Good Grades Mean More Money

As we know, the No Child Left Behind Law has converted many schools into test-taking factories. The Atlanta schools were really worried that many of their students would have a great degree of difficulty with the standardized tests. So, they figured out a way to ensure high scores.

The teachers reviewed the tests before recording the scores. When they came across a wrong answer, they simply changed it to the correct answer. Or, they made sure that lower-performing students were seated near higher-performing students so that both students would do well on the test; the lower-performing students had very good eyesight. Basically, the school system cheated. And they did it since 2001.

Thus far, 82 teachers and principals have admitted that cheating was rampant. For many teachers, it was a case of cheat or lose your job.

There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.

Education in India must be cutthroat

The photo above is of parents and friends trying to pass cheat sheets to students taking 10th-grade examinations. If the students fail the exams, their education stops. So, the pressure to pass is very high.  6 million parents and others accompanied the students to the examination centers. The authorities posted police at all schools where examinations were being held.

About 600 high school students were expelled for cheating on the exams. Given that 1,400,000 students took the exam, that's not very many cheaters. It's the parents climbing the walls that is truly bizarre.

Finnish schools vs. American schools

Diane Ravitch has been a long time critic of our educational system.  She has been especially damning of the current efforts at reform with its over-emphasis on standardized testing.  She is a strong believer that poverty plays a large role in the current sorry state of education in the U.S.  In her view the reformers believe that better teachers will solve our problems. Ravitch asks whether we also need better superintendents and elected officials, as these people control the purse and how funds are allocated.

Her latest article in the NY Review of Books discusses the education system of Finland, which is rated as one of the best in the world when measured by the PISA assessment of OECD countries.  She thinks this assessment is based on the following (emphasis mine):

• Unlike our domestic tests, there are no consequences attached to the tests administered by the PISA. No individual or school learns its score. No one is rewarded or punished because of these tests. No one can prepare for them, nor is there any incentive to cheat.
• Finland is an alternative universe. It rejects all of the “reforms” currently popular in the United States, such as testing, charter schools, vouchers, merit pay, competition, and evaluating teachers in relation to the test scores of their students.
• Finnish schools have the least variation in quality, meaning that they come closest to achieving equality of educational opportunity—an American ideal.
• Finland borrowed many of its most valued ideas from the United States, such as equality of educational opportunity, individualized instruction, portfolio assessment, and cooperative learning. Most of its borrowing derives from the work of the philosopher John Dewey.

 Another major difference between us and Finland is the training of teachers.  It seems more rigorous than ours; all must earn a master's degree in the subject they will be teaching.  The curriculum gives a lot of leeway to the teachers; they decide what to teach, how to teach and how to gauge the student's progress. And, of course, Finland is more socialist than the U.S., taxes are high but education, including college, is free.

Ravitch concludes the article thus, " the central aim of Finnish education is the development of each child as a thinking, active, creative person, not the attainment of higher test scores, and the primary strategy of Finnish education is cooperation, not competition."

 

Debate Cheat Sheet

For a larger chart and some interesting comments, go here.

Quotes from Neil Barofsky

He was the Inspector General for TARP.  These quotes are from an interview with Gretchen Morgenson.

• “The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true,” Mr. Barofsky said in an interview last week. “It really happened. These suspicions are valid.”  
• “Treasury had failed to ensure that the servicers had the necessary infrastructure to support a massive mortgage modification program.” It barely got off the ground, and few homeowners have received the help they hoped for. 
• “There has to be wide-scale acknowledgment that regulatory capture exists, dominates our system and needs to be eradicated,”
• “We need to re-educate our regulators that it’s O.K. to be adversarial, that it’s not going to hurt your career advancement to be more skeptical and more challenging,” he said. “It’s implicit in so much of the regulatory structure that if you don’t make too many waves there will be a job for you elsewhere. So we have to limit those job opportunities and develop a more professional path for regulators as a career. That way, they won’t always have that siren call of Wall Street.” 
• “So much of what’s wrong with Dodd-Frank is it trusts the regulators to be completely immune to the corrupting influences of the banks,” he said in the interview. “That’s so unrealistic. Congress has to take a meat cleaver to these banks and not trust regulators to do the job with a scalpel.”  
• “Incentives are baked into the system to take advantage of it for short-term profit,” he said. “The incentives are to cheat, and cheating is profitable because there are no consequences.” 

Talking with the elephants

Elephants can follow verbal commands from people.  That's the conclusion  of a study by Think Elephants, a Thailand-based organization that promotes conservation through education.  Can your dog or cat do that?

Perhaps even more surprising the resulting academic paper was coauthored by middle school students living and studying at the East Side Middle School in Manhattan. The students communicated with the principal authors in Africa via Skype.


