5.19.10 - Undercover investigators trying to enroll a handful of fictitious children in federally funded Head Start child care centers found that in about half of the cases, workers fraudulently misrepresented parents' incomes, addresses and other information to allow kids to qualify for a slot.

Some Head Start workers commit fraud so kids qualify, investigators say

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

Undercover investigators trying to enroll a handful of fictitious children in federally funded Head Start child care centers found that in about half of the cases, workers fraudulently misrepresented parents' incomes, addresses and other information to allow kids to qualify for a slot.

In one instance, according to the investigators' report, a Head Start worker in New Jersey handed back one of two pay stubs and told an investigator posing as a parent, "Now you see it, now you don't."

Prompted by anonymous tips to a fraud hotline, investigators with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) looked at centers in six states — California, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin — and the District of Columbia. In 13 of 15 cases, they tried to enroll children whose family incomes made them ineligible. In two more, families qualified, but the GAO wanted to find out whether Head Start would count children as enrolled even if they never attended the program. In all, investigators found fraud in eight cases.

The revelations, contained in congressional testimony presented Tuesday to the House Education and Labor Committee, come at a sensitive time for Head Start. Established in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, the program received $7.2 billion from Congress this year to serve 900,000 children in 1,600 centers. The stimulus law added $2.1 billion to create 59,000 more slots.

7.6.10 - The Boston Globe reported July 4 that students have been studying less in high school and college compared with past decades. “In survey after survey since 2000, college and high school students are alarmingly candid that they are simply not studying very much at all. Some longtime professors have noted the trend, which rarely gets mentioned by college admissions officials when prospective students visit campus.”

But two weeks earlier, the New York Times provided a clue about one reason students feel less compelled to hit the books:

One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average. But it’s not because they are all working harder. The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market. In the last two years, at least 10 law schools have deliberately changed their grading systems to make them more lenient. These include law schools like New York University and Georgetown, as well as Golden Gate University and Tulane University, which just announced the change this month. Some recruiters at law firms keep track of these changes and consider them when interviewing, and some do not.

Of course, if you can get a higher grade without studying at all, why bother studying very hard?

The New York Times went on to explain: “Law schools seem to view higher grades as one way to rescue their students from the tough economic climate — and perhaps more to the point, to protect their own reputations and rankings.” Grades given as economic support, rather than as a measure of student achievement? Yep, you read that right. But what is really happening is the destruction of the reputations of these colleges. Moreover, they are creating a “why try?” climate by granting higher grades for nothing.

The move to bump all students' grades northward is reminiscent of the satire based upon the fictional Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” Of course, not all children can be “above average” — or the word “average” loses all meaning.

The recent grade inflation at Loyola University will be retroactive to 2007, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Loyola's change will affect current students and alumni who graduated in 2007 or later — the classes that received grades based on a letter-grade system beginning in 2004.”

Victor J. Gold told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the school's purpose was to keep up with grade inflation in other law schools. “We're not trying to make them look better than other comparable students at other schools. We just want them to be on an even playing field.” The Chronicle of Higher Education quoted Stuart Rojstaczer, “a retired Duke University professor who has studied grade inflation and created an online database about it,” who “said that changes like Loyola's can open more job opportunities for students.” Huh? Do the law schools really think they can really fool employers? In a word, yes. “There are employers that have GPA cutoffs,” Rojstaczer said, “and by inflating grades, you increase the number of students who meet those GPA cutoffs.”

Keith O'Brien of the Boston Globe for July 4 explains that the students are coming into colleges with the knowledge of grade inflation, and the same expectations that academic mediocrity should be rewarded with high grades:

They come with polished resumes and perfect SAT scores. Their grades are often impeccable. Some elite universities will deny thousands of high school seniors with 4.0 grade point averages in search of an elusive quality that one provost called “intellectual vitality.” The perception is that today’s over-achieving, college-driven kids have it — whatever it is. They’re not just groomed; they’re ready. There’s just one problem. Once on campus, the students aren’t studying.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/culture/education/3946-grade-inflation-in-american-education