Category Archives: Testing

Here’s a good commentary article from the Washington Post by a second grade teacher in Silver Spring, MD, who describes the growing divide between rich and poor students as a result of the focus test-prep pedagogy that currently dominates in US classrooms.

Classroom Caste System

By David Keyes
Monday, April 9, 2007; A13

Written five years ago to reduce the “achievement gap,” the No Child Left Behind Act has in fact created a gap in American education. Its pressure to raise test scores has caused many schools to give poor and minority students an impoverished education that focuses primarily on basic skills.

As it comes up for reauthorization, members of Congress should consider the unintended consequence of the act: a new gap between poor and minority students, who are being taught to seek simple answers, and largely wealthy and white students, who are learning to ask complex questions. In my work as an elementary school teacher, I have seen this new gap and I worry about its impact on my students’ future prospects.

Although supporters and critics of No Child Left Behind agree on little, both would acknowledge that testing lies at the heart of the law. Schools approach the act’s testing requirements differently, depending on the students they serve.
Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, American schools remain largely segregated. Schools serving mostly wealthy and white students have a distinct advantage when it comes to testing. Their students are far more likely to be raised in an environment that gives them the necessary tools to succeed on tests. They grow up with the intellectual abundance their wealth provides: books, educational videos and Baby Einstein games, to name a few. Having these resources may not make children smarter, but it does educate them in many of the skills — such as letter sounds and addition facts — that are covered on standardized tests. Knowing their students are likely to succeed on tests gives these schools freedom to teach higher-level thinking skills.

Poor and minority children also come to school with rich backgrounds. They speak foreign languages, make music, tell vivid stories and have other skills not typical of their peers. Their backgrounds, however, often do not provide them with the academic skills needed to succeed on standardized tests. Fearful of poor test scores that can bring punitive measures, schools spend an inordinate amount of time preparing their students for the tests.

Schools often use test-prep programs to try to raise test scores. The problem with these programs is that they teach the skills covered on tests, and only these skills. Poor and minority students spend hours repeating “B buh ball” and two plus two equals four. Every hour spent drilling basic skills is an hour not spent developing the higher-level thinking skills that are emphasized in wealthier school districts.

I have worked in both types of schools. Currently, I teach in an almost exclusively minority, high-poverty elementary school. Administrators require teachers to strictly adhere to a months-long test-prep program. My students recoil at the sight of their test-prep books. Last year, some of my students cried, wracked with anxiety over the tests.

My students are 7 and 8 years old.

I did my student teaching in an almost exclusively white and wealthy school. There, the students studied the role of quilts on the Underground Railroad, brainstormed plans to save wolves from extinction and performed dances based on retellings of Cinderella. The children learned to think and they loved it.

At the end of the year, test results will come out for these two schools. Educators and politicians will trumpet any reduction of the so-called achievement gap. This misses the point. Students will leave these two schools and schools like them with a widely varying set of skills. As the achievement gap is being reduced, another gap is being created. Students in largely wealthy and white schools are learning to ask larger questions; students in poor and minority schools are only being taught to answer smaller ones.

The effect of this gap will be long-lasting. Students taught higher-level thinking skills will be able to compete for jobs at the upper echelon of the 21st-century economy. Students who receive an impoverished education focused on basic skills will be stuck at the bottom.

The No Child Left Behind Act is creating a caste-like system in which students’ future prospects are likely to be similar to those of their parents. This undemocratic development is at odds with a society that prides itself on being a meritocracy. As Congress debates the renewal of the law, members should consider not only whether the act is reducing the achievement gap but also the skills gap it is creating.

The writer is a second-grade teacher at Bel Pre Elementary School in Silver Spring.

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Washington Post: DOZENS OF REPUBLICANS TURN AGAINST BUSH’S NCLB ACT

More than 50 GOP members of the House and Senate — including the House’s second-ranking Republican — will introduce legislation that could severely undercut President Bush’s signature domestic achievement, the No Child Left Behind Act, by allowing states to opt out of its testing mandates.

One high-ranking Republican lawmaker is convinced that the burdens and red tape of the No Child Left Behind Act are unacceptably onerous. For a White House fighting off attacks on its war policy and dealing with a burgeoning scandal at the Justice Department, the GOP dissidents’ move is a fresh blow on a new front, reports Jonathan Weisman and Amit R. Paley in the Washington Post.

