Well done Monty Neill! The Executive director of FairTest, reaffirms what I have been saying all along about teachers caught cheating on standardised tests. Below was my reaction last week to the Atlanta School teaching scandal:
There is no excuse for teachers or officials to cheat. We are there to provide a moral example for our students, and cheating of any kind is clearly unacceptable.
But we must not leave the matter at that point. There’s a reason why some teachers have cheated on standardised tests. Those tests are anti-education. They measure success through pressurised outcomes rather than authentic teaching and learning. They expose teachers to unfair stress and scrutiny and force them the teach to the test, rather than teach to enrich and engage.
Mr. Neill says it even more succinctly:
Focusing solely on punishing the Atlanta school employees who wrongly changed test answers ignores more fundamental problems.
The Georgia investigators found that a primary cause of cheating was “unreasonable” score targets coupled with “unreasonable pressure on teachers and principals.” They concluded that “meeting ‘targets’ by whatever means necessary became more important than true academic progress.”
Misusing standardized exams as the primary factor to make educational decisions encourages score manipulation. Campbell’s Law predicted this result decades ago. It states, “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures, and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
That is precisely what happened in Atlanta. The nation’s students, schools and taxpayers deserve assessment systems that promote ethical behavior, better teaching and stronger learning outcomes.
Topical Teaching 