Newsday is running a double-barred "AP Exclusive" on New York teachers who help students cheat on standardized exams. The main article is here, a side article that provides some additional detail is here.
How did the AP uncover the cheating? And just how bad is it?
From 1999 through the spring of 2002, state records obtained under the state Freedom of Information Law included 21 cases of proven cheating by teachers from Buffalo to Long Island. Teachers usually reported cheating but some said the practice is more common than records show.
Teachers usually report themselves cheating, or they report other teachers? That statement could have been a bit more clear.
Teachers have read off answers during a test, sent students back to correct wrong answers, photocopied secure tests for use in class, inflated scores, and peeked at questions then drilled those topics in class before the test...
"Teachers care a lot, sometimes they care too much and try to provide too much help," said Dennis Tompkins, spokesman for New York State United Teachers, the state's largest teachers' union. "We moved in a complete new direction in the last seven years. The standards are higher."
Does that mean that if I, as a student, let my friend copy off my answer sheet, I shouldn't be punished because I "care too much" about my friend's GPA? I mean, come on. That excuse wouldn't get a student off the hook, and it shouldn't get a teacher off the hook, either.
The public knows that most teachers care a great deal about their students, but any teacher who believes that it is compassionate to help students cheat should be removed from the classroom. It's ludicrous that this is being floated as an excuse/explanation for deceptive behavior that, essentially, covers up the fact that students haven't learned the material, or that teachers haven't done their jobs. Why is it being spun as misplaced compassion, rather than a desperate cover-up for poor teaching skills?
[State Deputy Education Commissioner James] Kadamus said most of the cheating is in elementary and middle schools, not the high schools where so-called high stakes testing can determine whether a student graduates. In the lower grades, standardized tests are used to judge the performance of schools and teachers in "school report cards."
The assumption that cheating teachers are being "compassionate" is therefore even less likely, because it's not the kids who get negative feedback for low scores in the lower grades.
"If students' have academic weaknesses, their teachers need to strive to fix it, not cover it up and refuse to acknowledge it exists," said Andrea Rogers, research associate at the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability. " ... New York should instantly revoke the license of any teacher who is found guilty of committing testing fraud."
Most of the teachers quit, were suspended or fired or were subject to a state disciplinary process that could lead to dismissal.
Good. The state is sending a message that cheating won't be tolerated, no matter what the root cause is.
And then there's the obligatory quote by a researcher who wants readers to assume that high stakes exams cause cheating, and that teachers who "help" their kids on such exams do so only because of "compassion":
"We found cheating increased by 30 to 50 percent because of high-stakes testing," said Brian Jacobs of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and co-author of the teacher-cheating report "Rotten Apples."
"Classrooms where they have lower achieving students on average are more likely to cheat," Jacobs said of the Chicago study. "That could be some indication of a benevolent motivation on the part of the teachers, or on the other hand it could show motivation that they are trying to improve classroom test scores for themselves."
Emphases mine. I haven't read the study, but unless they randomly assigned teachers and students to take different exams, and observed that only the teachers who were asked to give high-stakes exams cheated, then the researchers haven't shown that high-stakes exams are the reason that cheating has increased. My guess is that they've found a correlation between the presence of high-stakes exams and the presence of cheating, and they've mistakenly concluded that the exams cause cheating. It's a fine point, and they're deliberately blurring it here.
Oh, and one other interpretation for the fact that classrooms with low-performing students may show more cheating behavior is that the teachers in those classrooms may be more incompetent, and more desperate to compensate for their poor teaching skills. Thus, in a high-stakes situation, it's poor teaching skills that lead to cheating AND to poor test performance.
That's certainly an alternate explanation that covers all the facts, and to me, it's just as likely as the "benevolent motivation" theory that Mr. Jacobs has suggested.
Posted by kswygert at October 27, 2003 09:35 AM