The trouble with high-stakes testing…......

Chas sent me a link to this fascinating opinion column about the Atlanta cheating scandal where 178 teachers were identified as falsifying students' test results. Likening it to the Soviet Union where middle managers fiddled grain production records because they were afraid for their lives, the article says that people are always going to cheat if the stakes are high enough. 

"The problem is not the cheaters per se; the problem is the ridiculous idea that you can reinvent reality by passing a law [in this case a law mandating higher student achievement] and enforcing it."

“No Child Left Behind” was nothing but a soft version of Stalin’s Five Year Plan. It was an attempt to reform around the edges a system that is fundamentally wrong. It mandated that nationalized institutions, with students who are  required to be there or face penalties, achieve a certain level of output or else everyone in charge gets replaced. This reform legislation was passed as a “back to basics” plan to replace the previous liberal plan that seemed to have no standards at all.

"Now it stands as just another failed reform, another attempt to make reality different by passing laws and cracking skulls. It never works. So long as schools remain the province of politicians and are owned and run by the State, these reforms will continue as they have for a century. And in the same way, there will be incentives to cheat the system, no matter how strict the penalties.

"The real way that education is being reinvented in our time is through myriad private efforts. Home schooling, privately-managed charter schools, privately owned schools, unschooling, Internet-based learning, church schools—each of these solutions is something that the political and bureaucratic class doesn’t like. But they are marking out the only real path for reform that can work."

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