Galena Park cheating scandal brings five resignations

From the Houston Chronicle:

Two administrators and three teachers resigned Monday from Galena Park ISD after district officials found evidence of staff-led cheating on the high-stakes TAKS test.

And

The district's investigation found evidence that staff changed fifth-graders' answers on the TAKS in April and helped students correct wrong answers.

More here.

Full disclosure: both of my parents are from Galena Park, and my grandmother lived there for many years, so I know the area well. But that doesn't really have anything to do with cheating on the TAKS, or any other kind of high stakes, all-in-one-basket test.

That is, standardized testing should play an important role in assessing a student's academic progress, along with portfolios of student work, special projects, writing samples, and various other forms of evaluation. Using standardized tests as the sole means by which we determine whether a student is or is not learning, however, not only gives a woefully inadequate picture of individual academic progress, but it also creates an institutional context wherein cheating is inevitable. Students are compelled to cheat because they will not advance to the next grade, or graduate, if they fail; teachers and administrators are compelled to cheat because their performance evaluation is directly tied to student test scores: we have created a system where so much is on the line with these tests that oftentimes people must cheat.

So why do we have everything riding on these must-pass tests? Politicians and journalists like them because they provide what appears to be solid data for political fodder. It doesn't matter that education experts are in lockstep with the assertion that such data isn't really as solid as it appears to be; our political structure demands that something as intangible as knowledge and thinking be numerically quantified. So we have a flawed system of academic evaluation that necessarily sets people up for engaging in unethical behavior. The worst part is that this system is generally bad for the students themselves. That is, the politics of education is more important than education itself.

Really, that's not surprising at all, par for the course, for both society and education. What a fucked up country we have.

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