Shortly after lunch yesterday, Gretchen began to receive frantic calls from the Associated American Federation of Educators, a well-known and powerful national lobby of K through 12 teachers here in Washington DC, urgently requesting a consultation as soon as possible. As it happened, the Turkish Foreign Under Secretary to the United States had to cancel – as a result of being beaned with an iron skillet during an argument with his Welsh wife about who committed the first genocide, the British or the Turks. The Turks, of course, as Kanye West and the Kardashians, as well as a somewhat lesser celebrity who goes by the name of Pope Francis are making sure everyone knows, killed a lot of Armenians a century ago. Images of neatly stacked piles of Armenian heads, heaps of Armenian corpses, and pathetically clichéd starving Armenians are easily accessible on the Internet, no doubt about that, as anyone who has entered “Armenian genocide” into their favorite search engine knows all too well. But how many of them know that Lord Kitchener coined the term “concentration camps” and saw to it that hundreds of thousands of Boer women and children imprisoned in them were fed bread baked with ground glass? Bad show, old boy, I say – at least Zyklon B was a quick death. Pimp, pimp, cheerio, there will always be an England, I guess, and those quaint Windsor Royals are more adorable than Barbie, I know, but let’s not forget that it was the British who invented genocide and not the Turks. And with that said, best wishes to my dear colleague, Nōspik Baksheesh Anusol, for his speedy recovery after that nasty bonk on the head from his Better Half – and many thanks to her for everything she did for me after I bailed her out of the DC jail Thursday night. Notwithstanding that, I had an open appointment slot, and so I agreed to engage in a consultation with Dr. Demiwit Dement, Principal Board Member of the AAFE.
“Mr. Collins,” he proclaimed as he stormed into my office and assumed a seat in the chair immediately to the right of my desk, leaning in with an air of high importance, “this is a dark time for American education!”
“You are referring,” I surmised, “to the Atlanta school teacher cheating scandal and the sentences handed down to them earlier this week by Judge Jerry Baxter.”
“Precisely!” Dr. Dement shouted, leaning even closer, his breath redolent of onions. “It’s a complete travesty of justice!”
“Perhaps,” I allowed, “but weren’t the teachers’ actions just as great a travesty of education… and public trust, for that matter?”
Dr. Dement sat back, his arms crossing his chest, and emitted a self-righteous harrumph. “The AAFE’s mission is the protection of its members’ interests.”
“Were any of the teachers sentenced by Judge Baxter members of the AAFE, then?” I sought to establish.
“No,” he admitted, “none of them were. But they could have been. The issues involved concern our members as much as any other teachers’ unions, and even teachers who don’t belong to a union, in fact.”
“In this case,” I observed, “the issues appear to be, first, that teachers in the Atlanta Public Schools District conspired with their administrators for a number of years to falsify students’ answers on various standardized tests in order to preserve their employment positions and gain pay increases and bonuses; second, when they were caught they lied about it to the authorities; third, they were subsequently convicted of conspiracy under the federal RICO Act; and, fourth, they generally refused to accept post-trial plea bargains for reduced sentences in return for public admissions and apologies for their reprehensible betrayal of Atlanta’s youth.”
“Those are the prosecutor’s issues!” he blared. “The teachers’ issues are that the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 unjustly punished them with threats of lost income and even lost employment through inequitable salary and advancement penalties and school closures; and, that conducting the trial of a group of school teachers and their administrators under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act is repugnant perversion of the intent of Congress; and, that the sentences given those unjustly convicted teachers are completely inappropriate, being more suitable for Central American drug kingpins, Mafia hit men and Russian mobsters trafficking in sex slaves.”
“It’s a fact,” I reminded him, “that one hundred and seventy-eight teachers at forty-four out of fifty-six Atlanta schools were involved in the conspiracy.”
“Yes,” he acknowledged, “that’s what the GBI found.”
“And,” I continued, “that between 2002 and 2009, Atlanta school children’s scores on Criteria-Referenced Competency Tests showed strangely remarkable improvements. Why, the eighth graders’ scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, increased by fourteen points, which was enough to get Beverly Hall, the Atlanta Superintendent of Schools, the Superintendent of the Year Award in 2009.”
“Unfortunately,” Dr. Dement sniffed, “Superintendent Hall died before the trial ended.”
“True,” I said, “but there were plenty of conspirators…”
“Teachers!” he interrupted.
