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Tampering with tests rob student learning
By MARY SANCHEZThe Kansas City Star
Cheating is often suspected of students.
But increasingly, it seems teachers and principals need monitoring. And their shockingly unethical behavior may be precipitated by the national obsession with standardized testing.
The latest scandal came to light last week in Atlanta.
There, a state investigation accused 178 teachers and principals of erasing students’ incorrect answers and supplying the correct ones on standardized tests. The bravado is galling and the cost to students perhaps irreversible.
A principal wore gloves (she didn’t want to leave any telling fingerprints) as she erased and changed incorrect answers on state standardized tests.
A group of elementary teachers gathered at a home for a weekend “changing party” to correct student errors.
In other instances, faculty used razors to slice off security seals and lighters to reseal the altered tests.
Teachers who attempted to blow the whistle were silenced by retaliatory administrators, the state’s report says. The cheating went on for years.
Meanwhile, the district’s superintendent was gathering accolades for raising minority test scores. She was even named the U.S. 2009 Superintendent of the Year.
The Atlanta Public Schools findings are eerily similar to allegations that have been raised in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and elsewhere.
Testing experts are beginning to uncover unusual patterns of either great gains or losses in standardized test scores around the nation.
A complicating factor is the move toward teacher accountability.
The use of standardized test results to measure teachers’ success is also growing. So theoretically, teachers will have even more rationale to cheat — to keep their jobs, receive a raise or a bonus.
Several state legislatures have passed bills linking how teachers will be retained and compensated, not by seniority, but by how well students learn.
And yet the dilemma persists. How to measure achievement fairly and accurately?
Audits can ensure that districts don’t tamper with student scores. But we also need to rely less on standardized testing.
Last week, the largest public teachers union — the National Education Association — agreed that student achievement should be a part of how teachers are evaluated.
But the NEA’s new policy for its 3.2 million members was carefully crafted to disallow the use of practically any standardized tests now available as a way to judge teacher effectiveness.
The difficulty will be how to fairly hold teachers accountable for what children learn, and reward or penalize them accordingly. Checking in on their progress via never-ending standardized testing isn’t the answer.
A fair criticism of No Child Left Behind is that it instituted far too much emphasis on test-taking. By now, nearly everyone can understand the problem of teaching to a test and absolving teachers of coaching students in less easily measured abilities like critical thinking and analysis.
But as Congress sets about rewriting NCLB and the push for teacher accountability grows, Atlanta can serve as a cautionary tale.
Some believe the district set unrealistic goals for student achievement and then unethically set out to meet such measures, at all costs. Wrapped up in all of this are sensitive racial issues. In Atlanta, those who first questioned the remarkable gains being made by low-income African American students were accused of racism.
Now it appears it might be the implicated teachers who didn’t have faith in student abilities to learn. They set those children up for failure.
What happened is criminal behavior. Unfortunately, the eventual penalties may stop at falsifying state-ordered data.
After all, how do you punish someone for stealing a child’s chances for success and happiness?