Teaching seemed a natural, uncomplicated career choice for Stacey Moskowitz. “I like children,” she says. “I enjoy watching them learn the things you need to do to succeed in life.” In 1990, in her mid-20s, she began teaching third grade at Community Elementary School 90 in the Bronx, N.Y., where she learned how to succeed on the school’s terms. She says the principal’s underlings gave her a list of students along with the order “to make sure they passed” standardized reading exams. On the mornings of such exams, she was given a 2-in. by 3-in. cheat sheet. She would then have the students put their answers first on loose-leaf paper, so she could check them before they filled in the bubble sheets. “It was kind of like the Mafia,” she says, explaining why she went along with the scheme. “Once you were in, you were in.” She found a way out, by going undercover and taking part in a 17-month probe that has exposed a shameful side of New York City’s public school system. A special investigator, Edward Stancik, alleges that two principals and 50 other educators at 32 elementary and middle schools helped students cheat on standardized tests. Some hinted broadly at correct answers while students were taking the test; others used the scrap-paper method to avoid the multiple erasures that often indicate cheating; a few even changed answers after their students turned in the exams. The motive is not hard to discern. Teachers, particularly in the early grades, are increasingly being measured by the test scores of their students and can lose their jobs if student performance is too low and shows no sign of improvement. New York City isn’t the only place with bad apples. A schoolteacher in Atlanta was caught distributing advance copies of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, and another in northern Georgia was cited when seven of his special-ed students scored a perfect 600 on the language portion of the test. Dan Erling, a respected sixth-grade math instructor in Atlanta, left the profession in disgust over what he felt was rampant cheating. He estimates that as many as 15% of his incoming students had inflated test scores because of improper help from teachers, such as telling students to “sit next to the smart kid” during testing. Last year 40 cases of educator cheating were brought before Georgia’s standards commission, compared with only three the previous year. The state of Texas is currently investigating 38 schools because of a high number of erasures on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. That crackdown follows the indictment last spring of an Austin school district for tampering with the results of the state test. And in Chicago, a high school English teacher was fired this year after he published six newly designed tests in an underground newspaper to protest high-stakes testing.