“Plenty of… teachers… and their… administrators,” I pressed on, “who managed to live through the trial. Dr. Sharon Davis-Williams, Executive Director of the Atlanta Public School System, got twenty years. So did School Resource Team Executive Director Tamara Cotman and APS Executive at Large Michael Pitts. Dana Evans, Angela Williamson, Tabeeka Jordan, Diane Buckner-Webb and Theresia Copeland all got five years in prison. Donald Bullock, the Testing Coordinator who turned state’s evidence and rolled on the rest of them got off with six months.”
“Yeah!” Dr. Dement complained. “The rat gets six months! What kind of justice is that?”
“The kind of justice,” I told him, “with which virtually every gang member in America is familiar. Although, it seems to me, having capos like Davis-Williams, Cotman and Pitts at the top of his criminal organization, I doubt Mr. Buckner will have much to worry about surviving in general population while he does his half penny. Any real criminal can do six months standing on their head, of course, but who knows? Maybe he’ll get shanked with a Number Two pencil in the exercise yard anyway. All very tragic – for the poor kids of Atlanta, Georgia, that is. But, be that as it may, what can I do for you on this reasonably idyllic Washington spring day?”
“Mr. Collins,” he confided, “we have reason to believe… there are… um… similar problems… in other school systems. Here, look at this.”
Dr. Dement handed me a photocopy of what appeared to be a page from an early elementary school work book. At the top, it was captioned, “Write the Opposite of Each Picture.” On the left were pictures of various objects and to the right of each, a blank line where the child was to fill in a word for the opposite.
“Okay” I mused as I examined the page, “I see an arrow pointing toward the top of the page, which I presume the child is expected to interpreted as ‘up.’ The expected response, then, I suppose, would be to write the word ‘down’ in the space provided.”
“Yes,” he nodded, “that is the expected answer.”
“And then I see an arrow pointing to the right,” I noted, “which presumably means that the child is supposed to respond by writing the word ‘left’ next to it. Then there’s… hmm… a picture of a campfire? What’s the expected response there – the word ‘water,’ maybe?”
“Yes,” he confirmed, “the expected response there is that the child will write in the word ‘water’ as the opposite of fire.”
“Holy Hanna,” I gasped, “the next picture is a frog! What in God’s name is the opposite of a frog?”
“Now you see the problem,” Dr. Dement barked. “The school board that approved that work book expects the child to write down that the opposite of a frog is ‘tadpole.’”
“This demonstrates a level of ignorance,” I assessed, “that would embarrass Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh and Ronald Wilson Reagan put together!”
“So it would,” he sighed.
“You’re not telling me,” I inquired, “that this is an example of the educational materials used in the Atlanta Public School System, are you?”
“I can neither confirm or deny,” he steadfastly stonewalled, “that this is an example of the elementary school educational materials used in the Atlanta public schools. It might be from the public school system of… oh, I don’t know… Tulsa, Oklahoma or Biloxi, Mississippi, or Ferguson, Missouri or Montgomery, Alabama or Lexington, Kentucky, or any number of other public school systems having… ah… shall we say… similar professional standards for their teaching work force.”
“You’re telling me,” I sought to confirm, “that the general level of teaching competency in Southern and Midwestern American school systems is so low that it’s a virtual certainty the ill-conceived and ham-handedly administered carrots and sticks of No Child Left Behind have spawned an epidemic of standardized test cheating throughout the marginal school systems of this nation?”
“That’s definitely one of the things,” he confirmed, “about which the AAFE is highly concerned. So for starters, Mr. Collins, what can we do about that?”
“For starters,” I advised, indicating his example classroom lesson, “under no circumstances should anyone in the media ever see this. And if anything similar surfaces, the AAFE should first claim it is obviously a joke, and if that fails, disavow any knowledge of such materials being used. Next, I’d like to ask you, frankly, isn’t there something the AAFE can do about improving teacher qualifications?”
“No, not really,” he lamented. “You have to realize, Mr. Collins, that, as I have already noted, the AAFE exists to serve the interests of its members, and if you are an organization where more than half of your members are incompetent nincompoops, you can’t go around promoting higher standards of performance for the profession, now can you? But look at it from our members’ point of view, if you will. Here they are, in a classroom with thirty or forty children, half of whom don’t even speak English, whose parents – if they have parents – live in a trailer or an apartment with ten other people – if they have a home at all, that is. And if those parents have jobs, then they have two or three of them and don’t have any time to spend with their children; and if they don’t have jobs, then they take drugs and drink cheap wine and malt liquor while watching television all day; and whatever else is going on, you can be sure that none of those parents even read the newspaper, much less books. Now tell me, Mr. Collins, what reasonably bright, talented and qualified educator would accept less money than a garbage man to put in twelve to sixteen hour days, six or even seven days a week, to work in a living hell like that? Don’t bother to answer, Mr. Collins, because I will tell you – nobody who can do better will stick with a job somewhere like APS for more than a couple of years because they know they don’t have to and after a couple of years, they realize it’s hopeless. So what you get in the permanent teaching workforce,” he insisted, waving the Opposite of Frog workbook page in my face, “is people who create educational abominations like this! And then, those poor, benighted fools receive a mandate from on high in the form of the No Child Left Behind Act which says if they, as teachers, can’t perform miracles in their classroom that make raising Lazurus from the dead look easy, they all lose their pay increases, and, if the school closes down, probably their jobs, too.”
