The pressure to cheat likely has never been higher in the nation’s secondary schools than it is now. In a climate where success is increasingly measured by standardized tests, a high score is often more than a measure of a student’s academic progress and achievement. Increasingly, it also can be seen as a way to safeguard a job, to earn a promotion or, in some instances, to win a substantial pay raise or bonus. And those who cheat on the tests for those purposes are not students: They are teachers and school administrators, and their infractions on high stakes tests are on the rise.
The most recent example comes from Texas, where a principal, an assistant principal and three teachers at an elementary school outside Houston resigned late last month following confirmed reports of tampering with a state achievement test. School district officials said the educators had prepared a detailed study guide for a fifth-grade science exam by “tubing” it — squeezing a test booklet without breaking its paper seal to form an open tube so that questions inside could be viewed and copied into the guide. The methodology was ingenious, but that does not obscure the fact that the act was certainly unethical and possibly illegal.
As it often the case, the cheaters ultimately were caught. When the school’s scores on the tests seemed artificially high, an official investigation was started. It didn’t take long to discover the cheating and to implicate the educators involved. The students’ scores were invalidated and they’ll have to retake the test — an unintended lesson that they’ll probably recall for years to come.
Similar cases of teachers seeking to boost scores have been reported across the United States. The most far-reaching of them so far occurred in Georgia.
There, the state school board instigated investigations into almost 200 schools in February following a study of math and reading test scores that suggested wrong-doing. They discovered that some educators seemed to have erased wrong answers penciled in by students and then substituted the correct answers. Detailed forensic studies uncovered a high incidence of what experts call wrong-to-right erasures. Subsequent inquiry revealed widespread cheating.