'Caring' cheaters: Jon Dougherty shames teachers who 'help' kids with tests

WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Friday, October 31, 2003 | Jon Dougherty

[JohnHuang2]

'Caring' cheaters

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Posted: October 31, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

If you still think there is hope for the nation's government school system, revelations about a number of New York teachers made public this week should change your mind for good. The news is quite appropriate for Halloween – because it's scary.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, the Associated Press uncovered records showing that 21 New York teachers between 1999 and 2002 cheated "on behalf of their students" when administering standardized tests – tests that were designed to demonstrate student progress in critical areas of learning.

According to the report, teachers have been found guilty of reading off test answers to students, sending students back to correct wrong answers, copying secure tests for class use, inflating final scores, and going over and practicing answering test questions in class before administering the exams.

Worse, says the report, the number of teachers caught doing this is probably low. Other teachers – in and outside New York – are saying the cheating is much more common than the statistics indicate.

Liberals have always hated the idea of standardized testing. They claim they object to it because it is unfair to poor and minority children – though liberals never explain why mommy and daddy's salary and skin color prevent their kids from learning the same stuff children from richer, whiter households also have to learn.

In reality, they object to such standardization because it bypasses all of the social engineering liberals have woven into the educational system. Standardized testing doesn't ask Johnny how he feels about himself, and it doesn't ask Johnny to take his best guess at the answer to three-plus-three. Such testing demands students provide unambiguous answers to specific questions. In other words, it requires teachers to teach and students to learn.

Before you say "duh," consider how most liberals react to anyone with a brain who challenges them on the issues. Do most liberals argue poignantly, or do they resort to name-calling, labeling and finger-pointing? Now ask yourself this question: Would those in charge of today's education curriculum tolerate millions of thinking, rational, patriotic anti-liberals graduating high school every year?

Consider that, since liberalism came to dominate American education so prominently, the nation has had to contend with substandard performance, "educated" illiteracy – whereby high-school and college graduates cannot read effectively or write clearly and concisely – mediocrity, and diminishing ability to compete with other industrialized nations. This is success?

New York's top teachers' union epitomizes this failure in excusing the cheating cited this week.

"Teachers care a lot; sometimes they care too much and try to provide too much help," said Dennis Tompkins, spokesman for New York State United Teachers. "I don't think our members are Machiavellian. I think they are just trying to help the kids do better."

Oh. As long as you "care," cheating is OK.

There may be some legitimate complaints about standardized testing – for one, it shouldn't be (and is not) the end-all, be-all guide to determining student progress and teacher effectiveness. But to dismiss it as biased against race and poverty is so inane it defies description.

Standardized tests can be used effectively to discover early on whether some kids – white, black, Asian, Hispanic; rich or poor – have serious learning disabilities, or whether they simply are not applying themselves to schoolwork.

They can also be used – and this is what the unions fear – as a way to gauge how well a teacher is teaching her students. God forbid parents, policymakers and taxpayers should have a way to check on the performance of teachers.

What is really grotesque is that the liberal academic establishment even deigns to introduce such concepts as race, creed and economic status into the debate over how to improve the nation's public education system. If the goal is educating children – teaching them to read well, understand what they read, reason sufficiently and figure – kids of all colors, backgrounds and social status are automatically equal.

Providing answers on standardized tests damages more than just the system put in place to gauge student/teacher performance. It is a lie that can devastate our children's futures, rob them of opportunities and sentence them to the kind of lives testing opponents contend are disadvantageous to begin with.

If that's how liberals define "caring," our kids would be much better off if liberals didn't "care" so much.

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Jon E. Dougherty is a staff reporter and columnist for WorldNetDaily.

[JohnHuang2]

Friday, October 31, 2003

Quote of the Day by Steven W.

[cornelis]

FYI

[ventana]

My daughter attended a Catholic elementary school and the teacher helped her class cheat on a standardized test. The majority of the students were from affluent "whitelandia." The teachers are just plain lazy and liars, and that's it. V's wife.

