We hope Colorado education officials are paying attention to a debacle in Atlanta, where the biggest testing scandal in the nation’s history has unfolded.
Not that we suspect anything similar is going on here. But cheating is a perennial hazard of any sort of testing, and all it takes is a single major scandal in a state to discredit an entire reform agenda.
Critics of so-called high-stakes testing are more vocal than ever these days, and are pointing to Atlanta as an example not only of what can go wrong, but indeed of what they say is likely to occur with increasing frequency. We think they’re wrong. Accountability needn’t breed corruption in education any more than in other professions, if proper safeguards are in place.
In Atlanta, the audacity and magnitude of the cheating are mind-boggling. Investigators discovered that nearly half of the city’s schools allowed cheating to go on for years — with some principals allegedly even punishing teachers who wouldn’t artificially boost scores.
Meanwhile, former superintendent Beverly L. Hall and her staff supposedly ignored numerous signs of the pervasive corruption, undoubtedly because the rising scores were to their liking.
Yet Atlanta’s stunning behavior is no more typical of districts that have adopted test-based accountability than Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was typical of investment advisers.
Colorado is a national leader in measuring student knowledge through standardized tests, having adopted such exams before the federal government began requiring them under the No Child Left Behind Act during the Bush administration. But the use of test results to help evaluate schools and more recently even teachers has provoked an organized backlash. A national group called Save Our Schools, for example, is dedicated to ending tests “used for the purpose of student, teacher, and school evaluations” and is planning a demonstration and rally at the White House later this month.
There is no doubt, of course, that pressure to improve test scores can tempt schools to cheat. That’s why the punishment ought to be a lifetime ban from the profession — and also why districts and the state need to keep careful tabs on how the tests are administered.
When gains in test scores appear implausible, for example, someone should take a closer look.
We might be more sympathetic to critics of the accountability movement — many of whom are educators themselves — if they had an alternative that amounted to something more substantive than “give us more money and trust us.” We’re all for giving schools more money, and have consistently deplored the funding cuts brought on by the recent recession. But for years, a lack of accountability and measurable data lulled Americans into believing that their schools were better than they were. As international comparisons dispelled that misconception, it became clear that “trust us” was no longer a credible policy.
The U.S. still lags behind too many countries in key measurements of knowledge and academic skills, and it may be that ongoing reforms will not wholly eliminate the gap. But it’s far too early to reach such a conclusion, or to let a fiasco like that in Atlanta discredit the overall movement.
