While NCLB may be fading into the mists, I’d like to put an issue on the table that deserves reflection:

The number-based NCLB and Race to the Top testing programs were brought to us by the Federal government. Aside from issues of whether or not the current mess of testing is improving education, I’d like to observe that the organizations that brought us these programs were and are the same organizations that decide whether or not federal initiatives related to education are working. An example from the federal stimulus aid package helps illustrate this. The conflict of interest is obvious and I’d like to share the first few paragraphs of a Chicago News Tribune article by Bob Secter and Erika Slife (November 4, 2009) which teachers in the school district in School District 187 in North Chicago found quite entertaining:

“More than $4.7 million in federal stimulus aid so far has been funneled to schools in North Chicago, and state and federal officials say that money has saved the jobs of 473 teachers. Problem is, the district employs only 290 teachers.

‘That other number, I don’t know where that came from,’ said Lauri Hakanen, (then) superintendent of North Chicago Community Unit Schools District 187.

The Obama administration last week released the first round of data designed to underpin the worthiness of its economic stimulus plan, which so far has directed $1.25 billion to Illinois schools. That money has helped save or create 14,330 school jobs in the state, the administration claimed. But those statistics, compiled initially by the Illinois State Board of Education, appear riddled with anomalies that raise questions about their validity, according to a Tribune analysis of district-by-district stimulus spending and other state data. Many local school officials were perplexed by the stimulus data attributed to their districts.”

The article described multiple other districts which had more jobs saved than actual teachers working in the district. When the dust settled, it appeared that all that money had bought only 222 new full-time jobs. Reporting by districts led to some confusion, but Illinois government actions contributed heavily: The state treasury used some of the federal funds to make payments the state owed, freeing state funds for other uses. The Feds should have watched those sneaky guys in Springfield more carefully.

The stimulus package is only of peripheral interest now except for the fact that it illustrates what can happen when government officials need to justify their labors. The many government officials employed directly or indirectly by NCLB and Race to the Top had a strong interest in showing that their efforts created educational improvements. With the many, many numbers at their disposal, they were easily able to present a case suggesting those improvements. The accuracy of government numbers and, more importantly, the actual meaning of those numbers can be extremely difficult to check. To my knowledge, there’s no one tasked with checking those numbers, either, whose employment is not somehow affected by state and county departments of education.

Nor is there anyone systematically checking for cheating by school districts, despite the obvious incentive to cheat when poor test results eventually lead directly to government intervention – although an internet search on school cheating suggests that such cheating may well have reached a state that could be termed both pervasive and endemic. When I put the search term “cheating by school districts” into Google a few years ago, the search returned 13,700,000 results. Currently, the search returns about 2,440,000 results. Cheating may not be trending, but it certainly has not gone away.