Monday I wrote about seven Arizona schools that have been accused of cheating on the high stakes AIMS test. I decided to look at the percentage of students on free/reduced lunch at the schools, and here’s what I found.

Two schools have more than 90 percent of their students on free/reduced lunch—Wade Carpenter Middle School and James Sandoval/Crown Point High School. One has over 75 percent—Integrity Education Centre. One has over 50 percent—Red Rock Elementary School.

Two—Edge and Children’s Success Academy—are charter schools that don’t report their free/reduced lunch percentage, like lots of charters which don’t furnish student lunches. The Star’s Tim Steller wrote about Edge in 2013.

Edge High School in Tucson takes in students from difficult backgrounds – about one out of 10 is homeless, many are parents or pregnant, some are sixth- or seventh-year seniors – and helps them graduate.

Last year the state recognized each of Edge’s three charter high schools – with a D grade. Two more years of D’s and the schools will be on the road toward a failing status.

All I can find about Children’s Success Academy is that it’s on E. Bilby near S. Nogales Hwy in Tucson with about 80 students and a B state grade. It’s in a low income area, and most of the nearby schools have C and D grades, which means its students are likely from low income families, though I can’t say for certain.

The outlier here is Metcalf Elementary with 34 percent of its students on free/reduced lunch. It’s a new school with no state grade I could find.

Here are a few schools not—repeat, not—on the list, along with their free/reduced lunch percentages: Copper Ridge Elementary in Scottsdale Unified (3 percent); Sonoran Trails Middle in Cave Creek (7 percent); Catalina Foothills High (12 percent).

The Atlanta, Georgia, schools where staff is going to jail for cheating serve mainly low income students. So do the Washington, DC, schools where then-Superintendent Michelle Rhee bragged about the boost in test scores during her tenure (she made the covers of Time and Newsweek), but no one did a serious investigation when evidence pointed to cheating in the schools with the greatest “improvement.” And here in Arizona, the schools cited for cheating mostly serve low income, low achieving students.

You’re not likely to find overt erase-and-replace cheating on tests in high rent schools, for a good, logical reason. Most students at those schools get high scores on their high stakes tests. Arizona’s B and A rated schools are clustered in high income areas, and the difference between a B and an A is a feather in your cap, not keeping your job or keeping your school open. Blatant cheating is a high risk endeavor. If you’re caught, you’re in serious trouble. It’s not worth the risk when your students’ scores pretty much take care of themselves.

But if a school has a D rating and is in danger of falling into the failing category, or if individual teachers fear their jobs will be on the line if their students’s scores are too low, well, desperate times can call for desperate measures. It may be worth the risk of changing some wrong answers to right answers.

Remember how No Child Left Behind was sold as a way to raise up students who were doing poorly in school—to combat, in President Bush’s words, “the soft bigotry of low expectations”? Test scores haven’t shown any significant improvement since 2001, so that hasn’t worked out so well. But high stakes testing has provided a target-rich environment for anyone who wants to blame and shame low achieving students, their teachers and their “failing schools.” And it’s created an environment that tempts staffs at low income schools to improve student scores by any means necessary, legal or illegal.

I’m detecting a pattern here. The War on Drugs was supposed to lessen the scourge of drug use and addiction in low income, minority areas. It’s arguably made things worse. Zero Tolerance was supposed to lock up the bad guys and make high crime areas safer. Along with the War on Drugs, Zero Tolerance has led to mass incarceration, done little or nothing to improve neighborhoods and encouraged the kind of abusive, sometimes lethal police/citizen interaction we’ve seen in Ferguson, Baltimore and elsewhere. And No Child Left Behind has been a failure at improving our schools while it’s made students and teachers in low income schools the objects of scorn and derision. You’ve gotta wonder whether there’s another agenda working here other than the help-the-poor-and-minorities pitch used to sell the three programs.

This article appears in May 7-13, 2015.

13 replies on “The Soft (and Not-So-Soft) Bigotry of High Stakes Testing”

  1. I thought no child left behind was authored by Tea Kennedy.

    Free lunch qualified? My money says they spend $200 per month on cable TV and internet service.

    Why can’t we just let people be whom they are? Stop social engineering. There are leaders and there are followers.

  2. Good article.
    I don’t get the ‘free lunch’ thing. Somehow it’s supposed to make less poverty. I don’t think it has any effect. If you can’t feed the kids you have, CPS should take them away. What other more basic function of a parent is there? Clearly if you can’t feed them, you are not qualified to be a parent in any way.

  3. The pattern, that will never be acknowledged by the lefties, is that ALL are the government replacing personal responsibility.

    Yet the lefties cry, more guvm’t, more guvm’t, praise, praise the federal guvm’t.

  4. “Last year, Wall Street paid out $26.7 billion in bonuses — which…is enough to double the pay of all full-time minimum-wage workers.” The Editors of Commonweal

    Would the parents referred to in one of the comments above be able to feed their children without government “assistance” if the money spent last year on Wall Street bonuses were spent instead on paying a living wage to minimum-wage workers? Having children and being able to feed, house, and educate them decently with the wages you make working full time in the U.S. should not be (one of the many) privileges we grant only to those at a certain level in the income scale.

