Testing Our Ethic

The following post was first printed as part of the Briggs-Chisnell project, a dialogue on issues of education and literacy.  

Let’s be in an uproar. Ethics have fallen in our society. Kids these days are apathetic and don’t care. No matter what we teach them, it is seen as irrelevant.

The recent “2008 Report Card on the Ethics of America’s Youth” by the Josephson Institute is getting wide press amongst educators, many eager to defend the behavior of teens. Sixty-four percent of students admitted to cheating on a test in the past year; over a third have plagiarized by using the internet. Yet 93% said they were satisfied with their ethics and 77% said they were better than most people they know. More than a quarter even said they lied on the survey questions.

It’s easy to see statistical anomalies in a study like this (how could 77% be better than most, for instance), but I’m curious about what cheating must mean to students who do it and yet are satisfied with their characters. I’d like to hypothesize about a rationale: to many, the content of testing is irrelevant. [And, for that matter, so are surveys on ethics to about a quarter of them.]

We talk a lot about “high stakes” testing, about ACTs and MMEs and SATs and APs and GREs and other exams which set the bars beyond which we cannot gain admission to college, secure scholarships, be “qualified citizens.” And there’s no question, this anxiety is spread to both teachers and students alike. My grade-conscious sophomores worry about whether their impromptu scores will appear on a permanent record, my AP students worry about reaching that arbitrary essay score of 5. My instruction follows suit, spending precious class periods (and for my colleagues, class weeks) analyzing the rubrics, looking for aids to “bump” scores by a point or two. Other students see their low ACT scores as evidence that they weren’t worthy of the university, after all.

What matters, then, is the high score, not what is on the test. We have built a system that teaches results, not learning; teaches scores, not the value of idea.

Bush’s educational legacy will be increased school accountability, no matter the costs. By demanding teachers compel students to improve scores, we end up focusing our attention on the political drives to get there, though these, too, are statistically impossible to achieve. Royal Oak High School school improvement efforts are only about improving MME scores to reach Adequate Yearly Progress; we spend no time discussing anything else. As our recent joint administration-union committee on assessing our work recently observed, one reason we are scoring low is that the middle school teachers are preparing their eighth grade students to achieve MME results and the high school teachers are prepping students for ACT results. And—no surprise—the objectives and rubrics for each do not match.

We have built a system that teaches results, not learning; teaches scores, not the value of idea.

But wait. Instead of raising the question, “Should we question whether school improvement should focus on test achievement?” the district will now seek to align the teaching across these two tests. Because, after all, scores are important, not the idea. Teachers are then subject to the same motivational forces as our students. We do not ask what we should teach; we ask only how we can raise scores.

Let’s not talk, then, about how cheating by teachers in Chicago and now South Carolina occurs around high-stakes testing. Is it a question of ethics? Is it a question about how we are taught to think about education?

For me, the question is less about ethics of students (or teachers) and more about what we are given time and incentive to think about. Political public policy-making around “academic rigor” merely creates a tunnel-vision for survival, not a reflective critical environment for education. The fact that this very essay would find no place in my district (let alone time to discuss it amongst my colleagues) suggests that our educational system limits opportunities for critical literacy. (I won’t here elaborate on our long and failing efforts to build collaborative collegial time into our work days.)

And I am not surprised, then, by a recent study which tends to corroborate my hypothesis. Heinrich Mintrop, of the Leadership for Educational Equity Program at UC Berkeley, writes that:

Given that schools these days are fundamentally driven by external assessments, we would have to start by constructing assessment systems with different incentives and indicators that train the lens of what we value in education beyond test scores. (Education Week, 10 Dec. 2008, 25)

The study of California schools examined several which believed that “tightening up, curricular alignment, more literacy remediation, and de-emphasizing nontest subjects” would be most effective in scores. But then it correlated such schools with ratings in instructional quality and student engagement, both in high-performing and low-performing schools. Simply put, “tightening up” created overall higher test scores, but little student engagement. There was no correlation between high scores (however they were achieved) and instructional quality.

This, perhaps, is the key to our failed ethic, both for students and teachers. We have stopped talking about motivation for learning, about instructional quality, and have asked only for the numbers at the end of the process. The reason we go to schools as teachers and students has become backgrounded, and—after all, ethics is not on the test.

In the end, we need to be less concerned with student cheating than with the educators who pursue score performance without question, itself an un-critical—and therefore, I suggest—unethical practice. At best we engage in a very narrow definition of quality. At worst we endorse a critical illiteracy in our students. Why should we expect them to be reflective?

Humans respond to stimuli, in economics terms, incentives and disincentives. Is it a surprise that Obama has nominated Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education? He’s the guy who worked with economist Steve Levitt in exposing the Chicago cheating teacher scandal; wow, and he’s only 44! Am I hopeful? Not until engaging educators as critically literate professionals in designing instruction is part of the test.