Teachers cheating. Why has it come to this?
June 16th, 2010
Cheating is not an option
The New York Times ran a story recently titled: Pressed to Show Progress, Educators Tamper with Test Scores. The article is about teachers supplying their students with test questions and in some cases, changing the answer sheets, all to raise their students’ scores.
Why would a teacher, a role model for his or her students, take such a drastic action?
The answer is clear: “test stress.”
Testing in America– and in many countries around the world–is so stressful that teachers “feel their schools’ reputation, their livelihoods, their psychic meaning in life is at stake,” says Robert Schaeffer, of FairTest.
Something is badly out of balance if teachers are cheating. Testing should be formative– students should learn from the process– not just about the subject matter, but about themselves. If they are learning that cheating is an option, that is unacceptable– not just for the teachers doing it, but for our society that perpetrates such high-stakes, over-the-top stress to cause this to happen.
This should be a wake-up call to President Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to take a good hard look at what testing is really doing to students, teachers and parents. Before we get even further into this mess with more and more testing, let’s ask the question: are we really measuring student achievement with all our tests or are we just giving people opportunities to find any means possible to get the highest scores?
Sadly, I believe it’s the latter.
Again, testing should be transformative. Students can learn how to be calm,. confident and focused when they take a test, and these skills will transfer over to any challenge in life. Cheating does none of that and worse.