    What we do now is have the government subsidize private companies “rights” to a cheap work force by giving government assistance to the working poor. Doesn’t that bother you, right wing trolls? Having the government “assist” these companies? Some of these companies are freeloading on the government’s willingness to help them pay their low wage workers, while they pay workers at the top of the scale salaries that provide enough to support 50 families … or a 100 families … or more. And perhaps bonuses on top of the high salaries. Where’s the outrage?

  5. Reality Check “if the money spent last year on Wall Street bonuses were spent instead on paying a living wage…Where’s the outrage”

    History has recorded millions of deaths and tragedy on the human condition committed by communist regimes. Yet the ‘progressives’ continue to cry for communism. Indeed, Where’s the Outrage?

  6. I agree with the central premise of David’s column, federal intervention in local and state government areas of responsibility have failed miserably while enriching parasites infesting the body politic. No argument that the wars on drugs and crime were expensive and counterproductive. Turning to public education, David excoriates NCHB and with good reason, it was, emphasis on WAS, an abject failure.

    But the world did not end in 2008, a new president was elected and his administration directly intervened, again, in state and local education policy. Race to the Top (a federal financial support structure underlying implementation of the Common Core) was rolled out and touted as the next best slice of bread to hungry state education agencies and school districts. But Race to the Top exacerbated the woes of educators by embracing at least three positions most public school teachers view as anathema. First, the legislation encouraged the expansion of charter schools. Second, it mandated the use of standardized test results in teacher evaluations. Third it narrowed the emphasis on curriculum to STEM courses and rewarded states that bought into that rubric by conducting extensive annual testing programs directed primarily at two subject areas, math and reading.

    Obama, Duncan, The Gates’ and others have continued this next war, the war on public schooling and its teaching professionals. Let’s not play Rip Van Winkle and pretend the past 6 years didn’t happen. They did, and brought with them a plague of profiteers within the school systems (those who cheat on testing programs) and the for profit educrats enjoying the latest Gold Rush.

    We are fourteen years into this latest war began during the administration of G.W. Bush and continued under Barack Obama. There are no heroes here except for the teachers struggling to teach with both arms tied behind their backs as they are bombarded with more impossible regulatory demands. How about a war in federal intervention in public schooling?

  7. Since Obama was elected they have added 12 million to the food stamp rolls. He has expanded benefits because his economic policies are a failure.

    What’s next, free cell phones?

  8. “Though praised by reform advocates for boosting accountability from schools, the law became anathema to many teachers and parents, who opposed its heavy reliance on standardized testing. Democrats eventually rued Kennedy’s support; Bill Clinton called it a “train wreck” and, in a 2008 editorial, Kennedy himself acknowledged its “results are mixed.”-Time Magazine

  9. David you bring up a number of issues here; the matter of cheating on tests and an issue that seemingly no one cares about: The difference in accountability and transparency between public and private charter schools. The fact that you could not get information from Edge and Children’s Success because they do not report that information highlights one of my issues with private charters, they are taxpayer funded but do not have the same level of accountability as public schools. A double standard.

  10. You would think that after the Democrats being 7-years in power that “journalists would have dropped “Bush” in their subject lines! The man in the mirror owns most of our problems instead we blame away responsibility, that is where we have been led too and that is so 2015, blaming others! You Democrats have built that!

  12. For those who complained that I condemned Bush for No Child Left Behind and omitted what Obama has done with Race to the Top, you need to read other posts I’ve written. This time, since I was focusing on the term, “The soft bigotry of low expectations,” I focused on Bush. I usually add that the program was continued by Obama, thanks in some part to his terrible choice of Arne Duncan as Ed Supe. Obama shares the blame for continuing and in some ways expanding a bad program.

  13. Both parties are to blame. Both parties still, today list charter schools as part of their education platform. So if they are here to stay, they need to be monitored. I really think President Obama was misguided in his belief that a business model would be the answer. Obviously this skipped the part that education is not a business. Children are not commodities. Schools do not control what goes on with children before they walk in the door. They are all different. Poverty does make a difference. We now have many homes with both people working who get food stamps because the pay is so low.. (Now called the working poor). We have the 1% ers who are running the show. We can attribute that to governors- like Ducey- who are not taxing their rich friends( You can check and see the cuts). Not all are Republican… Cuomo of New York is funded by Koch and doing the same as Ducey, et. al. High stakes testing, rewarding high achieving schools are all part of that business model.

    I totally disagree that people whose children are on free lunch should have their children taken away from them. They are then taken care of by foster parents who do not know them and taxpayers pay even more for them. In addition, children who are in foster care often have emotional and behavioral issues. There is no upside to that idea in my opinion. Public education that is well funded is the answer instead of schools that pocket profit. Education money is spread too thin.. what little there is. Magnet schools help by having mandatory racial balances in student population. So yes there is a lot of blame to go around and right now, I put the most at the feet of governors like Ducey. They are state by state making matters worse. Let’s work towards solutions that are reasonable as to what is best for kids. Not about making profits or competition. Evaluations can be done without that.

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