The Next Frontier (abyss?): Testing and its Kissin’ Cousin, Cheating
On Friday, at the end of a bang-up Education Writers Association conference on improving teaching quality, at the Carnegie Corporation in New York City, I was approached by a newspaper education editor who asked whether I thought charter school test results were real. “Are they cheating?” she asked, more pointedly.
The question followed what had been a bruising roundtable discussion between journalists and educators about the value of testing – good or bad? High-stakes or benchmarking? Standards-driven or curriculum-driven? And the newspaper editor’s question was whether the pressure to perform isn’t causing some testing impotence among our educators. Another reporter, from another state, at this quiet corner conclave, admitted that he had been wondering the same thing. “Who scores these tests?” he wondered.
The testing/cheating question reminds me of the military-industrial complex conundrum (or the public employees union contradiction): do we have a phalanx of foxes guarding our hen houses? To paraphrase President Dwight Eisenhower, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the educational testing complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Though the cheating scandal du jour is in Atlanta (not to be confused with the education leadership forum Checker is moderating there on Monday), the range and depth of the problem, especially given the improbability of a conspiracy, is troubling. Lacking a conspiracy, we are left with an explanation of moral and ethical breakdown of epidemic proportions. And the question: how is the virus spread?
The New York Times suggests an alternative in a headline this morning:
City to Toughen Audits Amid Concerns That Some Schools Manipulate Data
So, we go from “cheating” to “manipulating.” The key here, in Sharon Otterman’s story for the Times, is this sentence,
The Regents exams [the statewide tests that seniors must pass to graduate] are graded by teachers within schools, and teachers are not barred from grading their own students.
This would not be such a big deal were it not for the collateral damage implications: test results are, increasingly, being used to judge the teachers of the students and the schools themselves. We are now asking the inmates to score themselves.
The New York city Regent exam score results suggest the problem, as Otterman reports:
At one Queens high school, the number of students scoring 65 to 69 [65 is the passing grade] last year in the five most popular Regents exams — integrated algebra, global history, biology, English and United States history — was more than five times the number who scored 60 to 64.
We have a huge testing problem in the United States, but we should see it as a symptom not the disease. Whether at the district, state, or federal level, we should not expect kids to take tests that are not based on specific and known curricular texts. The current practice of testing kids on vague, black-hole standards, only encourages the kind of shortcuts that teachers are taking: teach to the test (whatever it is), then score it so that you can keep your job!
Something is wrong with this picture. For better or worse, mostly worse, we continue to think of our education system as a quiz show – what will the test-writers think of next? – rather than a system to impart knowledge to the next generation. Our education system is not a game of Jeopardy. We need to spell out what we expect our children to know, at what age, and then test them – and their teachers! – on how well that knowledge is learned.
–Peter Meyer
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I had the privilege of attending the EWA conference too. And of all the great insights I heard there, the one that resonated most with me was former Principal and current ASCD Chief Program Development Officer Judy Zimny’s assertion that test scores will increase as long as you provide students high quality, engaging instruction.
To your point, then, about testing being a symptom rather than the disease, it’s not testing that’s the problem. It’s the prevailing response to pressure to raise scores. Educators–teachers, but especially school leaders–must shift the focus from test preparation to teacher preparation. Not pre-service preparation (another topic altogether), but practical, ongoing, on-the-job support. Support that another panelist at the EWA conference, Ted Preston of The Achievement Network, advocated: classroom coaching, which we know from research (going back to Bruce Joyce’s and Beverly Showers’ study in the 80s and corroborated by other studies since then) is far more effective than traditional training methods.
Bottom line: people would have no incentive to cheat if they believed they could get results the “right” way, and were empowered to do so.
Peter sums the issue up beautifully. For Republicans, the realities of Watergate were unadmitted until the day Nixon resigned. The failure of our education system is abut system failure, not fixed student test score, which are a natural consequence of our failed system. Unitl our policy leaders (not classroom teachers) are held to account for their dismal performance nothing will change. Unfortunately, the editorial community is as much a part of the problem as the leadership, intellectual base and experts to whom they pander for shallow stories which only scratch the surface. It’s time we all woke up to the reality… where is Nixon when we need a weather vane.
It is ironic that no one complains about teachers grading all the other assessments students take in a course/class, or teachers determining report card grades, or teachers writing recommendations for students for college and jobs, but when it comes to the once-a-year high stakes tests, teachers cannot be trusted to score them! NY teachers have been “scrubbing” Regents exams since before I took them (in the 1950′s) and before test scores factored into the evaluation of schools. This practice came about because educators understood that tests are imperfect measures that can do harm to borderline students who demonstrate sufficient understanding of a content area and therefore ought not be penalized because of the society’s irrational need to reduce the complexities of learning to a number. After all, what is the operational and real life difference in the understanding of a student who gets a 63 and a 66? If you saw these students functioning, could a reasonably intelligent person point out the difference between the student who got a 63 and a 66?
Also ironic is the fact that the NY Regents exams, a NY college requirement, do not correlate with what students need to know and be able to do to succeed in college! And while you are scrutinizing teacher scoring of tests such as the Regents, how about scrutinizing NY State SED’s cut score decision making process! Talk about cheating, the NY SED’s decision making process for determining cut scores is totally arbitrary and political. The NY Times on occasion has exposed this, but nothing has changed.
The problem with the standardized tests and the Regents is that they are norm-referenced, which means that they are constructed so that a particular percentage of students must fail. Questions are field tested and then selected on the basis of the percent of students who get them right and wrong as well as the characteristics of the students who get them right and wrong. Unless the correlation of student characteristics and test scores remains constant, the reliability of the tests come into question. This means that tests are constructed so that the same population will always fail. How about the education reporters investigating the politics of test construction.
Ah, the politics of test construction! That buck seems to roll right down hill, to our poor students’ desks, where it joins all the other bucks of adult irresponsibility. Another conversation I had at the EWA meeting was with an education editor who wondered why educators and education policymakers are so afraid of curriculum? It is the name that shall not be spoken in education. One panelist did manage to say that “knowledge” was “the backbone” that ran through our school system — how come, then, we can’t get enough backbone to actually create a rigorous, comprehensive, and aligned — er, backbone.
I agree that testing, like weighing ourselves, invites fakery. Certainly most intellectuals are prone to lie about how long it takes them to finish the New York Time crossword puzzle each day (20 minutes is considered low normal). Hence the need for open-access calibrated dictionary-based measurements of vocabulary size, cf. my eBooks at http://www.npe.ednews.org. . . . I honestly believe that today, as opposed to 30 years ago, academic folk spend very little time trying to keep their own heads from slipping into la la land. So c’mon, guysm get with the anti-Alzheimer’s program, huh?.