History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
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Past Educational Opportunity Reports
The real cheating scandal of standardized tests
- 08-24-2011
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Opinion by Kimberly West-Faulcon/Miller-McCune
Kimberly West-Faulcon is a professor and William M. Rains Fellow at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, where she teaches Constitutional Law and Intelligence, Testing and the Law.
Last week, Montana became the leader of what is likely to be a number of states that will rebel against the provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind law by refusing to raise test score targets as required by the law. The list of states and cities plagued by allegations of cheating on standardized tests is likely to grow beyond Washington, Baltimore, Atlanta Pennsylvania and New Jersey. What are we to make of the Obama administration’s willingness to waive some of the most extreme penalties under the No Child law but to only offer the rather hollow response of calling for enhanced “test security” to combat test cheating? Instead of a shocking anomaly, it seems that the egregious test cheating uncovered in Atlanta public schools last month may be more common than we as a nation want to believe. The truth is that the greater the stakes imposed on standardized test scores, the greater the pressure on educators to do whatever it takes to juice up the scores even if it degrades educational quality. (more...)
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