Schools for Scandal
A U.S. News inquiry finds widespread cheating on standardized tests
Cherokee Elementary School in Lake Forest, Ill., was riding high in the late 1980s. It was named one of the nation's outstanding elementary schools by the U.S. Department of Education. Principal Linda Chase won kudos as a leading Illinois principal. And Lake Forest school Superintendent Allen Klingenberg was honored as one of the nation's top 100 education administrators and named Illinois Superintendent of the Year. But Cherokee's success was a house of cards. In recent months, the embarrassed Lake Forest school board stripped Chase of her principalship for urging teachers to doctor their students' standardized-test scores in order to inflate Cherokee's reputation. The board also bought out Klingenberg's contract.
The scandal in Lake Forest is not an isolated incident in American education. Intensifying demand that the nation's $228 billion annual investment in public education pay greater scholastic dividends has put tremendous pressure on teachers and school administrators nationwide to raise standardized-test scores, the most quantifiable measure of achievement. Coupled with astonishingly lax security among the nation's leading standardized basic-skills tests, this pressure has produced a school testing system that is rife with abuse--and consequently less and less useful as a true measure of educational success.
Satisfied customers. Blatant cheating--ranging from supplying students with test answers to actually tampering with answer sheets--is widespread. And in the highly lucrative but intensely competitive testing market, companies are acutely aware that customers are looking for high scores, and they frequently encourage a variety of practices that artificially drive up the numbers. The reality, laments Bonnie Bracey, an award-winning teacher in the Arlington, Va., school system, is that teachers are under the gun to hike test scores in order to "protect themselves." Consider:
Thirty-five percent of the participants in a 1990 survey of North Carolina teachers reported that they were aware of or involved in test tampering. Forty-three percent said the number of teachers cheating on tests was increasing.
In a national survey of educators in 1990, 1 in 11 teachers reported pressure from administrators to cheat on standardized tests.
In 1989, 12 of 17 Trenton, N.J., elementary schools met the state's standards for third graders on the California Achievement Test. In 1990, after allegations of test tampering, state officials monitored Trenton's standardized testing; only three of the city's schools met the state's minimum performance standards.
A 1989 survey of 3,000 Memphis teachers produced charges of extensive cheating on the California Achievement Test--including a case of a teacher's displaying correctly filled-out answer sheets on the walls of her classroom.
As a result of the widespread abuses in standardized testing, parents are denied a true picture of their kids' academic achievement, and taxpayers are misled about the performance of the schools they fund. What's more, say educators, standardized-test results typically are not used to individualize instruction and fill in the gaps in students' skills, as they were originally intended to do. Instead, they are filed or tossed, as teachers begin prepping for the next round of testing. Perhaps most important, at a time when experts are calling on schools to teach more advanced skills and to enliven their classrooms, today's standardized skills tests may in fact be driving down the level of instruction in many schools.
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