to come to that school?"

Ford says identifying a school that needs improvement is fine, but the way it's done matters. Ford also thinks human and financial resources are needed in the schools.

Ford hits the nail on the head. We can hem and haw about policy matters 'til dark and dawn, but committing to provide quality education to every child takes resources, and until the resources are made available, it's all just a little bit of history repeating.

In fact, a reasonable person could conclude that all the time and effort spent on these policy questions is subterfuge, mere distraction from the core question: Do we, as a state, commit to providing quality public education to every child?

A proposal to exchange one bad school-labeling policy for another bad school-labeling policy is evidence that we don't.

"To put a label on it and then suggest things are going to get better, that's not going to happen and it's not only going to have an impact on that school but an impact on the larger community as well."

Ford says if the state superintendent accepts more federal money, pays teachers well and increases student expectations, then communities should see a better outcome.

"If we get a waiver, if we don't get it, if it doesn't change the attitude of those in a leadership position -- i.e., our state superintendent who won't even take money from the federal government."

And Ford hits another homer. Until we have an advocate in the position of state superintendent, South Carolina's 700,000 schoolchildren are at a supreme disadvantage.

Do I hear Ford for State Superintendent? Anyone?

A big point of contention: the waiver gives the state superintendent the right to put someone else in charge of a low-performing school, convert it to a charter school, or change the overall program structure.

Notice that none of the options reflect strengthening the public school from within. The only available options further dismantle public education as a viable system for South Carolina's public schoolchildren.

No wonder educators and parents aren't flocking to support Zais in his waiver application.

Aiken Standard: Time to leave NCLB

Agreed!

When the No Child Left Behind act was enacted 10 years ago it was heralded as a program to bring accountability to the country's education system. It set standards and measurement methods designed to reward achievement and punish failure.

But the program has flaws. For one, it ignores differences in favor of a one-size-fits-all method. And, success is all or nothing. If a school passes 16 of 17 objectives, the school fails.

So for a decade, teachers and administrators have been battling these cumbersome mandates. The result, too many schools, especially schools in poorer areas, have turned to teaching what it will take to pass the one-size-fits-all tests. It's even more distressing to know what's happened to many special needs students who are expected to stay on grade level despite their disabilities.

There have been some gains in academic achievement. But teachers are burdened by massive paperwork, and schoolchildren are unreasonably pressured to do well on standardized tests.

To be vindicated in one's lifetime is a supreme joy. Educators -- people who know their profession best -- HAVE been saying these things since 2002, to no avail. After a decade of being ground down, it is comfort -- cold comfort, but comfort -- to hear opinion-makers like newspaper editors finally reach the same conclusions.

When the Obama Administration opened the door for states to opt out of portions of the program, South Carolina Superintendent of Schools Mick Zais wisely raised his hand quickly to take advantage. Zais has made no secret of his abhorrence for federal intervention in public schools. He's turned down millions of dollars in federal money because it came with strings attached.

Tonight, State Department of Education officials will be in Aiken to explain the proposal for the state to opt out of some of the program. A waiver would change the assessment of student performance to a growth model so that increases in student achievement from year to year would become a larger part of the assessment process.

According to its drafted application, South Carolina would pilot its revamped teacher and principal evaluation systems in 2013-14 with schools that volunteer. It would expand statewide in 2014-15.

It includes replacing the all-or-nothing label of making progress with a grade, from A to F. It also adds a carrot to the accountability system: The highest-performing schools and those that show the biggest gains would get rewarded, with $5,000 going to finalists in each category and $10,000 going to the winners.

Out of one deep fryer and into another. If I interpret the Zais proposal correctly, he intends to operate his own little NCLB here in South Carolina using the federal education funding, with letter grades to boot.

At what point do we allow educators to govern education, rather than political ideologues and corporate profiteers?

If South Carolina gets the waiver, it will be up to Zais to make sure the methods used do improve the system are fair and do make a significant difference.