[longtermmemmory]

The integrity of the public school system is so weak, teachers assisting students to covertly assist (cheat) to help students is probably a career asset.

[longtermmemmory]

Perhaps the recent increase in these stories is part of the unwritten left bias to eliminate the standardized tests.

I say start prosecuting teachers or better yet, teachers who cheat loose their jobs and have to PAY for students being retested.

[Ahban]

or perhaps it is the unevitable unintended consequence of high value tests, which always distort the ciricculum.

I say throw them out. Local control of schools is the conservative position. Standardized tests, when attached to state/fed sanctions, rips control of schools out of local hands.

[longtermmemmory]

there are more than a few law schools with high bar pass rates because their courses are geared to a bar exam.

It WAS a notion that standardised tests were used in conjuction with other measures. IE grade measure long term, tests only one moment, activity demonstrates behavior. Now we have arrived to a point where any system is "gamed" (and expected to be "gamed.")

The letter is used to violate the spirit.

[Political Junkie Too]

"Teachers care a lot; sometimes they care too much and try to provide too much help," said Dennis Tompkins, spokesman for New York State United Teachers. "I don't think our members are Machiavellian. I think they are just trying to help the kids do better." Oh. As long as you "care," cheating is OK.

Ken Lay (Enron) should try that one. "I cared too much for my stockholders. I was just trying to help the stockholders do better."

-PJ

[mrustow]

The main testing scandal in New York occurred in 1999, and got tons of ink. You didn't need to read the AP, and no one required the FOIA to find out about it. And all this blah, blah, blah, about testing, and no mention of Richard Phelps' new book on the testing wars, Kill the Messenger? This guy knows very little about the testing wars. This screed embodies much of what is wrong with WND

[mrustow]

Local control of the scoring of tests has always been inseparable from institutionalized cheating.

[mrustow]

Thanks for the ping; please see #9.

[DannyTN]

What makes the author think that these teachers are "caring".

With grading systems increasingly linked to determine "value add" or rather the amount that a student improves under a teachers tutilage, it is more likely that the teacher is cheating on his/her own scores by helping the kids.

The fact that the teacher doesn't care that she is a bad role model and instilling a lack of values in the kids in order to boost her own status is a character flaw that we should never let within 2 miles of our kids.

[Ahban]

Only if its Washington's test. If I am the teacher, and I make a test based on what I see fit to teach, why should I cheat?

[mrustow]

Only if its Washington's test. If I am the teacher, and I make a test based on what I see fit to teach, why should I cheat?

Why would the motivation magically change, just because it's a federal test? Besides, federal tests have never been locally scored. The locally scored tests were always state or local exams.

Why should you cheat? Because your principal or vice-principal put you under tremendous pressure to do so; because cheating will get you a "merit raise"; because not cheating might cost you your job or tenure.

[Hyacinth Bucket]

In reality, they object to such standardization because it bypasses all of the social engineering liberals have woven into the educational system.

The biggest reason why public school teachers hate standardized testing for their students and themselves is because they (teachers) barely know the material they are supposed to be teaching. Most majored in Education which means they majored in the bureaucracy and political correctness not in any of the academic subjects they are responsible for teaching the kids.

[Ahban]

I guess I am not making myself clear. I want to dump all high value tests from the state capitol or Washington. I want the students to be evaluated by the teacher that is with them every day, and not one test on one day. Standardized testing is a way to know about students without getting to know them. When there is a high value on that one test, their will be pressure to cheat where ever it is scored.

Educating children cannot be done in an impersonal manner, like making widgets in a factory. The human element is essential.

Local control of schools is the only legitimate conservative position. Everything else is statist. Will there be some bad schools if we give control to the locals? Yes, just as their are now, only in local control it will be much easier for the parents to do something about it when they are tired of rotten schools. If the parents don't care about it, there is nothing to be done anyway.

Local control will not ensure perfection, which is a utopian hallucination, but it will ensure justice. Communities will get the schools they deserve.

