School Cheating Rises Along With Standardized Tests

Fifth-grade teacher Barbara McCarroll was already puzzled and a little upset about her students’ low test scores when her boss at Eastgate Elementary in Columbus, Ohio, approached her.

How was it, the principal snapped, that the same children had done so much better on standardized exams the year before?

After eight years of teaching, McCarroll knew it paid to be frank with children, so she put the question to them. She was not prepared for the answer: “Well, Ms. McCarroll, that’s because they gave us the answers and you didn’t.”

Five months later, McCarroll sits at home, on disability leave since developing sleeping and eating problems. She says she was forced out of the school because she complained about coaching by teachers who administered last year’s state proficiency test. She, her principal and her school join dozens of others across the country caught up in a rash of alleged cheating incidents seemingly brought on by a political movement to raise student achievement.

Pressure to Succeed

Another recent incident arose at Potomac Elementary School in Montgomery County, Md., where Principal Karen Karch resigned after angry parents alleged that students were pointed to the correct answers and helped in rewriting answers to essay questions.

“We’re all shocked and flabbergasted. What the school feels is disbelief,” said Krysti Stein, Potomac Elementary’s incoming PTA president.

At a time when superintendents are under pressure to increase test scores and hold principals and teachers accountable for student achievement, talk of cheating dominates the conversation in education circles.

“What we are seeing is what comes from the pressures of these high-stakes tests,” said Vincent L. Ferrandino, executive director of the National Assn. of Elementary School Principals, who saw a similar scandal in Fairfield, Conn., while he was state education commissioner. “There needs to be some discussion of the validity of this kind of assessment.”

Teachers decry the breaking of testing rules but say they understand how colleagues might behave irrationally to ensure good results on tests that could dictate whether and where they will teach.

Few of the accused cheaters have spoken out in their own defense, although Bob Adams, a Woodland, Calif., teacher who allegedly broke the rules by using an old test to prepare his students, insisted that his case be made public and had his attorney speak of the pressures educators face.

“They put incredible pressure on teachers to get these scores up, but they don’t give them adequate training or preparation materials,” attorney Margaret Geddes said. Geddes said her client didn’t know the questions he used in class were from an old test.

In the last two years alone, schools in New York, Texas, Florida, Ohio, Rhode Island, Kentucky and Maryland have investigated reports of improper or illegal efforts by teachers, principals and administrators to raise test scores. The rise in incidents of coaching has matched the surge of standardized testing, as states move to punish schools and students who fail new high-stakes achievement tests.

Irregularities Mount

The testing movement still enjoys strong support from parents and politicians. Educators and policymakers argue that cheating is infrequent and should not curb a movement designed to bring high standards and better resources to children.

But the rapid increase in irregularities is hard to ignore, and in some cases the incidents have resulted in criminal charges. In Austin, a deputy superintendent was indicted on 16 counts of criminal tampering after central administrators and principals boosted scores by changing the ID numbers of students whose failing grades they didn’t want counted.

In New York City, cheating was found to be so rampant that it led to the resignation of the schools chief. A special investigator found that one principal in the Bronx had students fill out their answers on scrap paper. Only when they came up with the right answers did she give them the official bubble sheet to fill out.

At another New York school, a seventh-grade teacher allegedly left answers near the pencil sharpener, then urged her students to sharpen their pencils.

The New York investigation has been the most aggressive of any so far, and it has been denounced by some of its targets.

Stafford Gayot, a mathematics teacher at Public School 289 in Brooklyn, said he was forced out of a job he loved for showing 8-year-olds unaccustomed to testing how to fill out an answer sheet. Some were filling in more than one bubble per question, and he reminded them that was wrong.

He was proctoring a state reading test for another teacher’s class, he said, and had no motive to give students unfair help.

“Why would I want to cheat?” he said. “How dumb could I be?”

He was discharged in December. As a nontenured teacher with less than three years on the job, he could do nothing about it.

Still unemployed and with his wife about to give birth, Gayot blames the politics of New York and the testing movement for his plight. “Right now they have dumped on my whole life,” he said. A New York City schools spokeswoman said she could not immediately confirm the details of Gayot’s case.

Some say a culture of cheating has blossomed amid teachers’ skepticism or dislike of the tests. Gerald W. Bracey, an educational psychologist based in Fairfax, Va., said: “It may be easier for teachers to justify cheating on these tests because they don’t like these tests and don’t agree they’re valid measures of what teaching is about.”

Teachers know some students already consider shortcuts to success a part of the game. A nationwide poll of 20,000 students released in 1998 by the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina del Rey said seven of 10 high-schoolers admit cheating on a test.

Barbara McCarroll, the teacher in Columbus, said that when she asked other teachers about the cheating her students had described, they shrugged it off as old news. Her principal denied it had occurred, and an investigator for the district concluded that the claims were unsubstantiated, despite three boys’ insistence that an unidentified teacher’s aide had guided them to some right answers.

McCarroll said the principal took away her classroom piano, unaccountably locked her room and took other actions that led her to take a disability leave. The principal did not return a call seeking comment.

McCarroll said other teachers and many parents are convinced that the coaching occurred, in part because principals who show improvement get cash rewards of as much as $1,000.

“They should stop offering so much if the grades go up,” McCarroll said. “That tends to make people do things they shouldn’t.”