If there is a silver lining to the cheating scandals, it is the increased scrutiny being paid to the testing industry, including the education systems that administer the tests.
In New York, for instance, as Philissa Cramer of Gotham Schools reports, ?mounting anxiety? over recent events has prompted new State Education Commissioner John King to convene a task force to review the state's testing procedures.? (See also Sharon Otterman in the Times.)
Cramer describes it as ?a fast-moving process to tighten test security before it risks following Georgia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey into cheating scandals.?? It better be fast. The Empire State has been just a hare's breath in front a testing scandal for years, up to now, able to bury the problem in the weeds of bureaucratic inefficiencies.? (See my post of yesterday.)
In 2007 the New York Post reported that,
In 2000, for example, numerous teachers told The Post that educators had dumbed down that year's Regents history and geography exams to a laughable extent. Other reports have exposed grading scams - dubious practices, like "scrubbing," in which teachers find ways to get extra points to kids just below a pass/fail threshold. Other times, so many kids failed that results were simply scrapped, as with the math Regents a few years ago.
In January of this year, a Post headline put it bluntly:? ?Teachers Cheat: Inflating Regents Scores to Pass Kids.?
The Wall Street Journal did its own analysis of NYC's Regents tests and in February found what Journal reporter Barbara Martinez said was,
a disproportionate percentage of New York City students [who] barely got the passing score they needed to receive a diploma in the past two years, while very few received scores just below passing?.
The state does not conduct erasure analysis on any of its tests (the procedure which exposed the cheating in Atlanta and Pennsylvania) and New York City had ended erasure evaluations in 2001, but the passing rate anomaly at the cut score line, from a statistician's point of view, is just as telling.? "There's no question that there's something fishy going on," Jonah Rockoff, a professor at Columbia University's business school, told the Journal. Rockoff estimated that ?3% to 4% of the students who passed the Regents test last year should have failed,? wrote Martinez.? (The Journal hired three economists -- Thomas S. Dee of the University of Virginia, Brian A. Jacob of the University of Michigan and Justin McCrary of the University of California at Berkeley? to do an independent analysis of the data and they corroborated the significance of the anomalies.)
Under David Steiner the State attempted an end-around the dumbing down problem by raising the proficiency bar for its 4th- and 8th-grade math and ELA tests, but the reports of scrubbing -- and worse -- persist and King's team may be running just ahead of a train wreck.
This could be the first major test for King, who took over the state ed reins on July 15, and New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who assumed his duties in April, has already stumbled on the testing issue, saying that the City has for years ?gone above and beyond? state requirements when it comes to ensuring test integrity, citing a 2009 audit by the City's Comptroller as proof.? As Philissa Cramer points out,
while that audit found no new instances of cheating, it concluded that the city Department of Education had ?engaged in sloppy and unprofessional practices that encourage cheating and data manipulation.?
Is "encourage cheating" the same as cheating?? These are tough times to have to start shoring up our testing dikes.? But if educators wish to continue to pursue accountability practices through testing, they have no choice.? The tsunami is coming.
--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
