Test of Honesty

No amount of pressure for progress in the public schools justifies cheating to improve test scores. Progress falsely gained is no progress at all. The accusation that test results were altered at 50 schools in California in recent years, including 24 in Los Angeles, is an alarming indicator that testing has often taken precedence over teaching.

There are two major problems. First, lax security allowed the incidents to occur and made it impossible to fix blame. More fundamentally, lax attitudes allow teachers to teach test-taking and not reading, writing and arithmetic. The security problem can be fixed; the teaching emphasis may be insoluble, but it must be addressed nonetheless.

The possibility for tampering with test results has existed step by step in the process. First, the teachers clean up the test booklets, removing extraneous marks that could be misinterpreted by a computer. At some schools answer sheets were not locked up, and therefore there was no way of knowing who changed the answers. If testing is to remain the yardstick by which progress is measured, then tighter controls must be instituted so that the yardstick yields an accurate measure.

California schools enroll 4.6 million students. Tests using easy-to-grade multiple-choice or true-false questions may be the only way to measure students’ skills. The personnel simply don’t exist to conduct individual assessments or even to grade thoughtful essay-question answers.

Too many teachers, we now learn, are teaching students how to take tests. Within limits, that’s justifiable. But teachers must resist the obvious temptation to prepare students only to take tests and not to learn for themselves. Some are bullied into such methods by principals who insist that their schools score well; some slide into it to protect themselves. It’s easy to teach test-taking. It’s hard to challenge students to learn for themselves why the wind blows or why punctuation matters, but that is what education is about.

Students have unfortunately learned that some of their elders care more about making a good showing than they care about honesty. We can only hope that the adults throughout the state school system have learned something, too: that their mission should be to teach children rather than to teach to the test.