I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the cynic in me wants to wave this in the faces of the policymakers who think that more testing is going to fix all our ills. My worry: pressure for high stakes means that those with low morals find avenues to prevail and ruin it for us all…when a score matters more than learning, people will do whatever it takes to get the score.
In Washington, D.C., numerous schools, including at least one Blue Ribbon school and others touted as "models" of turnaround are being investigated in the media because of test scores which not only increased at a faster rate than other similar schools, but because their standardized tests also revealed more wrong-to-right answer changes on the bubble tests (who knew they tracked that? Well, they do, by scanning not only the right answers but also the smudges left by erased wrong answers).
I want to believe what one teacher says: that students are encouraged to review and revise answers during the course of the test, which would explain the wrong-to-right answer erasures.
But, we live in a world of heavy threats and high stakes. Many schools in question were squarely in the center of governmental crosshairs and a hair's breadth away from reorganization. It doesn't take much, especially in the current public climate which sees only bad teachers potentially willing to care about teaching tests and not students, to assume the worst.
Even if every teacher acted with supreme ethics–which I really want to believe–this is just a sign of the damned-if-you do and damned-if-you-don't nature of the game: get those test scores up or else, but get them up too quickly and you'll be in a new set of crosshairs.
They aren’t getting the benefit of my doubt! There’s no question but that cheating occurred. And you’re right, when the scores are more important than the actual learning, this is what you get.
By the way, I wrote an inferior post on the same subject. I’ll put it up tomorrow, mostly because of the effort I spent writing it.