[mrustow]

Thanks for the clarification. Ther problem is, today classroom grades are worthless as an index of academic progress. They have been thoroughly corrupted. The single reliable measure of academic progress is external, standardized, high-stakes testing. External means the grading is not done by those who have an interest in a particular result, often by a private testing company.

You're right that "educating children cannot be done in an impersonal manner," but how do you jump from that to your assumption that TESTING AND GRADING cannot be done in an impersonal manner. There's a word for teachers who test and grade in a personal manner: crooks.

And you're doing kids no favors. Unless they are affirmative action clients, universities are going to ignore all those meaningless "A"s they got from their caring teachers, and look at the real measure of their learning -- their SAT scores. If you're going to celebrate the corruption of grading, then every town is going to have to build its own corrupt, local university, for the local idiot kids.

I don't understand where "justice" comes in; you're politicizing everything. Politicization is the enemy of good schools.

I suspect that you've taken a ideological position that may have merit regarding non-academic, local governance, and thoughtlessly extrapolated it, not only to the schools, but to every aspect of education, such that intimacy rules. Then you'd also have to have, in addition to local universities, local disciplines, like Appalachian physics, and Rocky Mountain mathematics. None of this impersonal stuff.

Local standards is just another name for no standards.

[nmh]

Is it any wonder that kids are becoming dumber and dumber? Now their dumbness is being aided by "teacher".

[Ahban]

You are absolutley right about grade inflation. They have been corrupted. Some parents have demanded it, in true 60's self-esteem fashion. Those parents are getting the education value they deserve. Other parents and towns insist on high standards and they are getting what they deserve. Freedom is like that and it is worth it. The only corruptor I would get rid of is governor's scholarship's based on GPA (I'd get rid of them period). That puts OUTSIDE pressure on teachers to inflate grades.

Standardized testing IS a reliable indicator of the school as a whole, on what the test is measuring. I say give them, and let the community know how their kids are doing compared to others. If they see a need to do something about it, the state should be there to aid them. What I disagree with is the state coming in and imposing a certain level or type of education on families that DON'T WANT IT. Understand that not every family values education like you and I, nor do they have our inclination for it. The government can waste a lot of energy and tax dollars attempting to impose education excellence on communities that do not want it. Its utopian and its wrong.

How can you fix that, short of a totalitarian solution? Close the school and ship them to a high performing school? I sure would not want to teach a classroom where half the arrivals were hostages from such a district, neither they nor their parents wanting to be at the other school. It would ruin the better school more than it would fix the worse one.

Testing and grading should be done in an impersonal manner on average. I take grades every week. Some kids have problems at home that cause them to blow a test one week, but they do better on the next one. A single standardized test can't measure that. It can measure every trait either.

Hitlery loves standardized testing. Her deal was a "Basic Skills Test" that measured a core body of knowledge. It was a fiasco as we focused on that same limited content over and over until even the most unmotivated got it by osmosis. They good students were bored half to death. Even they did not understand how the facts connected. They just knew the facts.

The new test, made by Republicans, goes to the opposite extreme. It measures higher cognition and abstract thinking, except in writing, where it goes by a formula so rigid that Bob Dylan, greatist lyracist of all time, would fail it. We now focus on the abstract skills so much that we are failing to convey a core body of knowledge. Kids can't name the 7 continents but they can use a metaphor.

I know how it sounds, but I am the one in the trenches and I am telling you that high stakes standardized tests are NOT the answer to making education better. This is from someone who is too conservative to be a Republican.

As far as having local disciplines, to some extent I think we should. Not "Appliachian Science", but perhaps more emphasis on geology there and in the Rockies, with more emphasis on Oceanography in Rhode Island. How do you get a national standardized test to reflect that?

Its a "1000 points of light" answer. It is not as easy to grasp as a top-down, statist solution, but it is the only one that will work, as far as anything can work.

National standards are just another name for Centralized Statism.