From the WSJ Opinion Archives
SCENE & HEARD
School for Scandal
Teachers' explanations for cheating on exams don't pass the laugh test.
School's finally out, and across the country kids are skipping out the door, swinging Pokémon lunchboxes and singing: No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers handing out answers to standardized tests so they get a cushy raise, even though I still can't count to 20 with my shoes on.
We're all looking forward to this vacation, a small break from hearing about all the schoolteachers orchestrating mass cheating to ramp up their class test scores. School districts in half a dozen states are under investigation after teachers were caught circulating exam papers beforehand, coaching students to change answers, editing tests and giving students extra time.
The most recent scandal popped up in Michigan last week, after officials found remarkable similarities among students' written responses to standardized exams across 71 schools. The New York Times, with a complete lack of irony, reported that five fifth-graders wrote the same answer to a science question, and that "the only variations were spelling mistakes."
Of course when kids are caught cheating, we suspend, expel or fail them. Evidently, there are different rules for grownups. Ever since the scandals broke, the education cabal has been out in full force, explaining why double-dealing instructors deserve a pass. The problem, they say, lies with standardized tests: There are too many of them, they are too hard, and because tests are increasingly used to determine promotions and pay, they are forcing teachers to cheat.
The educrats get it half-right. Yes, standardized tests raise the stakes, scaring a good portion of the education community witless. But this is all good news. For the first time in a long time, the spotlight is on reform; parents are demanding accountability, and, when they don't get it, they increasingly have choices such as charter schools. Cheating isn't the inevitable outcome, but it is a clear indication that many teachers aren't doing their jobs. And that's just what the tests were meant to show.
The teaching establishment has been avoiding accountability for some time. The antitest movement got its legs in the 1970s, when a crop of pop psychologists concluded that competition was bad for kids. School districts tossed away a slew of traditional tools: grade-point averages, report cards, class ranks, honor rolls. Most of the ideas from the '70s ended up in the dustbin, because they didn't motivate kids to learn. But a lingering resentment of testing has remained, all the way up to higher education. Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California is calling for the abolition of SAT scores as a basis for admission.
Now, however, comes the passage of President Bush's education bill, which will make testing mandatory in every state. Teachers are becoming desperate and are attempting to smear the plan before it begins.
The biggest complaint is that tests are too hard and too numerous, meaning that teachers have to spend all their time preparing for them. That's a laugh. The recent testing push focuses mainly on third- to eighth grades and on basic proficiencies such as reading and writing. These tests aren't quizzing 11-year-olds on the theory of relativity or the economic underpinnings of Malta. Rather, they attempt to measure basic skills. Can you read a paragraph and then answer questions about it? Can you multiply and divide?
These aren't skills that teachers can cram into their charges two weeks before a test; they're a foundation of knowledge that take months of work to build. Last year, when 21,000 teachers went nuts in Philadelphia because the district wanted to tie pay to performance, the issue was that only 12% of the students performed at "proficient" levels on exactly these basic tests. Put another way, only about one-tenth could read, write or do math at a satisfactory level. These tests aren't asking teachers to do anything more than their job--provide what any of us would consider a rudimentary education.
Are there too many tests? In some places, kids face both state-devised tests and district-devised tests, in addition to the weekly spelling or math quizzes from different teachers. And some states have gone overboard, with some pretty silly exams. For example, Washington state will soon be instituting standardized tests in health and fitness (read "gym").
But for the most part, this is what school is about: You learn something; you are tested on it. Complaints from teachers that standardized tests cause the school to "shut down" when administered often come from areas with badly organized testing programs.
Another big complaint about testing is that it gives state and federal governments too much control over local curriculum. In truth, testing should have just the opposite effect. State governments do have too much direct control over some matters: They interfere in teaching methods and classes offered. What teachers forget, however, is that this interference is their own doing. So many schools have performed so badly, that state authorities are under pressure to step in. In 1998 Pennsylvania's Gov. Tom Ridge pushed for and signed a law allowing the state to take over failing schools; over the past decade, states have intervened in more than a dozen failing school districts. The Department of Education says one in 12 public schools is failing.
The hope is that testing will turn this situation on its head. Local officials and teachers should have wide latitude in how they teach and what subjects they offer. But at the end of the year, the tests will be the benchmark, the proof that the methods are working and the kids are learning. Under the new education bill, which mandates reading and math tests for third through eight grades, states are allowed to set their own standards for proficiency, and to devise their own tests--keeping federal interference to a minimum.
Finally, teachers complain that tying their pay to test performance isn't fair, especially if they get stuck with the dummies who didn't learn anything the year before. This last argument is enraging. Cut the platitudes, and teachers are basically saying that kids are too stupid to learn. It's not that the teachers are failing, it's that Tommy and Susie are failures.
They should spend an evening in front of "Stand and Deliver," the movie that immortalized the real-life Jaime Escalante, a Los Angeles teacher who in 1982 took 18 poor, written-off Hispanic kids and turned them into calculus whizzes. Since then hundreds of his "underachieving" students have gone on to pass the College Board's difficult Advanced Placement calculus exam.
It's worthwhile comparing the whining of so many public-school administrators with those of charter-school teachers. Charter schools have largely embraced standardized tests. Why? Because they've made promises to parents that their kids will make progress, and they know that the main way to demonstrate this is with test scores.
Charter schools are no panacea; 80 of them have already been shut down. But this is good. When they didn't follow through with what they promised, they were put out of business. Unfortunately, we can't do this with the rest of our public schools. But we can take a first step, which is to isolate those that aren't doing their jobs. And we can do this with tests.
Ms. Strassel is an assistant features editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.
