Authorities finally outwit 4-year-old who made hundreds of 911 calls

CARPENTERSVILLE, Ill. -- Authorities tracked down a 4-year-old girl who called 911 nearly 300 times last month by offering to deliver McDonald's to her suburban Chicago apartment complex.

Unbeknownst to her mother, the girl used a deactivated cell phone to call dispatchers 287 times in June -- sometimes as often as 20 times a shift.

Dispatchers on the other end heard the child's voice but could only track the phone's signal to an apartment complex. So authorities used a ruse to solve the mystery.

"We asked (the caller) what she wanted. She said she wanted McDonald's," said Steve Cordes, executive director of QuadCom's emergency center, which covers Carpentersville, Dundee and surrounding areas. "We talked with her and we convinced her if she told us where she lives, we would bring her McDonald's," he said.

"She finally gave us her address. So we sent the police over, with no McDonald's."

This from the Chicago Tribune.

Test score inflation: Coming soon to a state near you

One of Kentucky Education Commissioner Barbara Erwin's first duties will be to announce remarkable gains made by Kentucky students as measured by state tests.

The announcement will be made this coming fall.

The tests, recently completed, have not been scored. No reports are out. I have no scientific studies to back me up. No official statements have been issued by KDE that support my...let's call it a hunch.

And perhaps, I'm jumping the gun here, but I find it curious that I still haven't been able to find a teacher or principal - not one person - who thinks this year's test was as hard as past assessments. And I've been trying. The best I can offer is one 10th grade social studies teacher who thinks the test is about as difficult as before.


One elementary academic coach (in a tough school) actually laughed at my inquiry, giving me a big Cheshire Cat grin that only comes with that certain feeling of future success, and job security.

But all around central Kentucky, teachers and principals are smiling sheepishly because they believe the test they just gave to Kentucky students is noticably easier than past assessments.

Something's going on here and the most likely explanation is that Kentucky has (silently) joined the group of states that have dumbed down the test in order to realize numerical gains. Nationally—in response to NCLB—states have been tinkering with their state exams, in part, to help boost pass rates.

It makes for a better press conference.

It is almost comical that - if my hunch proves true - once again, Barbara Erwin will benefit - just as she did in Illinois last year.

The "benefit" comes from her ability to claim sole responsibility for impressive student achievement gains as though they were a result of her action. In reality, big gains were seen across Illinois only AFTER significant changes were made to the assessment.

In March, the Chicago Tribune reported, "Why test scores went up."

Illinois elementary school pupils passed the newly revamped state achievement exams at record rates last year, but critics suggest it was more the result of changes to the tests than real progress by pupils.

Overall, children passed 77 percent of all math, reading and science exams they took in 2006, compared with 69 percent the year before, according to a Tribune analysis of test data.

The 8 percentage-point gain is the biggest one-year increase since the state started giving the Illinois Standards Achievement Test in 1999.On most exams, the 2005-2006 gains outpaced the improvement made over the previous five years combined.
Low-income and minority pupils posted the largest increases, which helped narrow the pernicious gap between their performance and that of their white, Asian and more affluent counterparts.

...Most notably, the state dramatically lowered the passing bar on the 8th-grade math test. As a result—after hovering at about 50 percent for five years—the pass rate shot up to 78 percent last year.

...Pupils also were scored on one extended response, compared with two the year before. Extended response, which requires pupils to answer in essay form, is tougher than multiple choice.

"...It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that something doesn't compute here," said Lawrence Aleamoni, an education professor at the University of Arizona who has written extensively about tests. "The big jumps tell me something is going on here. All of the changes they made to the test will certainly inflate the scores."

But state education officials argue that the 2006 exams are just as difficult as the previous tests."Everyone on our staff wholeheartedly believes that teachers prepared their kids well," said Becky McCabe, who oversees testing for the Illinois State Board of Education, which administers the tests. "The kids were prepared for the tests and it shows in the results."

Statistically, the lower the pass rate, the easier it is to show progress. It's tougher to move from 80 to 90 percent passing, than from 30 to 40 percent. In Illinois, the test changes helped lift the scores of all but 52 of 766 elementary and unit school districts. The pass rate of low-income pupils on the 8th-grade math exam doubled, from 32 percent in 2005 to 64 percent last year.

"It's an anomaly that blows the credibility of this test," said Jeff Mays, president of the Illinois Business RoundTable, which opposed changes to the 8th-grade math test. "I think we need an independent party to come and look at this and help us build a road map to credibility."

From another Chicago Tribune piece: "There is clearly a race to the bottom going on," said Kevin Carey, a policy director at Education Sector, a think tank that studied state testing changes. "When states change rules under No Child Left Behind, it's always changes that will make it easier for schools. One state will come up with an `innovative' way to give schools the statistical benefit of the doubt and then every state will follow suit."

Education Sector's analysis from Thomas Toch's "Flunking Tests:"

Testing industry experts say that many of the tests that states are introducing under NCLB contain mostly questions that require students merely to recall or restate facts rather than doing more demanding tasks like applying or evaluating information, largely because it's easier and cheaper to test the simpler tasks.

Experts say that "open-ended" questions, which require students to produce their own answers rather than select from among answers supplied by test-writers (the format of multiple-choice questions), are a good way to gauge students' grasp of higher-level skills....Low-level questions have a role; it's important that students grasp the most basic skills.

But NCLB has sought to lift the level of teaching in the nation's classrooms by requiring states to set challenging standards. Tests that demand students learn only low-level skills give teachers incentives to drive down the level of instruction in their classrooms.

