Teach For America Corps Members Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal

Per 11 Alive in Atlanta, Teach For America corps members are among the teachers guilty of cheating in Atlanta schools.  Three teachers confessed and it seems there are others who may be identified.  Kwame Griffith, the Executive Director of Teach For America Atlanta called the teachers' actions "unacceptable."

Hat tip @BobSikes

Another Perspective on the Atlanta Cheating Scandal

Kevin Carey of The New Republic writes that perhaps the Atlanta cheating scandal shouldn't just be blamed on standardized testing.  After all, teachers are choosing to act inappropriately.  In other industries, we don't blame the entire system for the actions of a small minority of individuals.  Excerpts below.

TO BE SURE, people (and teachers) will succumb to dishonesty. They cheat on their taxes, spouses, and golf partners. Cheating corrodes trust in all things, especially education. Students whose test scores are manipulated upward don’t the get the extra attention they need. And, since teachers are increasingly being evaluated by how much their students’ test scores improve, a teacher who inflates scores could potentially cost her colleagues in the next grade of their job performance.

But cheating also means that public schools finally care enough about student performance that some ethically challenged educators have chosen to cheat. This is far better than the alternative, where learning is so incidental and non-transparent that people of low character can’t be bothered to lie about it. Blaming cheating on the test amounts to infantilizing teachers, moving teaching 180 degrees away from the kind of professionalization that teacher advocates often profess to support.

Indeed, it’s not a coincidence that cheating scandals tend to erupt in municipalities whose public institutions suffer from corruption. 

Washington Post Roundtable on Cheating

"You are what you measure", according to a Washington Post article from a leadership roundtable on education.  Dan Ariely, a behavioral economics professor from Duke, argues that by measuring a particular statistic and including it in employee evaluation, employees will devote a disproportional amount of their effort to maximizing that measure.  His analysis from the corporate word seems to support this.

Steven Pearlson writes that based on the actions of other employees across a whole host of sectors, we shouldn't be surprised to find teachers cheating.  His solution is to punish the offenders so as to deter others from engaging in similar behavior.  Certainly that's true, but I hope there can be structural changes to reduce cheating because it impacts not only data and things that matter to adults but also the futures of children.  Cheating has consequences for kids, and actively minimizing such dishonesty requires a multi-pronged approach.