There Is No Cheating "Crisis"

Like others, I'm a big fan of education writer Dana Goldstein (and love the line in her latest piece about the current mood of "brutal optimism" about testing). But the piece in Slate -- about how "a growing spate of evidence from around the country suggests that the most egregious practices in Atlanta... are part of a national, and indeed a historic trend... bolstered by No Child Left Behind's emphasis on pressuring educators to produce spectacular test results" -- seems overheated in its claims and makes several questionable connections.

Goldstein presents no real evidence that there is a cheating crisis going on in America, greatly overstates NCLB's real-world threat to educators, and seems to presume that educators are both unable to resist everyday temptations and shouldn't be included among those who should be held accountable for their actions. To all of this and more, I protest.  

No doubt, we've seen a slew of cheating scandals lately, the details of which -- test-fixing parties and high-level coverups in Atlanta, for example -- are infuriating to all. We should all be concerned about the integrity of the system and the ways in which we try and make schools and teachers more accountable for their results. I share her concern about the overuse of test results, especially in areas like individual value-added ratings for classroom teachers.

But Goldstein musters no real evidence beyond a handful of newspaper articles that cheating is dramatically on the rise, proportionally, or is particularly problematic in education as opposed to many other fields that involve testing. Cheating incidents are like shark sightings and crime reports; they are amplified by the media (which loves "trends") and are easily influenced by changes in definitions and reporting requirements.  At least some of the current cheating "trend" is the result of media outlets furiously imitating USA Today and the Washington Post.  It's ironic that the Goldstein piece is published in Slate, whose media columnist regularly debunks fake media trends.

Second, Goldstein substantially overemphasizes NCLB's influence and suggests a causal relationship between cheating and the law that isn't backed up by any real evidence. The creaky law's sanctions are notoriously weak -- a toothless transfer requirement, a watered-down after-school tutoring requirement and a hodge-podge of school improvement efforts that weren't even implemented in most parts of the country. Relatively few kids, teachers and schools have had their fates upended by NCLB (though many may have been told that is the case, and the Obama program called SIG has increased the number of closures and restaffing in recent years). The only real consequence of NCLB is an easily-dismissed annual rating that isn't even required to be displayed on the front door. 

Most troubling to me is Goldstein and others' suggestion that teachers and educators are somehow helpless to resist the notion of cheating and by extension shouldn't be held accountable for their actions. The world is full of opportunities to cheat -- on taxes, in sports, at the checkout register, on payroll day -- and yet in most of these situations, our notions of individual will and accountability remain. If testing and federal accountability systems were as bad -- as powerful, as destructive, as immoral -- as Goldstein suggests, then I hope we'd have had annual protests nationally and widespread refusals by teachers to administer the tests (or by administrators to collect them) rather than a decade of going along with a corrupt system.  But that's not what's happened, according to Goldstein. She seems to suggest that if someone tells educators to cheat, they will do so, out of concern for bringing shame on their school or to keep their jobs.  I just don't think that's true.

Yes, there's some cheating in education.  Yes it should be addressed.  But the most pernicious forms of cheating are systematic efforts in which schools and districts manipulate subgroup sizes and enrollment dates or states and elected officials and reform advocates cherry-pick data to give the impression. And we should neither overestimate accountability-based laws like NCLB nor ignore educators' roles in implementing them. Whatever has or hasn't happened over the past decade under NCLB implicates nearly everyone in education, including teachers.

 

 

 

Follow Alexander Russo on Twitter: www.twitter.com/alexanderrusso

Comments

[professor]

12:36 AM on 07/31/2011

This guy "musters no real evidence" that cheating ISN'T at "epic proportions." Just asserts the contrary. Lme argumentation. F that will be changed into a B - by the principal.

[Anne Zachry]

04:32 PM on 07/29/2011

Brilliantly stated! Thank you for focusing on the order that can be drawn from the chaos if one just pays close enough attention to what is really going on.

