Maureen Downey: Cheating our children

His investigation will likely find more than Dougherty’s feeble effort, which seemed to be a quick head count — “Anybody of y’all cheat? No? OK, we’re done. Pass the doughnuts.”

Atlanta’s review by Caveon Test Security and the auditing company KPMG was more substantial, but still fell short, according to Perdue, even though it concluded that 109 teachers and administrators may have cheated or ignored testing rules.

I wonder if we’ll ever get to the whole truth of who changed answers on the 2009 CRCT answer sheets and how many incidents of cheating occurred. I believe cheating went on in some schools in both APS and Dougherty. The rate of wrong-to-right erasures in those schools defies any explanation other than answer tampering.

If we went back and reviewed older tests, I suspect we would find that cheating has gone on since it became important to the adults in those schools that their students pass.

“A few years ago I taught a college ethics class, and one of the topics I covered for leadership ethics was how making employees accountable for results over which they had no control would naturally lead to unethical behavior,” says former Georgia child advocate Tom Rawlings, who is now director of the Guatemala office for International Justice Mission.

“The example I always cited was a standardized testing scandal in Texas several years ago in which the superintendent’s bonus, as well as the bonuses and jobs of principals, were dependent on improving test scores,” said Rawlings. “Given that teachers have very little short-term impact on the average test scores of a given school, I argued the resulting cheating scandal was something that leadership should have expected.”

The problem is that no one easily admits to cheating. People willing to cheat to make themselves look better are also willing to lie to save their jobs.

And the educators in the tainted schools can muster a strong defense: Many schools did not follow strict testing protocols. Completed tests stayed in schools for three days. Various people entered those schools over the weekend. The tests sat on principal’s desks or in the office.

Those gaps in the so-called chain of command of the tests enable cheaters to point fingers and cite other opportunities where cheating may have occurred.

Even if the Perdue investigator goes back and interviews students, what is the reliability of accounts given 18 months after the fact? My own children have taken a variety of exams since then. They would have a hard time recalling what was said or done in April of 2009.

I spoke to John Fremer, the national testing expert hired by APS who has investigated test security worldwide, about how often culprits are ferreted out in cheating probes.

“Often, you do all this work and you are very confident that you know where the problem is — you scaled it, you sized it — but you never get that confession. I would love it if that happened, but it doesn’t,” he said.

Unless the investigator threatens truth serum or bamboo shoots under fingernails, I think most educators will maintain that they knew nothing about cheating.

Educators cited in the APS report proffered flimsy excuses for extraordinary wrong-to-right erasures — that is those teachers and administrators willing to even talk to investigators. Too many APS employees gave “non-responsive” or dodgy answers. Others offered irrelevant reasons for the excessive erasures, crediting the school’s reading program or an active PTA for score gains.

Cheating on the CRCT did not help the children of APS, many of whom have poverty and family chaos already working against them. One of the best summations of the consequences of miseducation to poor children came from researcher Martin Haberman:

“Each will have a lifelong struggle to ever have a job that pays enough to live in a safe neighborhood, have adequate health insurance, send their own children to better schools than they went to, or have a decent retirement. Living in the midst of the most prosperous nation on earth, the miseducated will live shorter lives characterized by greater stress and limited life options. Miseducation is, in effect, a sentence of death carried out daily over a lifetime.”