Ethics and Elementary Schools Cheating on Assessment Tests

Like Los Angeles school district Associate Supt. Paul Possemato (“40 Grade Schools Cheated on Skill Tests, State Finds,” Part I, Sept. 1), I understand why a teacher might assist students taking the California Assessment Program test. The use of a single standardized test to evaluate years of education and to assess the quality of teaching is enough to make any teacher shudder. Teachers know first-hand that an hour’s worth of testing can only caricature the hundreds of hours they and their students have invested in one another and that some of the most important skills students learn are less than readily quantifiable.

That CAP scores are a fair and accurate measure of educational achievement--worthy of the credibility and importance routinely placed on them--remains to be proven, and it is therefore unfair to our teachers to use the test as a measure of educational quality in the meantime. (Was it not last year that The Times ran a piece about educators finding CAP questions too obtuse?) One can indeed understand why some teachers, their career achievements reduced to CAP numbers, might cheat.

Understanding, however, does not rule out severely reprimanding those who did cheat. And it is here that the Los Angeles Unified School District’s meek response to cheating becomes inadequate. Unlike the vast majority of teachers--who administered the test honestly, however pressed they were to produce stellar CAP scores--the district fails to see cheating as a moral issue, absolute and uncompromisable. “In all fairness,” Possemato told The Times, “I don’t think we had a basis for reprimanding teachers given that we did not have clearly delineated guidelines for them.” Such a response ridicules the moral fiber of the teaching profession.

In all fairness, Possemato’s “clearly delineated guidelines” are more than unnecessary. They insult those who know full well that cheating is categorically inappropriate, and they move us one step closer to a world where the fine print matters more than the concepts that loom behind it. In such a world, ethics and individual accountability suffer, automatons triumph, and schools fail more dismally than any standardized test could ever indicate. More than “clarification conferences” with offending teachers are in order when instructors cannot refrain from dishonest conduct.

Teachers who assist their students, in their understandable zeal to make scores reflect what they think their students should know, ultimately undermine one of those things that the CAP test cannot measure. We send our youngsters to school not to learn of and emulate the shortcomings of the “real world,” but rather to learn from and surmount them. At a time when ethical breaches remain all too routine, teachers stand as our moral standard bearers and are, next to parents, the most significant role models youngsters encounter.

To respond to instances of teacher cheating simply with bureaucratic jargon indicates the extent to which the recent discussion of ethics in education is equally rhetorical.

Our fair-weather ethicists at LAUSD apparently fail to realize that ethical reform will come neither from the military nor from the corporate world nor from the government, but rather from a new generation of students in whom ethics are ingrained by clear-thinking educators.

GARY D. ROWE

Woodland Hills