So much for that.

Turnout low for Zais's first public meeting on NCLB waivers

Here's one area where the state Superintendent of Education and the Obama administration apparently agree: Both want to be freed from the restrictions of the Bush administration's "No Child Left Behind." While Congress dawdles over the law's reauthorization, the Obama administration last year rolled out NCLB waiver options for states that wished to apply for them. Coincidentally, Superintendent Mick Zais has shown that he wants federal authorities to have as little influence -- and oversight -- over South Carolina's schools as possible, so an application for waivers from NCLB is one application that Zais is all too happy to send to Washington.

But, perhaps owing to Zais's lack of credibility on matters pertaining to strengthening and improving public schools, and on his responsiveness to public opinion generally, residents of Darlington reportedly reacted the first of Zais's 21 planned "public comment sessions" with a collective yawn. "About a dozen" attended the meeting, according to reporter Robert Sloan.

Good enough, as Zais himself neglected to attend. The superintendent sent instead his deputy, Charmeka Bosket, who previously worked as Governor Mark Sanford's third education advisor and for the state Chamber of Commerce's political action committee.

Interestingly, Bosket represented her superintendent's motives this way:

“We want to stress and emphasize at the stakeholder meetings that we are not trying to opt out of the No Child Left Behind program,” Bosket said. “We will not lose and federal funds by receiving these waivers. What we will gain is more flexibility to better serve our students. We want to stress that this process will not have a negative impact.”

Message: We like No Child Left Behind; we just want federal dollars without federal requirements.

Instead, Bosket explained, Zais has a better idea: Give schools letter grades according to his own grading system.

Under the Zais' plan, schools and districts would be given letter grades -- A, B, C, D or F -- based on their test scores, graduation rates and several other factors. Improvement in each of these areas and other categories would be recognized.

Just as Zais has never taught students in a public school classroom, I've never treated patients in a hospital. How might medical professionals react if I created, out of my own imagination, a plan to give letter grades to hospitals based on factors like how many patients died in them, and how many were cured of their ailments, and how much it cost to treat each patient? What about if I added a wheelchair-wheel-size criterion in my grading formula?

Indeed, I suspect the Zais Letter Grade Plan will go far with average education professionals across South Carolina. Imagine the size of that gradebook.

At least one of the dozen attendees at the Zais (without Zais) "public comment session" in Darlington was an educator. [Note: It is never a good idea to invite educators to attend public hearings on education issues; they tend to ask pertinent, logical questions and expect good, rational answers.] Sloan writes:

One question asked during the meeting came from a Darlington County teacher who asked about the cost of the program and whether teachers would get the necessary resources and instruction materials to implement the new plan. He cited the state’s present suspension on purchasing new textbooks and asked whether that suspension would be lifted.

“Without the proper resources, it will not help our kids,” he said. “We are being asked to do more and more with less and less.”

Bosket agreed with his assessment on the importance of cost and the need for proper materials in the classrooms. She said the suspension on buying text was driven by the poor economy and said that it is not likely the suspension will be lifted until the economy gets better.

My own translation: Yes, it is an expectation of this state and your elected employers that you will do more and more with less and less. This presentation was not designed to change that expectation, and you should not interpret this information as a proposal to lighten your burden. Do your work, and don't ask for more resources until the economy improves, which will allow more revenues to flow into the public treasury, which will allow lawmakers to give more of those revenues back to corporate entities in the form of tax breaks, incentives and loopholes. Only when corporate income tax is eliminated entirely, and then personal income tax eliminated, and then sales tax dramatically reduced, might we consider investing more of available resources in public schools, if public schools still exist then. We, as a state, cannot afford to invest more in the education of one another's children until that time.

Is there evidence to suggest that this translation is wrong?