“This is all very sad,” I agreed. “In places like Atlanta, Tulsa, Houston, St. Louis, Memphis, Birmingham or Little Rock, people are so short-sighted and greedy, they won’t pay reasonable taxes to support a decent public education system. Then American economic and immigration policies flood those public schools with the children of disadvantaged families and the result is an inexcusable disaster for which no one will take responsibility. Instead, Washington imposes moronic policy solutions like No Child Left Behind that are obviously designed to fail. It’s a heartbreaking situation with no feasible, practical and just solution, to be sure. But on the other hand, you can’t spit in this town without hitting a heartbreaking situation that has no feasible, practical or just solution. So what?”
“So,” he revealed, “the AAFE wants you to figure out how teachers can cheat on the No Child Left Behind tests without getting caught.”
“I am not a lawyer,” I averred, “but I’m friends with several of them, and I’m pretty sure all of them would warn me not to help someone such as yourself plan a criminal conspiracy.”
Dement knit his brow and stared up at the ceiling for a long moment. “Um… theoretically speaking, then… just hypothetically… perhaps even for purposes of planning ways to defeat such tactics… how could a teacher cheat on No Child Left Behind standardized tests and get away with it?”
“Okay, hypothetically, then,” I dryly responded, “first of all, they had better not be throwing parties where all the conspirators get together and change the test sheets, like those idiots in Atlanta did. The conspirators should adopt a cell structure, and work alone so that if one teacher gets caught, the other teachers who aren’t in the same cell, as well as the ringleaders… I mean, school system administrators… have plausible deniability.”
“Cell structures… plausible deniability,” he repeated quietly to himself, writing in a leather bound notebook with a Waterman pen.
“On the day of the test, each teacher should select several pencils from the same box they distribute to the victims… I mean, their students... so that the use of different pencils or erasers can’t be detected later with neutron activation spectroscopy. After collecting the answer sheets at the end of the test, any subsequent contact with them should be carried out wearing gloves so as to avoid a suspicious excess of the teacher’s fingerprints. Prior to… making the adjustments… each teacher will need an extensive table of random numbers, so that…”
“Tables of random numbers?” Dement interrupted. “What would they need those for?”
“To use,” I answered, “along with an appropriate procedure to avoid doing something monumentally stupid like those dumb peckerwoods down in Atlanta did.”
“Which was what?” Dement wondered aloud, staring at me blankly.
“Turning in altered test sheets where ninety percent of the answers with erasures had the correct answer blacked in,” I declared. “That’s how they got caught, you know.”
“All right,” he relented, “point taken. Where are would a teacher get tables of random numbers? Could they get their computers to print them out?”
“There are lots of ways to obtain them,” I informed him. “But they shouldn’t use a computer, because the Random function merely approximates randomness with an algorithm called a pseudo-random number generator. One way they could do it would be to use a numerical expansion of Pi, which these days you can download off the Internet, and three dice. They would throw the three dice and add up the total, then close their eyes and put their finger somewhere in the middle of the Pi printout, and starting from there, write down a string of the next digits in the expansion equal in length to the total on the dice. Then, if the total was even, they would throw two dice, otherwise throw three, obtain another total and skip that many digits in the expansion, again using two or three dice depending on whether the second throw total was even or odd, using the third throw total to obtain the next string length, the fourth throw total to obtain the next skip length, and so on, unless they throw the same number on three dice, in which case they multiply the total by the last five random digits they obtained and go back that many digits, passing through the beginning of the expansion into the end if necessary, and start moving forward again after throwing two dice. They would repeat this process until they had enough random numbers to assign one each to every answer on every test sheet, plus four more for each sheet.”
“All right,” he grumbled, “that sounds like an awful lot of trouble, though.”
