Does No Child Left Behind nurture a culture of cheating?
By Evan Grossman | Watchdog.org
With millions in federal money and jobs at stake, has No Child Left Behind created an incentive for teachers to cheat on standardized tests?
The high-stakes testing required by NCLB has been one of the most controversial elements of the federal law, passed in 2001. Those tests are meant to measure students’ academic growth, but, increasingly, they’ve been used as a yardstick for teachers and administrators.
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WRONG ANSWER: No Child Left Behind’s high-stakes testing tempts educators to cheat.
Some opponents of the high-stakes testing argue it has created a toxic culture that incentivizes cheating, deception and fraud.
“As in any profession, when the pressure is high enough, some people cross the ethical line,” said Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing.
“When jobs and self-esteem depend solely on getting test scores up by any means necessary, cheating is one type of negative fallout that occurs.”
FairTest is working to overhaul NCLB, along with state and local policies and what Schaeffer calls the “gross overkill” of administering more than 100 standardized tests over the course of a pupil’s academic career.
“That’s way over the top,” he said. “And it has produced a number of negative side effects, including cheating.”
Among the most explosive arguments against NCLB is it turns American schools into factories of felons. FairTest published a fact sheet in 2010 stating high-stakes testing dulls the curriculum, drives students to drop out and puts them on the street, where they are “much more likely to end up in trouble or in prison.”
But now it’s the teachers being led away in cuffs.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane recently announced the eighth arrest in an ongoing investigation into widespread cheating in Philadelphia public schools. Lolamarie Davis-O’Rourke was the fourth principal pinched in a probe of more than 50 schools. Davis-O’Rourke is accused of changing Pennsylvania System of School Assessment answers in an effort to achieve higher marks at Alain Locke Elementary school.
In the past five years, cheating cases have been documented in 40 states.
In Atlanta, 178 principals and teachers were accused in 2011 of cheating on standardized tests. Prosecutors charge they formed a conspiracy to protect their jobs and win bonuses, while federal funds earmarked for failing students went elsewhere because it appeared the students in those schools were scoring so well.
Borne of the poverty-fighting Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, NCLB was designed in 2001 to fund schools in poor pockets of the country. Underachieving districts qualify for federal money to help shore up test proficiency but also are subject to government intervention if progress is not seen in standardized test Does No Child Left Behind nurture a culture of cheating? « Watchdog.org: