Testing scandal: When school reform is a fraud

It’s the biggest fad in public education: judging schools and teachers based on their students’ performance on standardized tests. But now the folly of that “free market” approach to public education has been exposed, said Diane Ravitch in TheDailyBeast.com. An investigation by USA Today found evidence of “widespread test fraud” in Washington, D.C., schools during the tenure of controversial chancellor Michelle Rhee. In Rhee’s most successful school, the newspaper found, the average student’s tests had 12.7 erasures in which wrong answers were changed to correct ones. Usually, there is less than one such wrong-to-right erasure per test. The pattern of erasures throughout the district strongly points to cheating—“desperate behavior by principals and teachers trying to save their jobs and meet their targets.” Rhee’s hard-edged methods have been immensely popular in Congress, the states, and think tanks on the Left and the Right, but they may be based on an illusion.

The evidence of official cheating is clearly disturbing, said Jay Mathews in The Washington Post, but let’s not forget that Rhee “did much good for D.C. children.” Testing is still the best tool we have to “assess student achievement relatively quickly” and focus efforts where they’re most needed. Clearly, though, “we have to guard against relying too much on test results that can be distorted.” That should have been obvious even before this scandal, said James P. Lenfestey in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. George W. Bush’s first secretary of education, Rod Paige, oversaw “the Houston Miracle,” in which teacher incentives seemed to vastly improve test scores; Paige had to resign when “it was discovered that those results were phony.” The problem appears to be rampant: In recent years, suspicious erasure rates have been found in Atlanta, Detroit, Baltimore, and at least six states.

The larger question, said Marie Myung-Ok Lee in The New York Times, is whether multiple-choice tests constitute real learning. In high school, I was an unhappy, frequently mocked introvert, until an English teacher, Margaret Leibfried, took the time “to coax out the potential” in me. By inspiring me with great literature that wasn’t on the curriculum, and forcing me out of my shell, she quite literally “shaped my career and my life.” Great teachers do more than train students to regurgitate piles of facts. They inspire them, starting them down the road to becoming “productive and fully realized adults.”

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