Teachers cheating on standardized tests? Who woulda guessed?

by David Safier

Let's see. Put enormous pressure on teachers to have their students score well on high stakes tests. Tell them their salary levels and their jobs are at stake.

What might happen?

Oh, maybe some teachers will fudge their students' scores a little bit.

Investigators say more than 100 educators should face scrutiny or punishment after they found evidence of them cheating for students on a statewide achievement test at 58 schools in Atlanta.

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The review showed that most of the teachers — 78 of the 109 listed — worked at only a dozen schools. The report says that group of schools needs systemic changes because of "school-wide institutional issues."

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The Atlanta school board began the probe after the state ordered that 191 schools in Georgia be examined because of unusual numbers of erasures on 2009 tests. Atlanta had the most schools flagged in the report: 58, or more than two-thirds of the district's elementary and middle schools.

I'm not playing "Blame the teacher" here. I'm saying, teachers are human, and it's a no brainer that people will try to figure out ways to increase their chances to raise their salaries and increase their job security by figuring out ways to increase their students' scores on high stakes tests.

• Some will teach harder — to the test.
• Some will teach testmanship harder — drilling students with sample test questions until the children see bubbles dancing in their heads like sugar plums — or bubbles swarming around them like angry bees if the teacher overdoes it.
• Some schools will create a comprehensive test culture, complete with special assemblies and competitions and rewards.
• And some teachers, alone or in consort with other teachers and/or administrators, will scrub out wrong answers with erasers and substitute right answers.

And the actual educational gains for students in all these cases will range from minimal to zero — and even into negative territory if other parts of a comprehensive education are slighted for the sake of the test.