Some Republicans said yesterday that a backlash against the law was inevitable. Many voters in affluent suburban and exurban districts — GOP strongholds — think their schools have been adversely affected by the law. Once-innovative public schools have increasingly become captive to federal testing mandates, jettisoning education programs not covered by those tests, siphoning funds from programs for the talented and gifted, and discouraging creativity, critics say. “Republicans voted for No Child Left Behind holding their noses,” said Michael J. Petrilli, an Education Department official during Bush’s first term who is now a critic of the law. “But now with the president so politically weak, conservatives can vote their conscience.”

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Here’s an Education Week commentary on the deleterious effects of the No Child Left Behind legislation by David Berliner and Sharon L. Nichols, which is based on their new book Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools, published by Harvard Education Press.

Education Week
Published: March 12, 2007

Commentary
High-Stakes Testing is Putting the Nation At Risk
By David C. Berliner & Sharon L. Nichols

In his 2007 State of the Union address, President Bush claimed success for the federal No Child Left Behind Act. “Students are performing better in reading and math, and minority students are closing the achievement gap,” he said, calling on Congress to reauthorize this “good law.” Apparently, the president sees in No Child Left Behind what he sees in Iraq: evidence that his programs are working. But, as with Iraq, a substantial body of evidence challenges his claim.

We believe that this federal law, now in its sixth year, puts American public school students in serious jeopardy. Extensive reviews of empirical and theoretical work, along with conversations with hundreds of educators across the country, have convinced us that if Congress does not act in this session to fundamentally transform the law’s accountability provision, young people and their educators will suffer serious and long-term consequences. If the title were not already taken, our thoughts on this subject could be headlined “A Nation at Risk.”

We note in passing that only people who have no contact with children could write legislation demanding that every child reach a high level of performance in three subjects, thereby denying that individual differences exist. Only those same people could also believe that all children would reach high levels of proficiency at precisely the same rate of speed.

Validity problems in the testing of English-language learners and special education students also abound, but we limit our concerns in this essay to the No Child Left Behind law’s reliance on high-stakes testing. The stakes are high when students’ standardized-test performance results in grade retention or failure to graduate from high school. The stakes are high when teachers and administrators can lose their jobs or, conversely, receive large bonuses for student scores, or when humiliation or praise for teachers and schools occurs in the press as a result of test scores. This federal law requires such high-stakes testing in all states.

More than 30 years ago, the eminent social scientist Donald T. Campbell warned about the perils of measuring effectiveness via a single, highly consequential indicator: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking,” he said, “the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” High-stakes testing is exactly the kind of process Campbell worried about, since important judgments about student, teacher, and school effectiveness often are based on a single test score. This exaggerated reliance on scores for making judgments creates conditions that promote corruption and distortion. In fact, the overvaluation of this single indicator of school success often compromises the validity of the test scores themselves. Thus, the scores we end up praising and condemning in the press and our legislatures are actually untrustworthy, perhaps even worthless.
The scores we end up praising and condemning in the press and our legislatures are actually untrustworthy, perhaps even worthless.

Campbell’s law is ubiquitous, and shows up in many human endeavors. Businesses, for example, regularly become corrupt as particular indicators are deemed important in judging success or failure. If stock prices are the indicator of a company’s success, for example, then companies like Enron, Qwest, Adelphia, and WorldCom manipulate that indicator to make sure they look good. Lives and companies are destroyed as a result. That particular indicator of business success became untrustworthy as both it and the people who worked with it were corrupted.

Similarly, when the number of criminal cases closed is the indicator chosen to judge the success of a police department, two things generally happen: More trials are brought against people who may be innocent or, with a promise of lighter sentences, deals are made with accused criminals to get them to confess to crimes they didn’t commit.

When the indicators of success and failure in a profession take on too much value, they invariably are corrupted. Those of us in the academic world know that when researchers are judged primarily by their publication records, they have occasionally fabricated or manipulated data. This is just another instance of Campbell’s law in action.

We have documented hundreds of examples of the ways in which high-stakes testing corrupts American education in a new book, Collateral Damage. Using Campbell’s law as a framework, we found examples of administrators and teachers who have cheated on standardized tests. Educators, acting just like other humans do, manipulate the indicators used to judge their success or failure when their reputations, employment, or significant salary bonuses are related to those indicators.
The law makes all who engage in compliance activities traitors to their own profession. It forces education professionals to ignore the testing standards that they have worked so hard to develop.

We found examples of administrators who would falsify school test data or force low-scoring students out of school in their quest to avoid public humiliation. We documented the distortion of instructional values when teachers focused on “bubble” kids—those on the cusp of passing the test—at the expense of the education of very low or very high scorers. We found instances where callous disregard for student welfare had replaced compassion and humanity, as when special education students were forced to take a test they had failed five times, or when a student who had recently suffered a death in the family was forced to take the test anyway.

Because so much depends on how students perform on tests, it should not be surprising that, as one Florida superintendent noted, “When a low-performing child walks into a classroom, instead of being seen as a challenge, or an opportunity for improvement, for the first time since I’ve been in education, teachers are seeing [that child] as a liability.” Shouldn’t we be concerned about a law that turns too many of the country’s most morally admired citizens into morally compromised individuals?

We also documented the narrowing of the curriculum to just what is tested, and found a huge increase in time spent in test preparation instead of genuine instruction. We found teachers concerned about their loss of morale, the undercutting of their professionalism, and the problem of disillusionment among their students. Teachers and administrators told us repeatedly how they were not against accountability, but that they were being held responsible for their students’ performance regardless of other factors that may affect it. Dentists aren’t held responsible for cavities and physicians for the onset of diabetes when youngsters don’t brush their teeth, or eat too much junk food, they argue.

Teachers know they stand a better chance of being successful where neighborhoods and families are healthy and communicate a sense of efficacy, where incomes are both steady and adequate, and where health-care and child-care programs exist. So the best of them soon move to schools with easier-to-teach students. This is no way to close the achievement gap.

Dozens of assessment experts have argued eloquently and vehemently that the high-stakes tests accompanying the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act are psychometrically inadequate for the decisions that must be made about students, teachers, and schools. Furthermore, the testing standards of the American Educational Research Association are being violated in numerous ways by the use of high-stakes tests to comply with the law. The law, therefore, makes all who engage in compliance activities traitors to their own profession. It forces education professionals to ignore the testing standards that they have worked so hard to develop. We wonder, would the federal government treat members of the American Medical Association or the National Academy of Sciences with such disdain?

In reauthorization hearings for the law, members of Congress should abandon high-stakes testing and replace it with an accountability system that is more reasonable and fair.

What might such a system look like?

A move to more “formative” assessments and an abandonment of our heavy commitment to “summative” assessments would be welcome. Assessment for learning, as opposed to assessment of learning, has produced some impressive gains in student achievement in other countries, and ought to be tried here. Likewise, the use of an inspectorate—an agency that sends expert observers into schools—has proved itself useful in other countries, and could also help improve schools in the United States.

End-of-course exams designed by teachers, as some states are now offering, increase teachers’ commitment to the testing program and, if the teachers get to score the tests, can also be a great professional-development opportunity. There are other alternatives to high-stakes testing, as well.

Our research informs us that high-stakes testing is hurting students, teachers, and schools. It is putting the nation at risk. By restricting the education of our young people and substituting for it training for performing well on high-stakes examinations, we are turning America into a nation of test-takers, abandoning our heritage as a nation of thinkers, dreamers, and doers.

David C. Berliner is the Regents’ professor of education at Arizona State University, in Tempe, and a past president of the American Educational Research Association. Sharon L. Nichols is an assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. They are the co-authors of Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools, published this month by Harvard Education Press.

Vol. 26, Issue 27, Pages 36,48

© 2007 Editorial Projects in Education

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Sharon L. Nichols and David Berliner have a new book coming out from Harvard Education Press: Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools

Here’s the blurb from HEP:

For more than a decade, the debate over high-stakes testing has dominated the field of education. This passionate and provocative book provides a fresh perspective on the issue and powerful ammunition for opponents of high-stakes tests.

Drawing on their extensive research, Nichols and Berliner document and categorize the ways that high-stakes testing threatens the purposes and ideals of the American education system. Their analysis is grounded in the application of Campbell’s Law, which posits that the greater the social consequences associated with a quantitative indicator (such as test scores), the more likely it is that the indicator itself will become corrupted—and the more likely it is that the use of the indicator will corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor.

