Under Pressure, Teachers Tamper With Test Scores

If you're a bank teller, your whole job is to manage the flow of money and information to and from customers of the bank, the ultimate goal being to make more money for the bank. If you take $3k out of the drawer, then you have failed at your immediate task (money has gone to the wrong place) and worked against the overall purpose of your job (the bank has less money, rather than more).

If you're a teacher, the heart of your job is (or should be) teaching your pupils: enabling them to know more and think better and so forth. A secondary purpose (the real purpose, according to some cynics) is to keep them out of their parents' hair and off the streets for a few hours every day. Another (subsidiary to the first, in an ideal world) is enabling them to do as well as possible in whatever external examinations they take, in the hope that it'll help them in later life. Arranging for your pupils' standardized test scores not to be too high comes very low down that list -- and if you get away with it, it benefits your pupils and your school. (While harming other pupils and other schools and other people generally, by making the test results less useful. Tragedy of the commons.)

That's not to say that it's not very bad for teachers to cheat to get better test results for their pupils. But it's bad in a different way from a bank teller's embezzlement: peripheral to their job rather than central, and immediately beneficial rather than harmful to the people you're supposed to be working for.

A better analogy (though perhaps an overdramatic one, given recent economic events) would be a mortgage salesperson, working for a mortgage broker, who sells people mortgages they are too likely to default on. When that happens, the salesperson gets more commission; his employer, the broker, gets more commission; the person who buys the mortgage gets a mortgage they want and otherwise couldn't have had (and, let's say, does manage to keep up the payments in 90% of cases, fails to do so but not so badly that they lose their home in 5% of cases, and crashes hard in 5% of cases -- which is probably kinda parallel to the outcomes for pupils whose test scores are inflated); other people, less directly connected with the broker, are the ones who get screwed.

Anyone expect mortgage salespeople who sell a bit too enthusiastically to get kicked out of their profession en masse? ... No, nor me.

> In the world we actually live in ... you'll probably not miss a day of class.

That doesn't appear to be what happened in the cases in the NYT article.

The tragedy is that teachers who don't teach to the test and provide an excellent education that is tailored to the children they have are starting to worry about the security of their jobs, whereas poor teachers who have no real ability except to regurgitate the texts and drill the kids on process and recitation are relatively safe.

Evidence for this empirical statement? I have my doubts about this, because the best teachers I had in childhood (too few, but more than one) were able both to engage the pupils from the dullest to the brightest with deep, thoughtful questions and able to cover the fundamental facts of the lessons with efficiency.

Poor black kids are going to stay lower than everyone else, because poor black kids, statistically, have much less family involvement, and a (again, statistically), substantially less 'structured' home life. THIS is the number one problem with the low end of the socio-economic academic performance ladder. Rich white kids and poor black kids attending the same class, at the same school, will not perform the same, unless the parents are both involved to the same amount. Making everybody take tests to prove this out doesn't accomplish anything. Firing teachers because parents won't do anything to help their children also does not accomplish anything.

This issue is near and dear to me - I worked in one of the school districts cited in the NYT article for 7 years, and my wife is currently teaching there. It's a farce.