We keep hearing about how awful all these mandatory standardized tests are for today's youth. Why, then, are most of the episodes of cheating we hear about based on adult misbehavior? Are the teachers really cheating the most? Some say yes - depending on how broadly we define "cheating:"
Last week, Esther Jones, the principal of Santa Ana's Saddleback High School, circulated a memo asking teachers to reassess the failing grades of 98 students in hopes of helping the school meet the federal No Child Left Behind Act's standards. The note read, "please review your records for these students and determine if they would merit a grade of 'D' instead of a failure."Sadly, this isn't surprising. Instead it unfortunately reaffirms an increasingly common practice: from graduation rates to test scores to violence stats, schools across the country are painting a false picture of their performance.
Take Wesley Elementary in Houston. From 1994 to 2003, Wesley won national accolades for teaching low-income students how to read and was featured in an "Oprah" segment on schools that "defy the odds."
It turned out that Wesley wasn't defying the odds at all; the school was cheating. The Dallas Morning News found...severe statistical anomalies in nearly 400 Texas schools.
If schools don't want to cheat on the tests, they get rid of poor students. Oak Ridge High School in Florida boosted its test scores after purging its attendance rolls of 126 low-performing students...
Misrepresenting the dropout rate is another common way to make a school's performance look better than it is. The New York Times described an egregious example. Jerroll Tyler was severely truant from Houston's Sharpstown High School. When he showed up to take a math exam required for graduation, he was told he was no longer enrolled. And he never returned.
Funnily enough, for every case of misbehavior like this that's uncovered, the testing critics rush to blame the tests. They say that all of these cheaters are just hapless teachers/administrators with their backs to the wall, forced to fudge the numbers. I say every instance of this behavior is evidence that real, standardized, objective evidence of student performance is necessary. These sorts of crimes are proof that too many in the education world are willing to resort to fakery to make their students look better, and if it weren't for these tests, we'd be willing to believe them when they claimed the K-12 system was working just fine.
Posted by kswygert at June 20, 2005 02:18 PM