If There Is An Incentive To Be Wrong, Wrong Will Be Done

Yay!  Multiple Choice tests today!

My dad sent me an article about a school scandal in Atlanta ("Dog bites man!") surrounding a school that had cheating on standardized tests and the harassment of the principal brought in to clean the situation up.

This seems to me to echo the scandal in the DC school system where a charter school that was constantly pimped by Michelle Rhee turned out to also - allegedly - cheat on their tests.  Of course, the Atlanta saga came wrapped in a nice layer of racial politics, although Rhee has sort of played the Tiger Mom Superintendent card herself.

When you tie teacher pay and employment to the performance of a bunch of distracted, apathetic kids on a multiple choice test that has no relevance to their life, you will have teachers going back in, erasing the mistakes and making their scores look good.

This will likely require independent monitoring of the tests, because heaven forbid we acknowledge that high impact testing might warp educational values.  Students have to understand and internalize the need to learn first.  Then, those lessons need to be relevant to them.  Maybe the understanding is superficial: I need to get into college/avoid summer school/get a good job/not get grounded.  It's tougher to sell the standardized test as an internally valid educational experience.  Good students will apply themselves, because they are good students.  Indifferent and poor students simply won't.

And teachers who need to keep their jobs will go to great lengths to falsify a test that they likely don't believe in anyway.

My guess is teacher-based cheating will increase as these tests become more and more important to teachers being able to put food on their families.