Cheating in school became education topic number one this week, except this time it wasn’t students cheating on tests — it was adults cheating for them. As part of a series, USA Today published an article strongly suggesting that teachers or administrators goosed student test score gains at an elementary and middle school in Washington, D.C. Since it was a school former D.C. chancellor Michelle Rhee had singled out for praise, the news created yet another battleground for Rhee combatants. The distraction is too bad because the focus on cheating offers — pardon the clich — a teachable moment for parents and policymakers.
Even assuming that teachers and administrators at the school at the center of this week’s controversy didn’t do anything improper, too much cheating by adults does go on in too many schools around the country. When I was a state board of education member in Virginia, “testing irregularities” were not an every day occurrence but were not rare either. And before you rush to blame No Child Left Behind, the problems predate that law.
Teachers and administrators can cheat in gentle ways, such as indicating an answer or encouraging a student to really look at a question again, or through more aggressive steps, such as stealing copies of tests in advance or changing student answers after they’ve finished their work. This kind of cheating is notoriously hard to investigate. Even when the statistical data points to some kind of fraud — for instance, test score gains that cannot be explained by actions teachers took in the classroom during the school year — it’s difficult to prove that cheating occurred unless someone involved admits to it.
Critics of today’s push for greater accountability are quick to argue that cheating is the inevitable byproduct of any high-stakes system. That’s ridiculous. While cheaters are a fact of life there are numerous professions with high-stakes consequences for performance where cheating is not rampant. Besides, that argument insults teachers by implying that they can’t achieve challenging goals without cheating.
