Losers All Around

California schools face pressure today to show improvement. One way in which to show improvement is to have students score higher each year on the standardized tests that are given regularly around the state to measure academic progress. The only acceptable way to raise those test scores is to teach students reading, writing and arithmetic. Unfortunately, there is another way to raise them: by cheating.

That is what Los Angeles Unified School District officials say happened at 18 elementary schools three years ago. Now they are investigating reports of test tampering at six more schools two years ago and at one other school this May.

No amount of pressure can justify changing test answer sheets to correct wrong answers. Everyone loses. Students whose answers are changed lose because they will not know that they were wrong and may never catch up with the right answer. Parents lose because artificially high test scores give them a false picture of how well their children are doing. Students and teachers at other schools lose because, playing fair, they look bad in comparison when the test results are published. The public school system loses respect in the eyes of government officials who allocate money to education; the loss is even more severe when a system lets years go by without saying anything about the cheating.

Some of those losses might have been cut had school officials found the guilty parties, but it now appears that even that is not possible. Too many people had access to the test answer sheets after the examination was given to know where to point the finger. As long as state and local education officials place such emphasis on tests--as it appears they must to convince the public that they’re doing their jobs--the educators must place equal emphasis on test security. They need to ensure that they are measuring actual improvement and not the skill of someone at doctoring the answers.

The entire cheating incident teaches students two unfortunate lessons: (1) Some people consider doing well so important that they don’t mind doing wrong in the process; (2) so far, they are getting away with it.