MCAS and cheating

THE 15 CASES of teachers accused of helping students to cheat on this spring's Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exam hardly amount to an epidemic in a state with 70,000 licensed teachers. But it raises important questions about why any educator would willingly risk his or her job and license by undermining student assessments.

None of the accused has yet to step forward to say their actions are a protest against the high-stakes exam that all students in the state must pass in order to graduate from high school. Yet some MCAS critics suggest that lack of respect for the exam explains the cheating. This is hard to accept. MCAS was designed to monitor student progress beginning in elementary school, gauge academic weaknesses, and prepare the ground for remedial help. The great majority of students have risen to the MCAS challenge. In low-income school districts especially, MCAS pressure means that more is demanded of students than in the past when low expectations were the norm.

Some cases may simply reflect teachers with a strong impulse to help children and a weak grasp of the rules. That appears to be the case at Peabody High School, where one teacher allowed 10th-grade students to use a dictionary during the test. But Kingston school officials perceived more deliberation on the part of Lisa Desharnais, a third-grade teacher who was accused of prompting students during an MCAS exam. She was fired last week. Attorney Will Evans calls his client innocent and is appealing the termination to an arbitrator.

In the coming week, the state Office of Educational Quality and Accountability will be analyzing four years of data on MCAS improprieties to determine if cheating is more common in school districts that provide bonuses to teaching staffs for improving MCAS scores. Any link, however, would be surprising. Bonuses are small and available in only a handful of districts. And teachers' unions are ferocious opponents of linking salaries and performance evaluations with MCAS scores or other student assessments.

It is possible that the cheating is an early warning sign of pressure passed down from federal officials to state officials to school administrators to teachers to students. The federal No Child Left Behind law requires that all students achieve proficiency in math and English by 2014 as measured by annual progress reports on the MCAS test. Nervous educators could be worried about sanctions, including state takeovers of failing schools. But such pressures do not seem so immediate or threatening as to provoke unethical acts.

For now, the MCAS improprieties look like nothing more than poor judgment or sloppy practice on the part of a few educators.