Overreacting to cheating

Students don’t generally like tests, and a certain number of them cheat. Yet it’s a rare educator who would advocate eliminating tests or not including them in a student’s grade. Why, then, does each new scandal involving cheating teachers and administrators lead to a fresh round of calls to eliminate tests or at minimum not make them count for anything?

In the last few months, teachers or administrators in different parts of the country have been caught cheating. Locally, two Crescendo charter schools were shut down in July by the Los Angeles Unified School District, and the four others face possible closure, after students were shown the test questions for upcoming state standardized tests. The scam had allegedly been ordered by the head of Crescendo.

Also in July, an extensive investigation by the state of Georgia found rampant cheating in Atlanta under school leaders who allegedly covered up wrongdoing. Now, Pennsylvania is examining dozens of schools that were flagged in an examination of tests that had suspiciously high numbers of erasures.

Is this sort of thing more common now that tests count for more? Probably. Schools face closure or the loss of staff and in some parts of the country teachers risk critical job evaluations if test scores don’t rise enough. Some people who feel threatened will cheat to protect themselves. It’s also true that the parameters for what counts as adequate improvement under the federal No Child Left Behind Act are out of line with reality. In addition, critics rightly point out that states’ annual standardized tests are limited measurements of what students have learned; they were never designed to count for half of a teacher’s performance evaluation, as several states and school districts are doing.

Yes, those problems must be fixed — No Child Left Behind is long overdue for a rewrite — but not because they might contribute to cheating. Academic dishonesty is unacceptable no matter the cause. States should take reasonable steps to rein in cheating by regularly examining samples of tests each year for high numbers of erasures, a sign that a teacher may have changed wrong answers, and scrutinizing schools whose scores seem a little too good to believe. Any school professional who cheats or sanctions cheating should be fired. Yet states should not work so hard to prevent cheating that they create a whole new set of onerous regulations; in New York, educators complain that it is now so difficult for students to change an answer that many don’t bother.

Most teachers aren’t cheaters, and they shouldn’t be treated as though they are. Nor should standardized tests be eliminated because some educators respond by taking unethical shortcuts. Cheating is wrong; accountability isn’t.