An Invitation To Cheat

A NY Sun Op Ed from yesterday about the incentives to cheat when accountability and/or merit pay is introduced.  This is a very good point, which is why there need to be systems in place to detect and punish cheating.

Under the federal pilot program for the charter schools announced last week, administrators will receive bonuses of up to $8,000, teachers up to $6,000 and school aides, up to $2,000. These bonuses will be based on student gains on standardized tests, and therein lies the rub.

I'm a believer in the power of the market to influence outcomes, but this type of program, unless subjected to rigorous scrutiny and security, is nothing more than an invitation to cheat.

This article raises some fair points, which is why it's critical to examine the context for the rising scores.  I'm generally skeptical when test scores rise in the absense of genuine reform, but in the case of NYC, I think there has been genuine reform in many, many areas, so I'm convinced that what we're seeing here is not a short-term blip in performance but -- I'll really stick my neck out here -- the beginning of major improvement (if the reforms stay on track under the next mayor -- a huge if).  The best analogy I can think of is the reforms of the NYC police department initiated in 1994 -- in the subsequent 10 years, total crime in the largest city in America fell 67 percent!

We know the script. It opens with a Greek chorus lamenting how poorly students are reading. A pedagogic hero — a new chancellor or state commissioner — appears on the scene with a fresh quiver of weapons and schedules improved tests.

The results come back, and — alakazam! — achievement surges, and our hero is hailed as rescuer of the school system. That is, until tests in later years reveal that students are back to about where they were.

Such a pattern has stamped the history of standardized testing. And so the heartening results last month on the annual reading tests in New York State and New York City, and the results on the math tests announced yesterday, should be taken in perspective.

Officials trumpeted these results. In reading, the city’s proportion of passing eighth graders — for years the subject of hand-wringing — rose a breathtaking 7.9 percentage points, with 46.4 percent of fluent English speakers tested qualifying as proficient compared with 38.5 percent the year before. Reading results for eighth graders statewide were as comforting. In math, almost 73 percent of students from third through eighth grade met standards compared with almost 66 percent last year.

But some skeptics who have been on this roller coaster before wonder whether these increases are animated more by the content of the tests or by how the results are measured than by anything administrators or teachers did or did not do. In these critics’ view, a test may show an individual student’s progress, but is not as precise at measuring the progress of an entire grade or school system.

That’s not to say that New York students did not genuinely improve. State officials say scores rose because tougher curriculum standards were spelled out, teachers were given better training and students were given extra tutoring. But a little humility may be called for.

Robert Tobias ran New York City’s office of assessment for 13 years under seven chancellors, so he knows in his marrow the vagaries of test scores. He was there when chancellors flaunted the results and when they had to sheepishly explain why scores fell. He has learned neither to get too intoxicated by the leaps nor too downhearted by the plunges.

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An Invitation To Cheat

BY ANDREW WOLF
June 12, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/56370

As the schools chancellor joined in the announcement of a federal grant to test whether merit pay can lift performance in charter schools, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education confirmed that an investigation of test results was under way in a high-profile school in which the principal benefited from such a merit pay program.