Schools to be used as cultural battlefields all over again

Silly season is definitely here now. Slate magazine has posted an item on the significance of Michele Bachmann's rise in political power, and it has a lot to do with public education. Naturally, this means that educators should pay attention, if they're not already. If you wade through the political stuff, you'll find in the Slate article a number of issues that raise important and scary questions for all of us.

Michele Bachmann's victory in the Iowa straw poll Saturday represents many obvious things: the mainstreaming of the Tea Party, the overnight ordinariness of female presidential candidates, the increasing irrelevance of also-ran moderates like Jon Huntsman. But her growing popularity among the Republican base also signals something that's been less widely acknowledged: a sea change in the party's education agenda. It's safe to say that the political era of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind is now officially over, even as the law's testing mandates continue to reverberate in classrooms across the country.

As recently as a decade ago, Republicans like George W. Bush, John McCain, and John Boehner embraced bipartisan, standards-and-accountability education reform as a pro-business venture, a way to make American workers and firms more competitive in the global marketplace. Now we are seeing the GOP acquiesce to the anti-government, Christian-right view of education epitomized by Bachmann, in which public schools are regarded not as engines for economic growth or academic achievement, but as potential moral corrupters of the nation's youth.

This echoes what Rick Santorum has been saying in his stops in South Carolina and Iowa, that early childhood education is "government indoctrination," rather than preparation for schooling.

Against a backdrop of Tea Party calls to abolish the Department of Education and drastically cut the federal government's role in local public schools, Rep. John Kline, the moderate chairman of the House education and workforce committee, has refused to engage in productive negotiations with the Obama administration on how to update and reauthorize the troubled No Child Left Behind law. If it is not rewritten to emphasize academic growth instead of raw test score goals, up to 80 percent of American schools could be labeled "failing" this school year, because less than 100 percent of their native-born American students have reached "proficiency" on reading and math tests.

Shades of what is already happening here!

Bachmann stands at the forefront of the GOP's shifting allegiances on education. Like many female elected officials before her, she first got involved in politics as a mother concerned about local public schools. (Though Bachmann home-schooled her biological children, the family's 23 foster children attended public schools.)

I wonder why she home-schooled her own, but sent her 23 foster children to public schools?

As Ryan Lizza described in his recent New Yorker profile, in 1993, Bachmann, then an IRS-lawyer turned stay-at-home mom, co-founded a charter school whose curriculum was built around evangelical Christian themes such as creationism. Several years later, she went on to run unsuccessfully for the Stillwater, Minn., school board as one member of a five-person Christian conservative block. The group campaigned on the expected culture war issues, such as abstinence-only sex education, but also on a more esoteric platform: opposition to state education standards and to federal vocational education programs.

As her political career advanced, the overarching theme of Bachmann's education activism was that government attempts to improve schools threatened the prerogatives of the Christian family and represented a dangerous move toward a socialized, planned economy. In 2001, she charged that the 1994 federal School to Work Opportunities Act, which provided funding for low-income teenagers to do on-the-job apprenticeships with local companies, would turn students into "human resources for a centrally planned economy." As a state senator in 2002, Bachmann produced a bizarre film called Guinea Pigs II, which compared Minnesota's Profile of Learning curriculum standards—instituted in 1998 by Republican Gov. Arne Carlson—to Nazism and communism. As Tim Murphy of Mother Jones wrote of Bachmann last week, "She was Tea Party before the Tea party was cool. In 2002, with a Republican president in the White House and the Tea Party a full seven years away, she cited the 9th and 10th amendments while railing against No Child Left Behind as an unconstitutional abuse of power."

Bachmann wasn't the only Christian conservative local politician making these anti-education reform arguments in the 1990s. Rather, from the beginning of her activist career, she was part of a national "parental rights" movement organized by groups such as Focus on the Family and the Homeschool Legal Defense Fund. Like Bachmann, Sarah Palin was a foot soldier in this movement. According to an account local political activist Phillip Munger gave Salon, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin promoted a group of Christian right school board candidates. She also explored the possibility of banning "offensive" books from the town's public library.

Banning "offensive" books. Could book-banning come to South Carolina?

These Christian right organizations lobbied against curriculum standards and state and federal regulation of home-schoolers, and recruited thousands of school board candidates—many of them churchgoing moms like Bachmann—in an attempt to wield influence over curricula and textbooks.

This sounds an awful lot like Kristin Maguire, Mark Sanford's appointee to the State Board of Education. Though she home-schooled her children, she became the chair of the State Board. Her departure from the board was very strange for someone with her political ideology -- who is Bridget Keeney? -- but she's recently re-asserting herself in public.

The movement paid special attention to how public schools dealt with issues such as homosexuality, contraception, and abortion, but also sought to promote an uber-nationalist view of American history, in which the evils of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans were downplayed or sometimes totally whitewashed. (For more on the curriculum wars of the 1990s, see Sara Diamond's masterful Not By Politics Alone: The Enduring Influence of the Christian Right.)

Oh, that'll be the day: Whitewashing slavery, in South Carolina? What, the slaves enjoyed slavery here? They were better off, were they?

Bachmann's main competition for Tea Party voters, Rick Perry, has made opposition to federal education mandates a centerpiece of his political career. Under his watch as governor, Texas was one of just two states (the other was Alaska) to refuse to even consider adopting the new state-led common core curriculum standards in English and math. Perry also kept Texas out of the Obama administration's Race to the Top education reform grant competition, declaring, "[W]e would be foolish and irresponsible to place our children's future in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and special interest groups thousands of miles away in Washington, virtually eliminating parents' participation in their children's education."

Did Mick Zais get those same talking points?

It will be interesting to see how Mitt Romney, the man Bachmann or Perry will have to beat to claim the GOP nomination, handles all this. His centrism on school reform is a matter of public record. When he ran for president in 2008, he defended No Child Left Behind, saying similar legislation had worked well in Massachusetts during his time as governor. As recently as February 2010, in a speech before the Conservative Political Action Committee, he outlined a school reform platform largely indistinguishable from that of the Obama administration, supporting higher pay for teachers and more accountability.

But recently, Romney has gone quiet on the issue. His campaign website carefully avoids any mention of education policy, and he hasn't brought it up on the trail. At Thursday night's GOP debate, only Jon Huntsman and Herman Cain were asked about NCLB; Romney got off the hook. But with his party's congressional leaders rushing to the right on school reform—chasing after Bachmann, Palin, and other members of the Tea Party—Romney won't get a free pass for very long. He'll have to either defend his record of support for top-down education standards or perform another obvious and painful flip-flop in his quest to woo the conservative base.

So, the takeaway from this article is that rather than have an honest dialogue and debate about the equal access to high-quality public education, our public schools are going to be used again as the battleground for a culture war.

Haven't we been here before? Didn't we get sick of it then? Where are leaders like Dick Riley when we need them?

Record scholarships defy state's NCLB ratings

I noticed an odd juxtaposition of facts earlier this month when news came that all but one of South Carolina's school districts failed to meet federal adequate yearly progress goals.

By one measure, South Carolina's public schools have failed, failed, failed their students. By another measure, South Carolina's schools have surpassed their students' wildest dreams, meeting and exceeding their needs, and guaranteeing them access to higher education and great careers to come.

I wondered, How can both be true? Then I concluded that they both cannot be true; one is an invalid measure.

I'll give you two guesses about which I concluded was an invalid measure, and I'll spot you a really big clue: Many, many, many educators caught onto the game in No Child Left Behind way back in December 2001, when it became law.

The State newspaper, I thought, did a great job in putting the NCLB issue in context:

IT’S SCHOOL TEST results season again, and so again a few basics need to be remembered:

• South Carolina has made far more progress in recent years than most people realize — and considerably more than the professional public-school bashers want us to believe — in improving student achievement.

• We still have a long way to go to provide all children with the education they need to be the productive citizens we need them to be if our state is to become the place we all want it to be.

