Irony alert: Georgia leads both in ed data collection and cheating on standardized tests

by David Safier

The pixels had barely dried on a post I wrote Friday (he said, using possibly the worst print-to-cyberspace metaphor in history) about a cheating scandal on standardized tests in Georgia, when the Republic cited the glories of Georgia's use of student improvement on test scores to determine teacher salaries.

Hmmm.

The article I cited called Georgia's cheating scandal possibly the biggest in the nation. And students aren't doing the cheating. It's staff, probably a mixture of teachers and administrators. It seems some schools had highly unlikely spikes in student scores. When the state checked the number of erasures on the answer sheets and correlated them with answers that went from wrong to right, something like 200 of Georgia's 1800 schools were put under investigation for possible test tampering. The investigation is ongoing.

It's important to remember that the "high stakes" in "high stakes testing" applies to teachers and administrators as well as students. Staff members' salaries and jobs are at stake. The imperative to increase scores creates a toxic atmosphere where teaching to the test and/or cheating by teachers and administrators becomes more prevalent.

So what else is going on in Georgia while cheating is rampant? According to the Republic:

. . . the [Georgia] state Legislature now is working to build a mechanism for using the data, including basing teacher raises on improvements in student test scores.

Let's see . . . Georgia increases its emphasis on tests determining salaries. Georgia has increased incidents of cheating on standardized tests by staff. Could there be a connection?

Will we see the day when standardized tests are delivered in armored cars, armed guards stand in classrooms during the tests, and they leave with the tests in locked brief cases handcuffed to their wrists?

Arne Duncan said the other day, he's against creating curricula that teach to the tests. We may have found the solution. Don't teach to the test, just erase the wrong answers and put in the right ones.