They also give an inflated sense of student achievement.

Scores on reading tests that measure mainly literal comprehension are going to be higher than those on tests with a lot of questions that require students to evaluate what they've read by, say, reading two passages and identifying themes common to both. The same is true in math.

That's how it was in Illinois when Erwin's District 303 posted what would have otherwise been impressive gains.

I'm guessing that's how it will be in Kentucky. But here, too, testing officials will ignore the obvious and claim that the gains are real. What else can they do?

But you can credit Barbara Erwin...if you want to.

School gives boys the key to becoming real men

D'Angelo Gardner didn't like it when staff members at Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men started telling him to tuck in his shirt, pull up his pants, straighten his tie.He didn't like the unfamiliar feeling of having a black man telling him what to do at all.

His father had died of a heroin overdose when he was 9. His mother, raising three children on her own, hoped that the new charter school in West Englewood could teach her son how to be a man.

"Please pick my son. We need you," Angela Russell scribbled several times in the margins of his school application.Urban Prep, Chicago's only public all-boys high school, opened last fall against the backdrop of nationwide concern over the widening achievement gap between African-American boys and other students.

On the first day of school, the average freshman at Urban Prep was reading at a 6th-grade level.As the academy completes the first year of its experiment to reverse the abysmal high school graduation rate among black male students -- the lowest of any group in [Chicago] -- administrators say they are getting some traction in the classroom.

...Angela Russell, sees [her son] evolving into the young man she wants him to be, in big and small ways. He's less "D'Lo," the boy from the neighborhood, and more "Mr. Gardner."

"I knew I couldn't teach him how to be a man," she said. "That was my whole point of sending him to Urban Prep, so that they could show my son what real men do: They get up, they go to work -- not what you see on the videos or the corner..."

This from the Chicago Tribune:
~
Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men
* Founded by Tim King, former head of Hales Franciscan High School, a South Side Catholic school for black boys
* Opened Sept. 5, 2006, with 160 freshmen selected by lottery
* Mission: To provide a college-preparatory education
* By 2010 the school will house freshmen through seniors
* 22 employees, most of whom are African-American men: 10 full-time teachers, 12 full-time administrators and staff members
* $2.25 million annual budget; nearly $1 million from fundraisingStudent demographics
* 90 percent come from single-parent households
* 92 percent daily attendance rate.* 95 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch

Urban Prep Creed

We believe.
We are the young men of Urban Prep.
We are college bound.
We are exceptional -- not because we say it, but because we work hard at it.
We will not falter in the face of any obstacle placed before us.
We are dedicated, committed and focused.
We never succumb to mediocrity, uncertainty or fear.
We never fail because we never give up.
We make no excuses.
We choose to live honestly, nonviolently and honorably.

Girl in prison for shove gets released early

Teen is first of possible hundreds to be freed from a scandal-ridden juvenile justice system

Shaquanda Cotton, the black teenager in the small east Texas town of Paris whose prison sentence of up to 7 years for shoving a teacher's aide sparked nationwide controversy, was released Saturday.

Her release, ordered by a special conservator appointed to overhaul the state's scandal-ridden juvenile prison system, was the first of what could be hundreds as a panel of civil rights leaders begins reviewing the sentences of every youth incarcerated by the Texas Youth Commission to weed out those being held arbitrarily.

"We have no confidence in the system that was in place," said Jim Hurley, spokesman for the conservator, Jay Kimbrough. "And this case is an example of what we expect to happen if something wrong has been done to youths being held inside that system."

This from the Chicago Tribune.

In Texas, a white teenager burns down her family's home and receives probation.

A recent story in the Chicago Tribune has resonated - big time - with the public. The story was written by Howard Witt who is the Tribune's Southwest Bureau Chief, based in Houston.

Witt reported:

To some in Paris, sinister past is back

In Texas, a white teenager burns down her family's home and receives probation.

A black one shoves a hall monitor and gets 7 years in prison.

The state NAACP calls it `a signal to black folks.'

The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the nation. Unless you know the history of the place.

There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of white spectators would gather to watch and cheer as black men were dragged onto a scaffold, scalded with hot irons and finally burned to death or hanged...

There was the 19-year-old white man, convicted last July of criminally negligent homicide for killing a 54-year-old black woman and her 3-year-old grandson with his truck, who was sentenced in Paris to probation and required to send an annual Christmas card to the victims' family.

There are the Paris public schools, which are under investigation by the U.S. Education Department after repeated complaints that administrators discipline black students more frequently, and more harshly, than white students.

And then there is the case that most troubles Cherry and leaders of the Texas NAACP, involving a 14-year-old black freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, who shoved a hall monitor at Paris High School in a dispute over entering the building before the school day had officially begun.The youth had no prior arrest record, and the hall monitor--a 58-year-old teacher's aide--was not seriously injured. But Shaquanda was tried in March 2006 in the town's juvenile court, convicted of "assault on a public servant" and sentenced by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville to prison for up to 7 years, until she turns 21.

Just three months earlier, Superville sentenced a 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family's house, to probation...

~

Witt followed up today with a description of the internet activity and public outcry that followed:

Sometimes, as a newspaper reporter, you write a story that touches enough readers that a few write you letters or e-mails in response.

Less often, but even more gratifying, you write a story that actually changes something, like getting a bad law fixed or a corrupt politician indicted or a donation for a kid who can't afford life-saving surgery.

And every once in a blue moon, you write something that literally explodes across the Internet in ways no one could predict...