“Going to prison,” I reminded him, “would be considerably more trouble. If the teachers aren’t using truly random numbers, their… um… alterations… can be detected by statistical analysis.”
“Oh, all right,” he groaned. “What would they do next?”
“They would divide the test sheets into two piles, as nearly equal in number as possible,” I explained. “Taking the first sheet of the first pile, the teacher would use a small binder clip to attach a blank piece of paper to the left side of the sheet. On that piece of paper the teacher would write down a digit from the random sequence next to each answer on the test sheet, followed at the bottom with four more random digits. The first of these additional four digits is the Action Comparator Digit. The second is the No Answer Determinant Digit, the third is the Answer Correction Determinant Digit, and the fourth is the Additional Erasure Determinant Digit. The teacher would then process the test sheet in three iterations. In the first iteration, starting at the top of the test sheet, if a student did not blacken any of the ovals on a question, that is, if they skipped it, and the digit associated with that answer is greater than or equal to the value of the Action Comparator, and also less than the value of the No Answer Determinant, the teacher blackens in the oval with the correct answer; otherwise the teacher leaves the answer blank so as to avoid having a set of test sheets where all questions are always answered in every case, which is very suspicious. In the second iteration, if the student answered the question incorrectly, and the digit associated with that answer is less than or equal to the value of the Action Comparator Digit as well as greater than or equal to the Answer Correction Determinant Digit, then the teacher should erase the incorrect answer and fill in the correct one. In the third iteration, if the digit associated with an answer, plus or minus one, is congruent mod 10 to the Additional Erasure Determinant Digit and also greater than or equal to the Action Comparator Digit, the teacher should blacken and then erase one blank oval which represents an incorrect answer, unless the digit associated with that answer is exactly equal to the Additional Erasure Determinant Digit, and congruent mod 5 to the Action Comparator Digit and the answer is correct, in which case the teacher should erase the correct answer and blacken an oval which would be determined reading left to right as that which is congruent to the answer’s random digit in the modulus of the number of responses the question has, re-filling the oval for the correct answer if that is what the determination dictates. Lastly, any answers having more than one response filled in by the student should be left unaltered unless one of them is the correct response and the product of the Additional Erasure Determinant Digit with the answer’s random digit divided by the Action Comparator Digit and rounded to the nearest integer is an odd number, in which case the incorrect response or responses should be erased. At the end of processing for each sheet, the teacher would then unclip the piece of paper with the numbers on it and destroy it. The teacher would then repeat the same processing on the second stack of sheets, starting from the bottom each time instead of the top. After completing both stacks, the teacher would then shuffle and cut them like a stack of playing cards at least twenty times before sending them off for scoring, unless there is a requirement for submission of the test sheets in a predetermined order, such as by student number or last name, in which case the shuffling should be performed prior to dividing the sheets into two stacks for processing.”
“Well!” Dr. Dement exclaimed, drawing a deep breath and looking askance at his notebook. “That’s very clever, Mr. Collins. Your method would increase test scores significantly, but not suspiciously so, while leaving the teachers’… um… adjustments… virtually undetectable. But there’s just one thing about this that bothers me.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I don’t think the average AAFE member is anywhere near good enough at math to understand all this stuff.”
“Good thing we’re just speaking hypothetically then,” I observed.
“Yes, yes, of course,” he agreed. “But isn’t there something – hypothetically speaking – that’s not quite so… complicated?”
“Sure,” I vouched. “They could use a Magic Eight Ball.”
“You mean,” he ventured, “look at each question response and ask the Magic Eight Ball ‘should I write in the correct answer?’”
“Yeah,” I confirmed, “and then ask it ‘should I put in an extra erasure?’ And if they think the Eight Ball tells them to put one in, they could go over each blank oval and ask the Eight Ball if that’s the one they should blacken in and then erase. Hopefully, they’d have enough sense to change directions now and then.”
“That’s simple,” he pondered, “but it sounds like it would take a long time; much longer, even, than that complicated procedure of yours.”
“It would,” I confirmed. “Especially if they used a real, old-school Magic Eight Ball instead of an Magic Eight Ball computer program; which I would not recommend, because the computer Magic Eight Ball uses that pseudo-random number generator I mentioned earlier. It would probably take five or ten times as long, theoretically speaking, of course.”
“Obviously, then,” he asserted, “doing it manually with one of those real, old-school Magic Eight Balls would require quite a bit of patience. What would you recommend, hypothetically, I should say about that?”
“Hypothetically,” I replied, “you should tell them that the opposite of ‘patience’ is ‘unemployment.’”