Ditch Testing: Lessons from the Cheating Scandal in Atlanta (Part 1)
Last week a state investigation in Georgia confirmed massive cheating in Atlanta Public Schools. A total of 178 educators in 44 elementary and middle schools in the district were named in the report as participants in cheating on the state’s standardized test mandated by NCLB. This is not the first and certainly won’t be the last case of corruption in the nation’s schools. There are ongoing investigations in many other locales, most recently, Philadelphia. While laying blame on these educators, …
Not an Anomaly: Systemic Ills Caused by Test-based Accountability Policies
Secretary Duncan is not the only who tries to minimize the scale of the problem and reduce it to a technical issue. Chester E. Finn, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is a former assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education under President Ronald Reagan, tries to do same. In his essay entitled Don’t ditch testing after Atlanta cheating, boost test security and published as a CNN special on July …
Ditch Testing: Lessons from the Atlanta Scandal (Part 3): No Technical Fix: Human Nature?
Chester E. Finn says cheating on test scores “is about human nature.” Assuming cheating is human nature, then it would be logical to accept one of two assumptions: a) everyone cheats or has the tendency to cheat or b) some people are more likely to cheat than others by nature. But applying either one to the Atlanta situation raises more questions.
Fact 1: 80% of schools, nearly 200 educators, and 1,508 classes participated in cheating that had been ongoing …
“The answer here is very simple, you just have a culture of integrity and you have better security measures in place,” said Secretary Arne Duncan in response to the Atlanta cheating scandal. Other testing proponents offered similar suggestions. “A culture of integrity” is not easy because of the corruptive power of test-driven accountability as I have discussed in previous posts and “better security measures” will only incur more costs to tax payers without stop cheating.
In response to increased cheating reports, many states have stepped up their test security measures. For …