[DickSchutz]

01:44 PM on 07/29/2011

Whether cheating is endemic or marginal depends on the meaning of "cheating." Standardized Achievement Tests are insensitive to what teachers are teaching, apart from test-taking skills (which means thinking in the same ways that test developers do in inventing foils), practice tests, teaching to matters that very likely to be tested, and such. These practices are endemic, to say nothing of the defensive tactics that states, LEA's, schools, and teachers employ to defend against the impossible statistical formula of AYP, which will inevitably lead to their being labeled as "failing," if they haven't already been so designated.

The actual erasing/doctoring of bubbles, as Russo states, is marginal.

Test publishers and the government officials also cheat in defining "proficiency" in terms of arbitrarily-set cut scores on ungrounded statistical scales. "Below Basic," "Basic," "Proficient," and "Advanced Proficient, have nothing to do with the common meaning of the terms. They represent nothing more than chopping the conventional reporting by percentiles into four segments.
This practice is endemic and is far more detrimental than the "cheating" the media have focused on.

[kinger50]

03:24 PM on 07/28/2011

Shock doctrine demands a crisis.

[Alexander Russo]

02:24 PM on 07/28/2011

the washington post's bill turque writes that while the impression may be that cheating is newly increased or widespread, it's an ongoing concern going back 20 years (well before NCLB) and that the current "epidemic" includes only about 300 schools out of the nation's 100,000 http://ow.ly/5PGmR

[bwsmith]

12:47 PM on 07/28/2011

One of the most important points in the National Research Council's May report on test-based incentive programs is that you need results from a second test to see if teaching to the first test was worthwhile. Fortunately we have such second tests, in NAEP, the SAT, and so on, and results from these tell us that any claims of miraculous improvement in the ten years since NCLB are almost certainly hot air, so exaggerated claims by public officials don't endanger a public that knows how to read and think critically. And Goldstein is right when she claims that NCLB has corrupted public officials (I'm thinking primarily of principals and superintendents) who might otherwise have remained more honest and concentrated on more fundamentally effective ways to genuinely increase student learning.

[Jimmy Kilpatrick]

11:12 AM on 07/28/2011

This is what NCLB was started. If not for high-stakes testing the vast majority of kids would get a sub-standard education. Sad to say even today the unions destroyed real opporunity for meaning change. This is what keeps folks like you and I busy.

[johnthompson]

10:47 AM on 07/28/2011

Cheating is just the tip of the iceberg. I dare say we have an even bigger crisis due to "legal" cheating called "credit recovery." There's a fine line between run-of-the mill test prep that is dumb but not cheating and test prep with recently released items that show a complete corruption of the system. As with Wall Street, the real corruption tends to be legal. When "everyone is doing it," then you have what we used to call "honest graft." We're sending the message that there is a price tag on everything, but nothing of special value in learning. That's how we're really cheating kids.

[dadw5boys]

10:38 AM on 07/28/2011

The Students and the Teachers are ALL suffering from No Child Left Behind and they are ALL GETING LEFT BEHIND !!!!

If this Video will not wake you up nothing will !
Changing Education Paradigms
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

[Shaun Johnson]

10:37 AM on 07/28/2011

To examine the effects of NCLB through the lens of cheating, you're probably going to find an overall diminished effect because, as you state, cheating is not more epidemic in education than it is in other professions. But there are more subtle and insidious effects of NCLB and test-driven reform measures; for instance, the overall narrowing of curriculum to exclude subjects like social studies and the arts. If NCLB is as toothless as you claim, which to some extent I think it is, teachers have in such large numbers internalized some kind of threat and adhere to its mandates lockstep. I hear all the time that teachers know better and this too shall pass, yet they gobble up the highly scripted and narrow curricula representative of a test-driven education. Teachers are indeed more powerful and autonomous than given credit; however, teachers don't for some reason feel at all empowered to resist the whims of administrators and district leadership.

[davidwees]

10:27 AM on 07/28/2011

I think that you need to expand your definition of cheating somewhat to get a clear picture about how bad the problem is. There are lots of ways schools are cheating, circumventing the intent of NCLB, and preventing actual change from occurring in education. Schools are being told to improve their scores or else, but often being given no additional support in order to actually improve.

I've written about this issue as I worked at a school that cheated. See http://davidwees.com/content/i-worked-school-which-cheated