Atlanta Schools Cheating Scandal

When I heard about the Atlanta teacher cheating scandal story I had decided that it was probably not worth discussing since it is not a Michigan story but given my history of defending the public school systems a commenter on this blog asked if I was "going to conveniently dodge that issue, as I expect you to?"

Challenge accepted.

The issue in Atlanta and presumably elsewhere, are the incentives. When you incentivize the public sector like the private sector you shouldn't be surprised when you get the same sort of corruption. The housing bubble and the BP oil spill are prime examples of how bad incentives lead to bad results.

By in large the public doesn't understand what it takes to educate our children so it is easy to dumb it down to test scores as an evaluation method for public teachers. After all test scores can be posted and easily interpreted.

It is ironic that in a day and age when parents are increasingly involved in their children's education, some people believe that administrators are somehow uninformed on the performance of their staff.

Today's teachers get a constant barrage of "evaluations" and "recommendations" typically from parents of the worst behaved students, who, unlike in the good old days, defend their malcontent child instead of support the professional educator.

This lack of respect for the skills of an educator is what leads to these misguided incentives. In other countries teachers are revered not reviled. The belief that educators, many of whom hold masters degrees, are idiots, is a uniquely American view. Not surprisingly, the people who think teaching is easy also think that fixing education is easy.

We have become a society where keeping score in sports is bad for our kids mental well being and good grades for students are a more important evaluation tool then the actual education.

A recent study on college grading shows an ever increasing trend towards handing out better and better letter grades. In the 1950's only 15% of grades were A's while today that number has risen to well over 40%. Are the students smarter today? This report found that students today actually study less than their predecessors so probably not.

This study also found that private schools were much more likely to hand out good grades than their public counterparts. The studies authors have postulated that the reason for this rise, are the incentives. Students review their professors and higher grades means better reviews and better reviews mean the professor is better at their job. Obviously the institution would want to keep and subsequently pay their better teachers. Plus, there is the added bonus that giving out better grades also means less stress from student and parent complaints.

If linking teacher performance to outcomes was so simple it would have been done a long time ago. The reality is, there are a lot of things that go into being a good teacher and boiling it down to a simplistic format just so those outside of the profession can make a snap judgement helps no one.