Miami-Dade Schools & Education Data Fraud

Miami-Dade Schools & Education Data Fraud ‹ Campus Beast:

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

As a school superintendent, you’re typically measured by a few numbers. Test scores, graduation rates, crime rates, finances, gaps in student achievement, and perhaps a few other metrics, depending on your board of education. You can actually tackle these problems, or you can employ the dark art of data manipulation. 
In 2012, a news story exploded onto the national stage that was very instructive in how to magically lower school crime statistics – yet nearly every major news outlet missed it.

The story begins with the ways to magically lower crime stats.
1. Maximize control. Expand your “school police” – expanding your control over what happens within schools, including the crimes, also expands your ability to commit and cover up fraud. The key: make everyone within a school, including the police, report to you.
Now that you’ve expanded your control, you can proceed with the cover-ups.

2. Don’t report the crimes. For anything less than murder, it simply doesn’t get reported, doesn’t get reported correctly, or doesn’t get reported with a student name attached. No name, no details, no crime. Just a crime-free occurrence, stolen property without a perpetrator, accident without incident.

3. Manipulate the law. Transform police documents into “student records.” Student records are protected by FERPA and aren’t available to the public and can’t be FOIA’d, which means that no one other than a judge can gain access. All your school crime stats can then be swept under the rug, and all your scheming is protected by federal law. Convenient.

4. Convert crime into a mental health issue. And Baker Act the kid. Transform crimes into mental health issues, which then becomes further protected from public scrutiny.
Now imagine this scenario. A crime occurs at a house where someone breaks in and steals a significant amount of jewelry. Shortly thereafter, a student at a high school a few blocks away from the crime scene is discovered with that jewelry and a large flat screwdriver, what police officially describe as “a burglary tool.” The student reports that he does not own the mostly women’s jewelry and that he will not or cannot name the person who does. What should happen?

At the very least, the police would submit a report and confiscate the jewelry, which would then be linked to the crime and land the student in court. Most probably, the student would have been arrested. That’s what would happen if the person in charge wasn’t a political hack scheming to rig numbers at the expense of students and the public. But unfortunately for the public at large, Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto Carvalho was in charge, so the jewelry was confiscated, but no criminal report was produced, no link to the crime, no charges, no arrest. The report on the confiscated jewelry doesn’t even mention the student’s name.

This was most unfortunate for that student, Trayvon Martin.Had Superintendent Carvalho been interested in enforcing the law – not to mention obeying the law – and teaching students about consequences, Trayvon Martin would have been in juvenile detention instead of buying Skittles and getting shot.

Alberto Carvalho just won Superintendent of the Year, and his numbers appear to be impressive. So we decided to do something that the Broad Foundation, The School Superintendent’s Association, and apparently his own Board of Education have failed to do: actually dig into the data and find out what’s going on.