Nichols and Berliner illustrate both aspects of this “corruption,” showing how the pressures of high-stakes testing erode the validity of test scores and distort the integrity of the education system. Their analysis provides a coherent and comprehensive intellectual framework for the wide-ranging arguments against high-stakes testing, while putting a compelling human face on the data marshalled in support of those arguments.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction: “A Short History of High-Stakes Testing”

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Eliminate No Child Left Behind is new web site by the Kings/Tulare UniServ Unit of the California Teachers Association (NEA) with information and resources for organizing to eliminate the NCLB, and the destructive effects it is having on teaching and learning in US schools.

Backers include the Educators’ Rountable, Susan Ohanian.org, and The Rouge Forum.

NCLB should be eliminated because it:

1. Is not scientifically based.

2. Is test driven education and it is not meeting the individual needs of students.

3. Violates the US Constitution.

4. Supports complicity of corporate interests rather than democracy based on public concerns.

5. Fosters coercion over cooperation with regards to federal funding for public education.

6. Does not follow the U.S. Government’s own data on learning. We must take action now!

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San Francisco Chronicle: One for the books — tutoring gets outsourced

Fifth-grader Kevin Chen studies math in his living room in Alameda every week with his tutor, Syeda Nikath Sumaiya — who works from her home in Seoul.

In the latest incarnation of outsourcing, overseas tutors are teaching U.S. students math, science, English and social studies. And parents are paying half as much as they would for face-to-face instruction.

Via Internet phone, Sumaiya, 27, who works for a Bangalore company, coached the 11-year-old through drills and word problems in her clipped British Indian accent one recent evening. The equations she drew in red materialized on Kevin’s screen in Alameda, and he wrote back in blue.

“I think you’re carrying twice sometimes,” said Sumaiya, an engineer from Bangalore, India, before she moved to South Korea for her husband’s job. “Just do it once.”
Sumaiya, who communicated with The Chronicle by e-mail, drew a red arrow to point out Kevin’s errors, asking aloud, “Do you follow?” and rewarding him with, “That’s right,” and a big check for a correct answer.

At least a half-dozen tutoring companies operate from India, including two with Bay Area ties: Growing Stars is headquartered in Santa Clara, and TutorVista in Bangalore received $11 million in venture funding from Menlo Park’s Sequoia Capital this year.

Online tutoring, which began in the late 1990s, has grown in the past five years, education analysts say, as communication technology improved and became more affordable. It accounts for about 6 percent of the $2.2 billion U.S. private tutoring market, which reached 1.9 million K-12 students last school year, according to Tim Wiley, senior analyst at Eduventures, an education and research consulting firm in Boston.

“You encounter the same natural incentives as manufacturing did in the 1980s, moving factories offshore to lower-priced markets, and what the white-collar sector is going through now,” Wiley said. “The dynamics are in place for India-based tutoring companies to really grab a big chunk of the online market.”

Between $20 million and $25 million of the roughly $132 million spent on online tutoring — or one-sixth — now goes to tutors in India, Wiley said. But Indian tutors may make up an even larger share of online tutors because they are paid much less than their U.S. counterparts.

TutorVista pays its employees $300 per month, and Growing Stars pays $350 to $450 per month, for roughly a 40-hour workweek. That’s a lower-middle-income salary, said Ashok Bardhan, a senior economist at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. By comparison, in-home tutors in the United States charge $40 to $60 an hour.

Growing Stars, which began offering tutoring in 2004, serves 400 students who pay $21 to $25 per hour. TutorVista, which started in November 2005 and charges $20 for a 45-minute session or $100 a month for unlimited hours, has 2,000 students and aims to reach 5,000 by next fall.

Sanjo Mathew, 25, has tutored with Growing Stars for a year.

“You don’t see the students, so you must listen to them. Some of them don’t speak for two to three months. You have to make those children interact,” said Mathew, who has a master’s degree in biology. “Tutoring takes a lot of time and patience.”

But tutors are common in India, said Growing Stars founder Biju Mathew (no relation to tutor Sanjo), who moved to the Bay Area from India in 2000 as a software programmer and founded his startup two years later.

“The idea seemed good for me as a parent, and I thought there would be thousands of other parents for whom this could be of use,” said Biju Mathew, who had sought affordable tutoring for his three sons.