• The federal law that makes our gains look like regression is deeply flawed and in no way reflects either how far we’ve come or how far we still have to go.

The idea behind the No Child Left Behind law is the same as the idea behind the S.C. Education Accountability Act that predates it: To improve student learning, we must set high expectations for all students and hold not only students but also schools accountable for their performance.

The problem is that the federal law set unrealistic standards that forced states to either manipulate the numbers to give a false impression of success, or else be honest and quickly be labeled abject failures, subjecting the schools to political attack that could undermine public support for public education. The first approach cheats students out of the educational opportunities they deserve; unfortunately, the second approach can do the same. For the most part, South Carolina has maintained its high standards, although the Legislature did succumb to a minor bit of manipulation last year.

But even that minor manipulation wasn’t enough to counter the tyranny of the Lake Wobegon law, which requires increasingly unrealistic improvement each year until it reaches its crescendo in 2014: the statistical impossibility that every student in the nation be “proficient” in math and reading.

Meanwhile, at the same time that principals and teachers were in tears at being called failures by those The State rightly calls "professional public-school bashers," news of a completely different sort came, and it changed the game entirely.

South Carolina high school graduates had a record-setting year for college scholarships, the South Carolina Department of Education announced Wednesday.

The South Carolina Class of 2011 earned around $966 million in scholarships — the most since the state began tracking the information 10 years ago. The figure pushed the state’s five-year scholarship total to more than $4.2 billion.

Which means that educators across South Carolina must have been doing something right -- in fact, a hell of a lot right -- for a lot of years to help South Carolina's high school graduates qualify for so much scholarship money.

Failures? Our graduates' record-setting scholarships seem to say different.

Graduates from Spartanburg, Cherokee and Union county schools collectively earned about $87.1 million in 2011 — nearly $6 million more than the previous year.

Spartanburg County graduates from the seven school districts combined earned about $74.5 million in 2011. Cherokee County students received $8.5 million in scholarships, and Union County graduates earned about $4.1 million.
...
Among local districts, Spartanburg District 6 graduates earned the most scholarship funding in 2011 with about $19.8 million, and with an increase of nearly $6 million over 2010, also showed the biggest dollar figure growth.
...
Union County saw the biggest percentage increase in the amount of scholarships earned. Scholarship totals more than tripled in a year’s time, increasing by nearly $3 million.

Likewise, the scholarship haul broke records in the Low Country.

Charleston, the state's second- largest school district and the biggest in the Lowcountry, reported the most scholarship earnings locally with $47.9 million, a $1.7 million increase from last year. Its students' winnings ranked sixth statewide.

Berkeley and Dorchester 2 school districts ranked 9th and 10th statewide, reporting $29.9 million and $25.5 million, respectively. Berkeley saw a $3.1 million increase from last year, while Dorchester 2 had the biggest jump locally with $4.7 million.

Rural Dorchester 4 reported $2.2 million for Woodland High, its lone high school, representing a $400,000 increase from last year.

Make sure you catch that: Graduates from Dorchester 4's only high school collected $2.2 million in scholarships.

And, while we're here, let's give credit to South Carolina's guidance counselors:

Candy Bates-Quinn, the Charleston County School District's coordinator of school counseling, attributes some of the increase to school counselors who do more than talk to students about personal and social issues.

Counselors also are doing career and academic counseling, and they're doing so sooner than they have in the past, she said. When students and their parents are informed early on about what it takes to get into college, they are more likely to understand the process and apply for scholarships, she said.

"With the (poor) economy, students are seeking out the smaller scholarships and seeing the meaning in them," she said. "I'm excited. We want to try to improve and get more funding (for students)."

Did Michelle Rhee's merit-pay policies and firings lead to test irregularities?