The founder of Think Elephants, Dr. Joshua Plotnik, arranges for three to four elephants in the camp to hang out with the students while the handlers feed them. The students can ask questions, see inside the elephants’ mouths, watch an impromptu veterinary check, etc. The publication of the paper paper capped off a “three-year endeavor to create a comprehensive middle school curriculum that educates and engages young people directly in elephant and other wildlife conservation.”

Through his experiments, Dr. Plotnik has shown that elephants have cognitive abilities on par with or that exceed dolphins, primates and even approach humans. Elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror, joining other animals that have self-awareness, express empathy and lead socially complex lives. They can lend a helping trunk and cooperate with one another in fulfilling complicated tasks. Sometimes they even cheat.

Will anybody be indicted?

Citibank has just paid another fine. This time the $158,000,000 fine was assessed because Citi tried to cheat the FHA.  Citi passed bad loans - some of which were fraudulent - to the FHA, which insured these loans and allows Citi to avoid the risk of default by the homeowner. 

The FHA has standards for these loans. Citi essentially ignored these standards. In some years, almost half of the loans Citi had passed to the FHA defaulted. Citi did establish a quality control unit for these loans, but did almost everything in its power to emasculate the unit.

While the government has reserved the right to pursue criminal charges, do you think any Citi bigwig will face retribution?

Is it being involved with nuclear weapons?

Last month we learned that many Air Force officers working with nuclear weapons at a Montana base were involved in a cheating on tests they were require to take. Apparently, the cheating is not restricted to Air Force people. Now the Navy has checked in and said that at least 30 sailors involved with nuclear weapons at a South Carolina base also had a need to cheat on tests. You may recall that this is not the first Navy scandal. In November I reported on the bribery with regard to contractors to the Navy.

OnLine Learning is everywhere

Even soldiers use it to get promoted; sometimes a soldier's spouse takes the exam for the soldier. The problem is that some sites provide both questions and answers to many promotion exams. The Boston Globe found copies of 1200+ different promotion exams on the web.

Many of these exams are used to find out whether soldiers know things that can save their lives and the lives of their comrades. Yet, for the sake of getting a promotion some are willing to take the risk of not really knowing these matters.

Would an army of draftees cheat as much as an army of professionals?

A beauty contest for camels

Thousands of camels compete for the beauty prize of the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival in Saudi Arabia. They are judged on their shapely lips and humps. There is big money involved, a combined prize money of $57,000,000. So, there was a decent incentive for some to cheat. Twelve camels were disqualified from the contest because their owners tried to tweak their good looks with Botox. They applied Botox to the animals' lips, nose and jaw as big heads, lips, noses and jaws, which are important for a camel's beauty.

Don't cheat on your spouse

If you do in Aceh province in Indonesia, you'll be stoned to death. The provincial parliament approved this law unanimously along with a law that prescribes 100 lashes and 1,000 grams of gold or up to 100 months in prison for homosexual or lesbian activities. Allah must be served.

The CEO’s Shadow Account

There have been intermittent stories about the firing of Robert O’Connell, the CEO of MassMutual, an old New England company. Although Mr. O’Connell really did a good job for the company (revenue was up 50% and shareholders’ equity by 62% in the five years he ran the company), he was sacked in June. Based on an article this week in the Wall Street Journal, there were a couple of reasons for letting him go: a possible affair with a subordinate, nepotism, the usual ‘management style’ and, the most interesting to me, misuse of his shadow account. Shadow accounts appear to be a fairly common 'perk' among large company CEOs.

What, you may ask, is a shadow account? Well, it’s another perquisite of being a CEO of a big company. When O’Connell started with MassMutual, he was awarded $4,100,000 in a ‘funny money’ investment account, referred to as a shadow retirement account. I say ‘funny money’ because no money actually changed hands; it was like monopoly money. Except in this case - as with other CEOs - the company would pay him the real money value of this account when he retired.

The real money value of the account would change as Mr. O’Connell made hypothetical trades. He was able to convert his original kitty of just over four mil to $30,600,000 by March of this year. Had he invested in the Dow Jones, his kitty would have grown to ‘only’ $5,500,000. How did he do so well? Basically, by cheating and by the lack of any real supervision of the account by the company.

The people who signed off on the account were Mr. O’Connell’s subordinates and really did not review his hypothetical trades and understandably so. This wasn’t enough for O’Connell. Although he was restricted to ‘trading’ in either of 15 mutual funds or Dow Jones stocks, he ‘invested’ in IPOs of such household names as CoSine Communications, Inc. Not only did he invest in unauthorized securities, he took advantage of the hypothetical nature of his trades by investing early in the morning at the previous day’s closing price; so he could take advantage of any after hours news.

Being CEO of a large public American company is still the best job in the world. You can be incompetent. You can cheat. You can be a thief. You’ll still walk away with millions.