So far, industry leaders such as Kumon and Score do not offer online tutoring, because they run centers and their value lies in their face-to-face interaction, company officials and analysts say. Sylvan offers it only with instructors from the United States, to control quality, said spokeswoman Wendy Odell Magus.

Officials at tutoring companies that hire abroad say they check tutors’ references and academic backgrounds — Growing Stars and TutorVista require tutors to have a master’s degree in the primary subject matter they teach. The one-on-one attention they offer is more effective, they say. The companies train the tutors for a couple weeks, review their performance, and solicit feedback from parents.

At Growing Stars and TutorVista, tutors receive training in accent reduction and American culture — including the rules of baseball, and popular movies and music. And TutorVista will switch tutors until the student feels comfortable, said Patricia Perry, vice president of marketing. She said the average TutorVista instructor has 10 years of teaching experience, more than any state requires for in-school tutors. TutorVista’s employees tend to work from home, while instructors at Growing Stars work from its teaching center in Cochin, on the coast in southwest India. They start as early as 1:30 a.m. at Growing Stars and 4:30 a.m. at TutorVista in India.

Kevin’s mother, Biyu Lin Chen, 33, who emigrated from China in 1997, said she wants her son and twin daughters to have a good education. Now a child care provider, she prefers TutorVista to the traditional tutor her children saw for a couple months because TutorVista is cheaper and more convenient. And she said Kevin is getting better scores on his math tests, after only a few weeks.

Kevin said he feels more comfortable talking to his tutor — sight unseen — than asking questions in class: “No one is paying attention to me that much.”

Some parents sign up their children with online tutors to give the students an edge. Even though Raj and Rati Sardesh’s daughter Nina, for example, had skipped a grade and was doing well in the sixth grade at the French American School in San Francisco, they signed her up for Growing Stars tutoring in math and science.

“Some other parents laughed at us since we spend money for a private school,” said Rati Sardesh, an ultrasound technician.

Despite disliking the extra work, Nina, 11, said the tutoring boosted her marks.

“I really like my tutors. We’re friends and have student-teacher status,” she said. “It’s almost like they’re there teaching you, when you close your eyes.”

Online tutors also help answer the endless “why” questions of a curious child.

Isha Gulati, 8, of San Jose connects with her TutorVista instructor four or five times a week and asks her about math, science, geography and English.

“It’s really fun,” Isha said. “We always talk about things I really want to know.”

Her tutor, Bina Joseph, 36, has worked for TutorVista for about six months, logging on from her home in Bangalore, she said by e-mail. The job gives her time to raise her family, said Joseph, who has a master’s degree in English and bachelor’s degrees in science and education.

Isha’s mother, Charu Gulati, is a middle school science teacher who sees the benefits of both educational systems: the rigors of India and the creativity encouraged in the United States.

“She loves to know about more stuff. But I don’t always have the answers or the time to answer.”

E-mail Vanessa Hua at vahua@sfchronicle.com.

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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/22/MNGTILTVRR1.DTL

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The Columbus Dispatch,/i>: Cheating is up — among teachers
Pressure for state-test success driving some to break the rules

Pressure for state-test success driving some to break the rules
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Jennifer Smith Richards
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Answer sheets and test booklets arrive at districts in securely taped boxes, shipped by FedEx or UPS. Packets are shrink-wrapped and are supposed to be stored in a locked room until test time.

But in some districts, teachers got access last school year. Some made copies. Others shared the questions with students ahead of time, or gave answers during the test.

And a few devised nonverbal signals to cue children that their answers were incomplete.

For all the lock-and-key procedures and explicit rules, more teachers cheated on Ohio standardized tests than ever before.

A Dispatch analysis of 28 school districts found that at least 15, including some in Franklin County, had instances of cheating. The state had named 12 districts that were being investigated in March. The other three were among the 16 districts surveyed in Franklin County.

It’s probably because there were more Ohio standardized tests than ever before, state officials say.

And it wasn’t that hard to cheat.

Barbara Oaks did it. While fourth-graders took their reading test last spring, the Coventry schoolteacher thumbed ahead through the math portion. Coventry is a district near Akron.

In the test, she spotted a geometry problem she thought students might have trouble with, so she jotted down a diagram in her notebook.

Oaks said she didn’t know she was cheating.

In Parma, near Cleveland, Winifred Shima took a copy of the test and used it to make a study guide for students that included 45 of the 46 actual test questions.

