Cheating the Cheaters

Accountability, on the surface, makes sense. If democracy is to function properly we need transparency and tools to ensure that the government is indeed serving the interests of the people. We need tools to help us in deciding if a particular policy is working and to contemplate alternatives that might make government and society function better. The push toward accountability accelerated dramatically under Reagan, as he consistently talked of governmental waste. And he certainly had a point. The accountability movement in schools was much slower, though it accelerated dramatically after the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2002. Now test scores are the key measure of success in our schools. Rather than provide a fundamental critique of this law and its shortcomings (which I have done in previous entries), I want to focus on one particular problem that has emerged -- the bringing of politics into the equation.

Politics and education are inextricably bound for a number of reasons, among them the nature and content of knowledge taught, the focus, funding differentials, teacher training and the relationship of schooling and education to democracy and equality. But more specifically, mayoral takeover of schools has been accompanied by a strong necessity to show results for political purposes. As I noted in an earlier post, in New York City this has manifest itself in making the tests and the grading of tests easier and easier to ensure positive results. In Houston and Texas it led to widespread fraud and the pushing of students to drop out before high school level exams and drop out rates were accessed. And now in DC, where former chancellor Michelle Rhee gained positive press for turning the system around, we find that widespread fraud appears to exist in actually changing the tests themselves (with a statistically significant overrepresentation of wrong answers changed to correct ones): USA Today.

Essentially calls for accountability must be accompanied by checks and balances that address the penchant toward cheating and manipulation as ways to avoid the pressure of that accountability. We want to know that our children are being educated in schools, but we want that to manifest itself in smarter, more independent and responsible adults -- not simply in a population that masters a few basic skills (if that) and learns the valuable (but socially destructive) lesson that one should do anything to succeed. While teachers across the country recognize that teaching to the test is undermining education in America, they continue to be the ones blamed for the failure of our schools. It is time to scrap the accountability and choice movement and build a more reasoned, holistic series of measures that allow real teaching and learning to return to the classroom.