Michelle Rhee knows how to get attention. Yesterday, USA Today published a huge expose on the "testing irregularities" at several schools in Washington, D.C., that made rapid improvements during Rhee's short and tumultuous reign as schools superintendent in that city. Specifically, USA Today found large numbers of "incorrect-to-correct" answer erasures, meaning that someone -- maybe it was the students, maybe it was someone else -- marked standardized test forms incorrectly, then erased the answers and marked them correctly.

How many erasures are we talking about?

Erasures are detected by the same electronic scanners that CTB/McGraw-Hill, D.C.'s testing company, uses to score the tests. When test-takers change answers, they erase penciled-in bubble marks that leave behind a smudge; the machines tally the erasures as well as the new answers for each student.

In 2007-08, six classrooms out of the eight taking tests at Noyes were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of high wrong-to-right erasure rates. The pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, when 80% of Noyes classrooms were flagged by McGraw-Hill.

On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.

"This is an abnormal pattern," says Thomas Haladyna, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University who has studied testing for 20 years.

But when did it become criminal for a student to erase a wrong answer and mark a correct answer?

There can be innocent reasons for multiple erasures. A student can lose his place on the answer sheet, fill in answers on the wrong rows, then change them when he realizes his mistake. And, as McGraw-Hill said in a March 2009 report to D.C. officials, studies also show that test-takers change answers more often when they are encouraged to review their work. The same report emphasizes that educators "should not draw conclusions about cheating behavior" from the data alone.

Haladyna notes, however, that when entire classrooms at schools with statistically rare erasures show fast-rising test scores, that suggests someone might have "tampered with the answer sheets," perhaps after the tests were collected from students. Although not proof of cheating, such a case underscores the need for an investigation, he says.

Hmm. Why would anyone have cause to tamper with test sheets? Could bonuses for principals in the DC schools have anything to do with it? Bonuses worth thousands of dollars, offered by Rhee and her lieutenants for rapid gains on standardized tests?

Sorry; those who know aren't talking. Most of them evacuated after Rhee lost her job last November.

In April, state superintendent [Deborah] Gist left Washington to take a job as head of Rhode Island's state school system. Her successor, Kerri Briggs, then dropped the request for D.C. public schools to investigate its schools. Both Gist and Briggs, now director for education reform at the George W. Bush Institute in Texas, declined to comment.

But others are singing like canaries.

From the start, Rhee emphasized a need to raise scores, restore calm to chaotic schools and close those with lagging scores and small enrollments. She paid bonuses to principals and teachers who produced big gains on scores. She let go dozens of principals and fired at least 600 teachers. Others retired or quit.

Turnover was brisk. Richard Whitmire, author of The Bee Eater, a biography of Rhee, reported that Rhee hired 1,918 teachers during her three years in office –– about 45% of those on the payroll last October. Only 2,318 current teachers had been hired before Rhee took charge.

The pressure on principals was unrelenting, says Aona Jefferson, a former D.C. principal who is now president of the Council of School Officers, representing principals and other administrators. Every year, Jefferson says, Rhee met with each principal and asked what kind of test score gains he would post in the coming school year. Jefferson says principals told her that Rhee expected them to increase scores by 10 percentile points or more every year. "What do you do when your chancellor asks, 'How many points can you guarantee this year?' " Jefferson says. "How is a principal supposed to do that?"

Rhee churned through principals. The Washington Post reported that Rhee appointed 91 principals in her three years as chancellor, 39 of whom no longer held those jobs in August 2010. Some left on their own, either resigning or retiring; other principals, on one-year contracts, were let go for not producing quickly enough.

Union officials say the pressure for high test scores may have tempted educators to cheat.

"This is like an education Ponzi scam," says Nathan Saunders, head of the Washington Teachers' Union. "If your test scores improve, you make more money. If not, you get fired. That's incredibly dangerous."

Dana Goldstein, a columnist for the Daily Beast, took up the issue yesterday and explained why Saunders is right, that incentives for high test scores are dangerous.