In Marietta, a veteran teacher photocopied a state test. She said she wanted to help prepare students she’d have in class this school year. Officials there said an investigation showed she’d done the same the year before.

“Did I cheat? No,” said Judy Wray, who retired from her job as an eighth-grade teacher at Marietta Middle School. “Did I do something wrong? Yes. I made one copy and should not have done that.”

Some districts are still investigating. Cincinnati closed three cases and is still sorting through a fourth. One teacher was fired; several kept their jobs. But for the schools where they taught, the consequences were sometimes severe.

Cheating on the tests doesn’t happen very often, the state says. In Ohio, roughly 2 million tests are given each year, and most of that testing happens without incident.

And not all who broke the rules did so on purpose.

A teacher in Whitehall, for example, left test booklets in an unlocked room. In Hamilton, a teacher excitedly discussed questions and answers with students after they had finished the science portion of the graduation test, not thinking about how absent students would have to take the same test as a make-up.

A Worthington teacher started to help a student on a problem, then realized she couldn’t, and stopped. The Education Department didn’t punish any of those districts, although the districts did punish the teachers. Hamilton suspended the science teacher; the rest were reprimanded.

Others, though, probably knew they were breaking the rules. School districts pass out specific instructions and regulations to teachers, and some, including Hamilton, ask teachers to sign a form stating that they understand them.

They risked losing their teaching licenses anyway.

Brian Wirick, a teacher in the East Knox school district in Knox County, used the test to make a “look-alike” study guide for his students.

“Brian wanted to see his students succeed,” said Superintendent John Marschhausen. “The lesson we need to learn is you can’t succeed at any cost.”

Wirick resigned.

Wanting students to do well is a common excuse among teachers who are caught.

“I just kept thinking that every teacher in the state of Ohio is looking at these math problems and their kids will do better and our kids will look like they don’t know anything,” Heather Buchanan, a seventhgrade teacher in Wapakoneta, a city in western Ohio, told the district during its investigation.

Buchanan, one of two Wapakoneta teachers caught breaking testing rules, created a study guide from the actual test, too.

“I love my kids. I just wanted them to have one last chance to practice.”

Wray, the Marietta teacher who photocopied a test, said that teachers cheat more than administrators know. Several more in her school did, she said, and she understands why.

“Did they cheat? Not really,” she said. “They just wanted the kids to do their best.”

…

There’s less of a gray area when it comes to punishment. Although the state won’t provide exact numbers, investigation records from school districts show that most of the teachers found violating test security measures had their teaching licenses suspended — often for several months — by the Education Department.

Punishment from school districts often was harsher.

Of 14 school districts that verified security breaches and had completed their inquiries, six accepted teachers’ resignations or retirements. Only one was fired — Kathie Conlon, a teachers aide in Newcomerstown schools, about 100 miles northeast of Columbus.

Nine teachers were reprimanded but allowed to continue teaching. That was the case for South-Western teacher Lora DeCarlo, who admitted that she helped students with answers during the test.

In Cincinnati schools, one teacher helped students during the test and another let students have extra time to complete the make-up exam. Both were reprimanded.

The district is still investigating whether an entire school, Robert A. Taft Information Technology High School, might have cheated. The testing company flagged the school because there were so many erasures on the answer sheets, raising suspicion of whether someone erased wrong answers and replaced them with the right ones.

Punishment doesn’t apply only to teachers.

As a result of teachers’ actions, many school districts received zeroes for their test scores. If students did well, they’ll get no credit for it. That’s especially important for a highschool student who must pass the state test to receive a diploma.

Researchers who studied the prevalence of cheating in Chicago schools a few years ago suggested statewide standardized testing should be structured more like the SAT, using independent test proctors. That would eliminate any temptation among teachers.

Districts also should publicize the consequences for teachers caught cheating, according to Harvard University professor Brian Jacob and Steven D. Levitt, a professor at the University of Chicago.

There won’t be independent test proctors in Ohio for this year’s tests. In fact, little will change.

Last year, the state blitzed school districts with information about the rules and procedures for testing, and they’ll do it again this year, spokesman J.C. Benton said.

Other than that, the Education Department will rely on the honesty of teachers.

“We don’t anticipate that any more security breaches will happen,” Benton said. “I think people learned from last year’s unfortunate events.”

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