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Educators who help their students cheat are a tiny minority. Teachers' union leaders disputed the cheating charges in New York City last week, claiming they were based on the unproved allegations of children and, in any event, do not constitute a "sweeping indictment of the entire system." Still, the temptation to cheat seems to be growing among teachers, who are being held accountable if their students don't measure up. "Anytime you have this kind of mounting pressure about getting children to a standard," says New York City's school chancellor, Rudy Crew, "it shouldn't come as any wonder that there are going to be people who will find a creative way of cheating." Crew argues that such incidents do not mean the tests should be abandoned, though others disagree. "The country has gone test crazy," says Robert Schaeffer, a director at FairTest, an organization that monitors standardized testing. "The more you ratchet up the pressure on these Trivial Pursuit types of exams, the more cheating you will see."
Yet blaming the exams seems misdirected, since such cheating represents a basic betrayal of a teacher's job--and responsibility to the student. A girl cited in Stancik's report scored only in the 12th percentile in reading in 1997, jumped to the 81st in 1998 and then fell to the 19th in 1999. What remedial help was she denied after the second year because of her "improvement"?
Worse than the lessons lost, however, are the lessons learned. Many of the kids did not even know they were cheating. They were just following the teacher's orders. "It's important for them to do what the teacher wants; they need to think the teacher is looking out for their best interests," says Moskowitz. "At that age, in the third grade, I don't think they had any clue."
--With reporting by Hilary Hylton/Austin, David Nordan/Atlanta and Maggie Sieger/Chicago