How Schools Cheat

From underreporting violence to inflating graduation rates to fudging testscores, educators are lying to the American public.

Lisa Snell from the June 2005 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

The newspaper obtained raw testing data for 7,700 Texas public schools for 2003 and 2004. It found severe statistical anomalies in nearly 400 of them. The Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth districts are now investigating dozens of their schools for possible cheating on the TAKS test. Fort Worth's most suspicious case was at A.M. Pate Elementary. In 2004, Pate fifth-graders finished in the top 5 percent of Texas students. In 2003, when those same students were fourth-graders, they had finished in the bottom 3 percent.

In the Winter 2004 issue of Education Next, University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and Brian A. Jacob of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government explored the prevalence of cheating in public schools. Using data on test scores and student records from the Chicago public schools, Jacob and Levitt developed a statistical algorithm to identify classrooms where cheating was suspected. Their sample included all student test scores in grades 3�7 for the years 1993 to 2000. The final data set contained more than 40,000 "classroom years" of data and more than 700,000 "student year" observations. Jacob and Levitt's analysis looked for unexpected fluctuations in students' test scores and unusual patterns of answers for students within a classroom that might indicate skullduggery.

They found that on any given test the scores of students in 3 percent to 6 percent of classrooms are doctored by teachers or administrators. They also found some evidence of a correlation of cheating within schools, suggesting some centralized effort by a counselor, test coordinator, or principal. Jacob and Levitt argue that with the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, the incentives for teachers and administrators to manipulate the results from high-stakes tests will increase as schools begin to feel the consequences of low scores.

Texas' widespread cheating likely was a response both to high-stakes testing and to financial incentives for raising test scores. The Houston school district, for example, spends more than $7 million a year on performance bonuses that are largely tied to test scores. Those bonuses include up to $800 for teachers, $5,000 for principals, and $20,000 for higher-level administrators.

Texas is not the only state where schools have cheated on standardized tests. Teachers provided testing materials to students nearly a dozen times in 2003 in Nevada, for example. And Indiana has seen a raft of problems, including three Gary schools that were stripped of their accreditation in 2002 after hundreds of 10th-graders received answers for the Indiana Statewide Testing for Education Progress�Plus in advance. A teacher in Fort Wayne took a somewhat subtler approach in 2004, when school officials had to throw out her third-grade class's scores after she gave away answers by emphasizing certain words on oral test questions. In January 2005 another Fort Wayne third-grade teacher was suspended for tapping children on the shoulder to indicate a wrong answer.

Phantom Dropouts

If you want to make a school's performance look more impressive than it really is, you don't have to abet cheating on standardized tests. Instead you can misrepresent the dropout rate.

In 2003 The New York Times described an egregious example of this scam in Houston. Jerroll Tyler was severely truant from Houston's Sharpstown High School. When he showed up to take a math exam required for graduation, he was told he was no longer enrolled. He never returned.

So Tyler was surprised to learn, when the state audited his high school, that Sharpstown High had zero dropouts in 2002. According to the state audit of Houston's dropout data, Sharpstown reported that Tyler had enrolled in a charter school--an institution he had never visited, much less attended. The 2003 state audit of the Houston district examined records from 16 middle and high schools, and found that more than half of the 5,500 students who left in the 2002 school year should have been declared dropouts but were not.

The Manhattan Institute's Jay P. Greene argues, in his 2004 paper "Public School Graduation Rates in the United States," that "this problem is neither recent nor confined to the Houston school district....Official graduation rates going back many years have been highly misleading in New York City, Dallas, the state of California, the state of Washington, several Ohio school districts, and many other jurisdictions." Administrators, he explains, have strong incentives to count students who leave as anything other than dropouts. Next to test scores, graduation rates are an important measure of a school's performance: If parents and policy makers believe a school is producing a high number of graduates, they may not think reform is necessary. Greene writes that "when information on a student is ambiguous or missing, school and government officials are inclined to say that students moved away rather than say that they dropped out."

Greene and his associates have devised a more accurate method for calculating graduation rates. Simplifying a bit, it essentially counts the number of students enrolled in the ninth grade in a particular school or jurisdiction, makes adjustments for changes in the student population, and then counts the number of diplomas awarded when those same students leave high school. The percentage of original students who receive a diploma is the true graduation rate.

Using Greene's methodology, the national high school graduation rate for 2002 was 71 percent. Yet according to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2002 the national high school "completion rate," defined as the percentage of adults 25 and older who had completed high school, was 85 percent. As Greene notes, "There were a total of 3,852,077 public school ninth-graders during the 1998�99 school year. In 2001�02, when that class was graduating, only 2,632,182 regular high school diplomas were distributed. Simply dividing these numbers produces a (very rough) graduation rate estimate of 68%." The states show similar discrepancies between their reported graduation rates and the number of students who actually receive diplomas.

As Sharpstown High School's former assistant principal, Robert Kimball, told The New York Times, "We go from 1,000 Freshman [sic] to less than 300 Seniors with no dropouts. Amazing!"

The problem isn't limited to Texas. In March researchers at Harvard's Civil Rights Project released an analysis of state graduation rates for 2002, in which they derived their figures by counting the number of students who move from one grade to the next and then on to graduation. The report found serious discrepancies between the rates calculated by the Civil Rights Project and those offered by education departments in all 50 states. In California, for example, the state reported an 83 percent graduation rate, but the Harvard report found that only 71 percent of students made it through high school.

The Civil Rights Project's paper also found a high dropout rate among minorities, which California officials hides behind state averages. Almost half of the Latino and African-American students who should have graduated from California high schools in 2002 failed to complete their education. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, just 39 percent of Latinos and 47 percent of African Americans graduated, compared with 67 percent of whites and 77 percent of Asians.