In the social sciences, there is an oft-repeated maxim called Campbell’s Law, named after Donald Campbell, a psychologist who studied human creativity. Campbell’s Law states that incentives corrupt. In other words, the more punishments and rewards—such as merit pay—are associated with the results of any given test, the more likely it is that the test’s results will be rendered meaningless, either through outright cheating or through teaching to the test in a way that narrows the curriculum and renders real learning obsolete.

In the era of No Child Left Behind, Campbell’s Law has proved true again and again. When the federal government began threatening to restructure or shut-down schools that did not achieve across-the-board student “proficiency” on state reading and math exams, states responded by creating standardized tests that were easier and easier to pass. Alabama, for example, reported that 85 percent of its fourth-graders were proficient in reading in 2005, even though only 22 percent of the state’s students demonstrated proficiency on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard, no-stakes exam administered by the federal government.

Simultaneously, instances of outright cheating were rising nationwide. The USA Today investigation on the probable cheating in Washington, D.C. is just one article in a must-read series based on student achievement data culled from 24,000 public schools across the country. The paper found 1,610 instances in which test score gains from year to year exceeded three standard deviations—a jump greater than that of 99.7 percent of all test-takers annually in any given state, the threshold at which statisticians agree that test results may be suspect.

The good news is that Campbell’s Law does not mean we should give up on assessing students and holding school systems accountable for their academic success. Research shows that certain kinds of exams—those that require essay writing on broad themes, for example—enhance student learning of key concepts. We can also assess students by requiring them to give oral presentations, or by looking for growth in portfolios of their work over the course of a year. Effective teachers produce students who excel when held to these more sophisticated standards, which are difficult to fudge or cheat.

Of course, creating better testing systems will be expensive, and implementing them will demand significant expertise on the part of school administrators. But as the Obama administration and national education reformers—Michelle Rhee chief among them—ask states and school districts nationwide to tie teacher evaluation scores and pay to student performance, it is crucial that we measure student academic growth in nuanced ways that encourage deep learning, not in over-simplified ways that create perverse incentives to dumb-down the curriculum and cheat.

Surprise, surprise: 'No Child Left Behind' delivers its payload

Thursday's edition of the Spartanburg Herald-Journal highlighted remarks from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan projecting that "more than 80,000 of the nation's 100,000 public schools could be labeled as failing under No Child Left Behind, the main federal law on public education."

This outcome is neither mysterious nor shocking.

Imagine that you were given a plot of land -- say, 100 acres -- and were provided all the bushel baskets you could fill.

Now imagine that you were told that you had to plant all the seed you were given, a combination of well-developed seed and stunted seed, genetically-enhanced seed and organic seed, and -- to top it off -- seeds from a variety of crops: radishes, lettuce, corn, carrots, soybeans, cotton and okra, all mixed together.

Now, though you're planting a variety of crops, imagine that you're only going to be judged on your harvest of radishes! And only on the highest grade of radishes.

And, to make this even more absurd and fascinating, let's say you're demanded to produce more and more radishes, year after year, still planting all the mixed-together seeds given to you annually!

And for each year that you don't produce more radishes than the past year, you're punished with less fertilizer the next year...

And after not making the grade, you're branded a low-performing farmer -- year after year after year -- and government authorities threaten to take away your hundred acres and your license to farm.

And now, after 10 years of this asinine system, the federal farm czar announces that 80 percent of farmers suffering under this system are failing at farming.

Would you be shocked at this outcome? And would the outcome be a mystery?

No reasonable person would.

Yet this was the system adopted in 2001:

The No Child Left Behind Act, introduced in 2001 by President George W. Bush and passed by Congress with bipartisan support, requires that all schools bring 100 percent of their students to proficiency in math and reading by 2014. Mr. Duncan has called this requirement “utopian.”

In other news, a few dogs barked at postmen in South Carolina, night followed day, and lawmakers looked for more ways to undermine and weaken the state's system of public schools.