Cheating and High-Stakes Testing

The AJC has a super article about cheating on standardized tests. It probably should cause some hard questions to be asked:

The analysis shows that in 2010 alone, the grade-wide reading scores of 24,618 children nationwide — enough to populate a midsized school district — swung so improbably that the odds of it happening by chance were less than one in 10,000.

And:

Big-to-medium-sized cities and rural districts harbored the highest concentrations of suspect tests. No Child Left Behind may help explain why. The law forced districts to contend with the scores of poor and minority students in an unprecedented way, judging schools by the performance of such “subgroups” as well as by overall achievement.

Hence, high-poverty schools faced some of the most relentless pressure of the kind critics say increases cheating.

Improbable scores were twice as likely to appear in charter schools as regular schools. Charters, which receive public money, can face intense pressure as supposed laboratories of innovation that, in theory, live or die by their academic performance.

This will almost certainly need more study to see how widespread cheating on these sorts of high-stakes standardized tests. There have been some recent gains on standardized tests—how much of that is attributable to cheating? The impact of charter schools on test scores is ambiguous—but how much of that ambiguity might be removed if we knew that a disproportionate number of them were cheating, as the AJC article suggests? These questions need further study.