Cheating and NCLB

We knew it was happening. It was impossible, statistically impossible, for many of the success stories to be true.

July 5, 2011, Atlanta, GA

Dozens of Atlanta public school educators falsified standardized tests or failed to address such misconduct in their schools, Gov. Nathan Deal said Tuesday in unveiling the results of a state investigation that confirmed widespread cheating in the city schools dating as far back as 2001.

Some of the cheating could result in criminal charges, Deal said.

"I think the overall conclusion was that testing and results and targets being reached became more important than actual learning for children," Deal said. "And when reaching targets became the goal, it was a goal that was pursued with no excuses."

Falsifying test results made the schools appear to be performing better than they really were. But in the process, students were deprived of critical remedial education and taxpayers were cheated, as well, Deal said.

Investigators said 178 teachers and principals working at 44 schools were involved. The educators, including 38 principals, were either directly involved in erasing wrong answers on a key standardized test or they knew -- or should have known -- what was going on, according to Deal's office.

June 10, 2011 Texas, Massachusetts, Virginia, Georgia

Recent scandals illustrate the many ways, some subtle, that educators improperly boost scores:

At a charter school in Springfield, Mass., the principal told teachers to look over students’ shoulders and point out wrong answers as they took the 2009 state tests, according to a state investigation. The state revoked the charter for the school, Robert M. Hughes Academy, in May.

In Norfolk, Va., an independent panel detailed in March how a principal — whose job evaluations had faulted the poor test results of special education students — pressured teachers to use an overhead projector to show those students answers for state reading assessments, according to The Virginian-Pilot, citing a leaked copy of the report.

In Georgia, the state school board ordered investigations of 191 schools in February after an analysis of 2009 reading and math tests suggested that educators had erased students’ answers and penciled in correct responses. Computer scanners detected the erasures, and classrooms in which wrong-to-right erasures were far outside the statistical norm were flagged as suspicious.

May 18, 2011 Washington, DC

The District has voided the 2010 standardized test scores of three classrooms after an investigation found evidence or a strong suspicion of cheating, officials announced Wednesday.

The disclosure comes amid ongoing reviews of security questions related to the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System, the high-stakes test used to measure student achievement, teacher effectiveness and annual progress as required by the federal No Child Left Behind act. It also comes as multiple school system and teachers’ union sources have said that at least two instructors were fired for inappropriate actions while administering tests.

March 17, 2011 When Test Scores Seem too Good to Believe

Scott Mueller seemed to have an uncanny sense about what his students should study to prepare for upcoming state skills tests. Charles Seipelt Elementary School's gains and losses are typical of a pattern uncovered by a USA TODAY investigation of the standardized tests of millions of students in six states and the District of Columbia.

By 2010, the teacher had spent his 16-year career entirely at Charles Seipelt Elementary School. Like other Seipelt teachers, Mueller regularly wrote study guides for his classes ahead of state tests. On test day last April, several fifth-graders immediately recognized some of the questions on their math tests. The questions were the same as those on the study guide Mueller had given out the day before. Some numbers on the actual tests were identical to those in the study guide and the questions were in the same order, the kids told other Seipelt teachers.

The report of possible cheating quickly reached district officials, who put Mueller on paid leave. He initially denied any wrongdoing. Ultimately, investigators concluded that Mueller had looked at questions for both fifth-grade math and science tests in advance — a violation of testing rules — and then copied them, sometimes word for word, into a school computer to develop his study guides.

The 50-year-old teacher resigned. He signed a consent agreement with the Ohio State Board of Education admitting that, by looking at the 2010 tests in advance to prepare study guides, he had "engaged in conduct unbecoming a licensed educator." His teaching license was suspended for three months.

I believe we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg: the cases that are so blatant that they were simple to discover. Administrators live and die by the standardized test scores. Teachers are told they will be evaluated for effectiveness based on the test scores.

Forget about the child who came to school in August or September from another district and about a year behind her peers. Forget about the boy whose father is deployed yet again who worries that this time he's going to be killed. Forget about the pubescent girl whose friends are harassing her on Facebook. Forget about the children who are diagnosed with a learning disability. All, ALL of them must score "proficient" by 2014, and in 2011 have arbitrarily set cut-off scores that they must reach.

Any teacher can tell you that a student's ability to do well on a single test is hugely variable. This is why students frequently take the SAT or ACT test more than once, and usually score significantly higher the second time around.

I've attended professional development sessions designed to teach teachers how to train their students to do better on these standardized tests. Just like SAT-prep courses, teachers now have the students take myriad 'practice' tests, simply to get them used to what the test looks like and how the questions are stated.

In Pennsylvania, years ago, the extended response questions in mathematics for 8th graders had a little box at the bottom of a large white space. The answer was supposed to go in the box. One point (out of 5) was deducted if the student failed to put the answer in the box. The rest of the white space was for the student to write out his/her explanation of the problem and how to solve it. We hammered our students for seven months with practice problems with a little box at the bottom of the page. I dutifully took off points when the student forgot to write in the box. When test time came around, after a few minutes my students' hands started to go up. "Where's the box?" they all asked. It was gone. They panicked, because it had been my mantra all year: Put your answer IN THE BOX. And now the box was gone. "How will they know what my answer is?" they asked. I had them DRAW a box around their answer and write, "Here's the answer," so no grader would miss it.

How often was I tempted to simply tell a student what a word meant in a reading selection, to remind them that they had done literally hundreds of similar problems from the math test when they froze and couldn't remember.

I heard reports from other teachers who were parents that their younger children literally tore out their hair during testing. They vomited from the stress. They cut at their arms with sharpened pencils. I knew of a case where a special needs student missed lunch three days in a row to stay in the guidance office to finish her test, crying and pleading to be able to stop.

This is not what NCLB was meant to do. This comes about because of intense pressure to demonstrate student achievement. It's time to re-think how we're assessing our students, and craft a policy that more closely matches what the rest of the world is doing. They do not test their children using 50 different assessments. They do not assess their children repeatedly throughout the school year for practice. And they do not make every funding decision based on a single test near the end of the year. We want our children to have a world-class education? Then for God's sake, we should follow where others have led instead of this horrific testament to cheating.