Cheating

Photo by Alberto G.

The latest shock to hit American schools and education reformers is the revelation that teachers and administrators have been fiddling with test scores in Atlanta and, evidently, in D.C., Baltimore, and half a dozen other locales.

In Georgia, where a state investigation implicated 178 individuals in the Atlanta public schools for cheating on or allowing cheating on the 2009 round of state assessments, Governor Nathan Deal declared that “when test results are falsified and students who have not mastered the necessary material are promoted, our students are harmed, parents lose sight of their child's true progress, and taxpayers are cheated.” He’s right, of course. But, as destructive as the actual cheating is the cry from many directions that the remedy for it is to do away with testing or radically reduce our reliance on its results as markers of student and school performance.…

Unfortunately, CNN.com, which originally published this piece, wouldn’t let us run more than 150 words of it here. To read the full essay, find it here on the CNN.com opinion page.