Atlanta teacher convictions: Do standardized testing pressures foster cheating?
An Atlanta jury convicted 11 out of 12 teachers charged with conspiring to manipulate student test scores, but experts say 'Atlanta is the tip of the test-cheating iceberg.'
A jury convicted 11 educators of racketeering Wednesday for their role in the Atlanta cheating scandal. But nationally, there’s a strong split between those who see their actions as an aberration and those who would convict right alongside them the accountability systems that have attached increasingly high stakes to standardized tests in recent decades.
The teachers and administrators face potentially harsh sentences for a conspiracy to manipulate test scores – which investigators said involved more than 44 schools and about 180 educators. Eleven out of 12 who went to trial were convicted, and they were sent immediately to jail to await sentencing (with the exception of one who is pregnant).
For opponents of such high-stakes testing, there’s likely to be more sympathy for the educatorsbecause of undue pressures being placed on teachers by an overemphasis on test scores. But for proponents of accountability, it’s just as easy to hold up these educators as an example of why strong objective systems are needed to oversee and measure educators’ performance.
The pressured atmosphere doesn’t justify cheating, but it’s one indication of a much larger problem, say critics of how testing has been used.
Especially as the federal government has pushed states to tie teacher evaluation policies to standardized-test gains, the testing regimen “creates a climate in school where you have to boost scores by hook or by crook,” says Robert Schaeffer, a spokesman for the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest).
Atlanta offered up extreme examples such as test-cheating “parties.” But “Atlanta is the tip of the test-cheating iceberg,” Mr. Schaeffer says, with other cases surfacing in about 39 states, including a dozen or more that showed widespread cheating.
The El Paso, Texas, superintendent went to prison in 2012 for fraud for manipulating federal accountability measures, and nearly a dozen others were held accountable for their role by the state education department.
An Arizona State University study surveyed Arizona educators in 2010 and found that 39 percent knew of situations in which colleagues encouraged students to redo test problems, while 10 percent knew of colleagues who did something they considered more outright cheating.
“We have a system in which people are told all the time that all that really matters is raising test scores,” says Daniel Koretz, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Some examples of the “shortcuts” teachers are encouraged to take? Teachers are often shown “power standards” – the types of items most commonly tested – by administrators, and sometimes are taught to skip chapters of textbooks that don’t fall in that category, Professor Koretz says. And states now routinely offer teachers old test items to use for test prep, a practice frowned upon in the 1980s.
“Clearly cheating is unethical, but at what point does this other stuff become unethical?” he saysAtlanta teacher convictions: Do standardized testing pressures foster cheating? - Yahoo News:
