STATE RANKING OF IOWA SCHOOLS’ HONESTY & INTEGRITY  

1-10-06

This posting is about Iowa school honesty, integrity and cheating—and its impact on state school rankings as shown in the Ranking Table below.  Iowalive has yet to hear a school superintendent claim there is no cheating in a district or that classrooms are discretely observed or monitored so the superintendent knows what is going on in them.  

Anyone doubting these rankings is asked to provide better rankings, or to start a drive to have Deloitte, Ernst & Young, or a similar auditing organization--do a thorough, statistical audit of Iowa school's honesty/integrity--for comparison with Iowalive's.  

The effort to prepare this posting would have been greatly reduced by an Iowa law prohibiting school cheating and by an effective Iowa law encouraging, rewarding and protecting whistle blowers!!  Such laws might reduce school cheating to a level that this posting, and its test score and ranking adjustments for cheating, would not be necessary.  Iowalive can find no state laws against school cheating.  The Des Moines Register editorial telling schools to keep two sets of books and do anything legal to look better—certainly includes a multitude of ‘legal’ sins.   A GOOGLE search on school cheating resulted in 5,520,000 references.  Standard & Poors is investigating schools cheating on the 2006 NAEP tests.  Iowalive professionals have been informed and concerned about school cheating for several years. .

WHY SCHOOLS CHEAT

Schools cheat to look better and to get more money.  Educators often refer to themselves as insecure control freaks, obsessed with money.   Money is their culture.  All school proposals include needs for more money.  It doesn’t occur to schools to do better with equal or less money.   There are no policies or procedures in place to prevent or punish cheaters, and there is no encouragement or protection for whistle blowers.  Schools have no quality control systems in place and retaliate against anyone mentioning cheating.  The deck is heavily stacked against honest educators—and there are many of them.  All of the above invite, reward and support cheating.  

HOW SCHOOLS CAN CHEAT

Schools can cheat in many ways--some of them are:  misleading school boards about school performance, inflating enrollments, inflating the number of students on free and reduced lunch,  teaching the test, teaching to the test, giving students added time for tests, giving students answers to tests, allowing improper use of calculators on tests,  copying and distributing tests to students,  excluding students from taking tests, throwing student answer sheets in the wastebasket—as if the tests were never taken, excluding low test scores from reports,  inflating the number of students classified as special education, classifying students as special ed. without medically diagnosed learning disabilities,  keeping two sets of books as advised by the Des Moines Register editorial, dumbing down the tests and norms, distorting data to make it appear schools are doing better,  etc.

 HOW SCHOOL HONESTY AND INTEGRITY  IS DETERMINED AND RANKED  

School honesty and integrity is determined and numerically ranked from data and school observation and statistical analysis of schools and school data and their action (or the lack of it) to eliminate (or encourage) reasons for cheating and to reduce or eliminate (or practice) the ways schools cheat.  This includes the district’s emphasis (or the lack of it) placed on honesty and integrity in teaching, administering tests and compiling and reporting test scores.  It includes analysis of cohort test score patterns as students progress through the grades—as was done by analysts who found large scale cheating in Chicago and Dallas schools, resulting in teachers being fired. It also includes information obtained from other sources--who cannot be disclosed for obvious reasons.  Anyone claiming to have a better ranking of Iowa school honesty and integrity is asked to provide it for evaluation and comparison.   

 SCHOOL HONESTY AND INTEGRITY RANKING

The following honesty and integrity ranking of 03-04 biennium Iowa K-12 school districts is the best attempt to date at eliminating the unfair state ranking advantage gained by schools that cheat. 

 The most, and least honest districts found were Maquoketa Valley and Cedar Rapids, respectively. 

 The following color coded legend shows the four honesty and integrity levels—and the honesty adjustment factor in % used for each color.  The 70% honesty adjustment factor was used to discount % Proficient scores for the least honest school districts in the state—shaded in red in the Ranking Table below.  There was no adjustment made for schools shaded in green, even though their honesty and integrity is no where near that of Iowa’s casinos—that have very effective quality control systems in place and working.  Casinos obviously care more about what happens to casino money than public schools and teacher’s unions care about what happens to children.  Anyone doubting this need only visit a casino and learn about their superior auditing/monitoring/quality control system.  Anyone claiming to have a better ranking method is asked to provide it to Iowalive. 

It is encouraging that many schools are ranked high in honesty and integrity and the avg. % claimed proficient as well--such as Aurelia and Maquoketa Valley.  This is not a competitive ranking—all schools could and should be tied for number 1 in honesty and % Proficient. 

There can be no doubt the larger schools have the lowest integrity and % Proficient rankings-with the eight largest districts ranked within the bottom 15 school districts.  It makes no sense to push for larger school districts.   Analysis has shown the Cedar Rapids school district, ranked lowest in integrity and now operating at 31% efficiency, annually wastes more money ($58,035,400) than the total $56,873,300 the 31 smallest school districts spend.  

CAUTION:  A top state ranking in Iowa doesn’t mean very much as Iowa 4^th NAEP scores rank Iowa 22^nd in the U. S.--which ranks 24^th of 29 countries in the world.   Nothing to date has improved student achievement in Iowa—to the embarrassment of the Governor and state legislators, not to mention the media, who have blindly supported the schools to date—and the billions spent/wasted on ‘education’.  

CONTENTS OF RANKING TABLE 

The ranking table consists of four columns—name of school district, district honesty & integrity ranking, the adjusted ranking of % of students claimed as proficient and the adjusted average percentage of students claimed as being Proficient in 4^th and 8^th grade reading and math.   The baseline % Proficient data was obtained from the 05 Iowa Teacher Quality Report. 

For example, for Cedar Rapids, the baseline, unadjusted numbers for the 03-04 biennium were:  68, 68, 71, 69 and averaged 69% proficient, for a 311 state ranking —as posted on website: http://www.iowalive.net/03-04%20rank.htm   .  To correct the Cedar Rapids numbers for honesty and integrity, they were multiplied by the 70% red honesty adjustment  factor to get 48, 48, 50, 48 for an average of 48% actually proficient, and a state ranking of 342--as shown in column 4 in the Ranking Table below.    

Because of Iowa’s low Proficiency standard, (40^th National Percentile Rank--NPR) Proficiency merely means students scored at or above grade 3.2 or 6.9 in 4^th and 8^th grade tests respectively.  Honest people would likely consider this deception to be fraudulent. 

To find your school, click on ‘edit’, ‘find’ and then enter the name of your school and click ‘find next’.  

Note:  Because cheating skews the bell curve, a reasonably honest school, such as Red Oak, can make a large improvement in rankings.  This is shown by comparing Red Oak’s % Proficient rank (90) in the following table with its ranking (306) in the table on website: http://www.iowalive.net/03-04%20rank.htm    This is the purpose of the honesty/integrity adjustments—honesty  and fairness.   It should be noted there are about 3 times as many Iowa schools shaded in red than are shaded in green. 

To Iowalive’s knowledge, the following rankings and % Proficient numbers are the most honest ever posted.  Multiply the numbers in column 4 by .6 to get the approximate avg. % of Iowa students scoring at Iowa Equivalent Grade Level (IGE).  At most there are only 37% of Iowa’s 4^th and 8^th graders scoring at grade level.   NAEP TEST RESULTS SHOWED ONLY ABOUT 27% WERE “PROFICIENT” AT GRADE LEVEL. 

  RANKING TABLE