“A thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.” W.C. Fields
I recently watched a Freakonomics video about why cheating happens in the K through 12 system. There is an interesting perspective about why teachers help students cheat on standardized testing. From a student's perspective, there is much incentive to cheat, such as increased opportunities for college, scholarships, and better academic records. However, the economist in the video suggested that there was an incentive for teachers to cheat or at least help the students cheat to increase their test scores. If the students do well on the tests, it reflects positively on the teachers and their school. It is a way for them to show that they are doing a good job and that their students are learning.
How Teachers Cheat.
There are many ways that students can cheat on tests, and some of them are pretty creative. Nevertheless, how would a teacher cheat? The video states that the last 8-10 questions were often filled in correctly in a review of thousands of standardized tests. On a standardized test, these are often the most challenging questions. Students who do not finish the test usually stop around 50-65% of the questions. However, those tests that were higher on average had a commonality: the answers at the end of the test were 100% completed and correct. The video suggests that the teachers were given the answers to the test in advance and filled them in. Instead of the school or district paying the extra cost of sending tests out to a third party for grading, they give the teachers the answer key to grade after proctoring the test. The school is then responsible for reporting the test score.
Why would teachers cheat?
Job justification. Higher test scores would then correlate to better job performance. If a teacher has low test scores, there could be questions by the administration. In some districts, test scores drive performance evaluations and end-of-year reviews.
Funding. Higher test scores might see increased funding for a particular program or department. On a district or school level, increased test scores in a grade level or a specific department might translate to increased teacher bonuses or compensation. There is no set standard for how schools can evaluate performance, and if the administration values high stake testing, teacher incentives to manipulate test scores could increase.
Increased test scores could also show increased funding for the district. In the case of No Child Left Behind, funding was based on high scores on standardized testing, so federal funding was then issued based on the highest performers. It created an inequitable incentive where high-performing schools were getting the funding, and low-performing schools that most likely needed funding were missing out. The incentive was so that low-performing schools would increase pedagogical techniques to vie for the funding. However, as these videos show, an incentive is unpredictable. No child left behind ended up creating competition versus incentive.
So the incentives for teachers to cheat often outweigh the alternative, which is accurate test scores. What skews the data is that the higher test scores due to cheating do not show the ineffective education policy. The policies include reducing faculty, reducing the humanities subjects, and reducing extracurricular activities. These reductions increase focus on standardized testing subject to improving test results. So the focus is now on testing versus holistic education. In the book "Surpassing Shanghai" by Mark Tucker, the author examines countries with the highest performing education systems and compares them to the USA. He found that countries with decentralized curricula prioritized educational funding, and higher teacher wages produced higher-performing students. These findings would jive with the main points of the Freakonomics authors, where incentive was inherent within the teaching profession versus tying incentive to funding.
What can be done to stop this from happening?
Policymakers can do some things to try and stop teachers from cheating on standardized tests.
1) Making the test results invalid if there is evidence of cheating. Invalid results would message that cheating is not tolerated and that there are consequences for breaking the rules.
2) Investigate claims of cheating. Administrators can investigate allegations of cheating. Investigations might help deter teachers from cheating if they know there is a chance they could get caught.
3) Increase transparency around the test scoring process. If teachers and administrators know precisely how testing companies calculate the scores, it will be more difficult for them to manipulate the results.
4) Provide more training on test administration and scoring. More teacher training would help to ensure that everyone involved in the process understands how to administer and score the test correctly.
5) Create a more balanced assessment system. If standardized tests are not the only factor used to assess student performance, it will reduce teachers' incentive to cheat.
Conclusion.
While there are no guarantees that these measures would stop all instances of cheating, they could help to deter some teachers from breaking the rules. A broken system is an issue. There is already a teacher shortage, so increasing monetary or merit-based penalties would only drive people away from the teaching profession. Systematic change in supporting teachers and decentralized curricula is a way to emphasize holistic education for the student and not hitting a metric.
Dr. Mike Testa