Let’s not blow the “cheating scandal” out of proportion

This is one half of a point-counterpoint about recent revelations over cheating on DC standardized tests at DCPS and charter schools. read the other view, by Ken Archer.

Of course teachers shouldn’t cheat on standardized tests that measure student performance. But let’s keep the allegations and findings about cheating in DC schools in perspective.

The media world and the blogosphere are abuzz with outrage over recent revelations about cheating on the DC CAS, the standardized tests that measure student performance and factor into DCPS teacher evaluations. But is the outrage justified?

Journalist John Merrow recently disclosed a memo written in 2009 by an outside consultant to DCPS. The memo raises the possibility that widespread cheating might have taken place on the DC CAS. But the author of the memo himself said that it was based on “incomplete information” and that further investigation was needed.

Two further investigations did take place. And they concluded that widespread cheating hadn’t occurred. The DC Office of the Inspector General issued a detailed report in 2012 saying that cheating in DC schools wasn’t widespread, and the US Department of Education came to a similar conclusion in 2013.

The OIG report did conclude that cheating had occurred at one DCPS school, Noyes Education Campus, and recommended tighter security procedures, some of which DCPS had already started implementing on its own. DCPS has continued to work on improving test security.

The outrage about the memo seems to stem from the idea that Rhee engaged in a “cover-up” about it. But why should she have released, or even spoken about, an internal memo based on incomplete information? Isn’t it more important that later, and more thorough, investigations turned up no evidence that cheating was widespread?

A lot of the fuss seems to be fueled by antipathy towards Rhee, the Chancellor so many people love to hate. Merrow’s blog post, entitled “Michelle Rhee’s Reign of Error,” uses the 2009 memo as a springboard to launch an attack on Rhee for just about everything she ever did. Rhee may have made mistakes during her tenure, but let’s not allow generalized hostility towards her to blow one internal, preliminary memo out of proportion.

The other recent development is a report released on Friday by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. First OSSE surveyed all the schools that administer the DC CAS for signs of possible testing violations: a high number of wrong-to-right erasures, unusual changes in scores from year to year. Out of 243 schools that gave the test last year, OSSE found that “critical” violations occurred at only 11 of them.

If you look at the findings in terms of “testing groups,” which could either be a single classroom or a group of classrooms taking the test together, the paucity of violations is even more striking. OSSE looked at 2,688 testing groups and found 18 with critical violations. That’s 0.6%. In other words, as far as we know, 99.4% of the testing groups were playing by the rules.

Critics say that cheating on the DC CAS is inevitable as long as DCPS factors student test scores into its IMPACT teacher evaluation system. But 4 of the 11 schools with critical violations (and 3 of the 4 schools with moderate violations) were charter schools, not DCPS schools. And teachers at charter schools aren’t subject to the IMPACT evaluation system. So even if test scores were left out of evaluations, as some have advocated, we might still find a few teachers falsifying results.

In an ideal world no one would cheat, but that’s not the world we live in. The Washington Post recently mentioned a 2012 study of 23,000 high school students in which 51% admitted to cheating on an exam. At Harvard, 125 students were disciplined for cheating on an exam last year, and students have been prosecuting for cheating on the SAT.

Nobody suggests that this means we should stop giving high school or college exams or do away with the SAT. Instead, people call for more precautions and better security. That’s what the allegations of cheating on the DC-CAS should lead to as well.

There may well be other reasons to deemphasize the importance of test scores, but the fear that teachers will cheat shouldn’t serve as the sole basis for that decision.

The fact is that the overwhelming majority of teachers don’t cheat. That doesn’t mean we should ignore the ones who do. Obviously, we should do everything we can to ensure the integrity of the testing process. And then we should move on and focus our attention on the many problems in our school system that really are widespread.