A report issued yesterday by the District of Columbia’s inspector general has found that cheating on standardized tests occurred at one school in 2010 but has found no evidence of widespread cheating across the school system, the Associated Press reports. You can see the whole report on the Washington Post’s website.
Similar independent investigations across the country are reaching similar conclusions, like one in Baltimore that I’m most familiar with. We see that some students erased the bubbles on a multiple-choice test and changed them to the correct answer, and we assume teachers or other school officials did it, not the kids themselves.
Then, we ask the kids, Did your teacher help you on the test, or did she tell you what answers you should pick? The kid says no—and we can’t prove that any actual teacher interference occurred without an outright confession (and even then, it’s messy in terms of due process, firing or demoting someone at work, depriving them potentially of their livelihood, and so on)—so the investigators have no choice but to drop the investigation.
You hear a lot about erasure analysis in these cheating scandals. That’s what happened in Atlanta. It was found that a large percentage of answers were erased on the tests. That is, one bubble was darkened very lightly, which indicates that it was erased, while the correct answer had a dark mark in the bubble.
Normally, when kids take multiple-choice tests using the bubble-in method, they don’t erase very often. That’s just from experience in a classroom. So, if I found a test that had 50 percent of the answers “corrected” by erasing one mark and bubbling in the right answer, I would become suspicious.
Just because most kids don’t normally do this kind of thing on tests, though, doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. And when we’re talking about proof in a case where someone is on trial for their job or professional license, hearing officers and independent investigators have every right to demand a higher standard of proof. Statisticians cannot satisfy this higher standard of proof, so without a confession or a credible whistle-blower, the case doesn’t get very far beyond this point.
Furthermore, some of the investigations have meticulously tracked erasures in certain cases. They examined one student’s number of erasures when he took the test in fifth grade, say, and compared that to the number of erasures that same student made on the test in sixth grade. If this number were higher in my school, it would also raise a red flag for me to check out. Kids don’t change their behavior and habits all that much when it comes to standardized tests. They pretty much take them every time the same way.
But as in the earlier example, just because it’s not typical doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. And when the standard of proof is high, this is the test that must pass muster of our laws.
However, teachers are reportedly feeling vindicated when it comes out that actually proving that cheating occurred in court is next to impossible. That is also the wrong attitude for an educator. Making your students’ scores higher than they should be will deprive those students of the attention they need, the extra help our Elementary and Secondary Education Act was written to guarantee.
Let’s say you’re a principal at a school with two fourth-grade classrooms, one whose kids aced the test and the other just barely missing the cut. Which teacher would you send to get some extra training? Sending the one whose kids were outstanding on the test would probably be considered a waste of your school system’s money. Yes, she gets to keep her job and you’ll probably write her an inaccurately positive evaluation, but you deprive her of the help she needs to teach her students next year. The losers just keep piling up!
