Cheating Scandal Newsflash: Teachers Aren't Plaster Saints!
by Frederick M. Hess • Aug 22, 2011 at 9:46 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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ShareAs I noted last Thursday, I'm fairly confident that isolated cheating scandals will eventually snowball. After all, I'm a pretty bleak person, and yet even I've been surprised to learn just how incredibly lax test security was in cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia, and DC--even as we amped up the significance of testing for teachers and school leaders. Seems to me that through all this there's been a bizarre tendency to assume that educators are human enough to respond to incentives but angelic enough that they won't cheat or cut corners, even when given manifold opportunities to do so. The result, I'm afraid, is going to be a slow-building wave, the same pattern we saw with baseball's steroid troubles or banking's mortgage lending debacle.
First, it is true that a bevy of teachers and principals behaved immorally and unacceptably. In doing so, they were much like mortgage lenders, circa 2005, who misled clients or falsified mortgage applications, or WorldCom, Tyco, or Enron executives, circa 1999, who cooked their books. But, it is also true that these teachers, like those mortgage lenders or executives, operated in systems which allowed and rewarded cheating--and where supervisory pressures encouraged malfeasance. Ambitious financial reforms like