Teachers Pressured to Cheat on State Testing, Creating Inquiries Throughout Testing System

ELLEN LI
News Editor

Recently, one of the fastest-improving middle schools in Los Angeles has been suspected of cheating. However, this act was committed not by the students, but by a veteran algebra teacher on California ’s standardized tests.
Virgil Middle School , located in Koreatown, a district within the Los Angeles county, is the second camps in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to be faced with such allegations.
Like the other twenty-two schools in the state that have been suspected of cheating or other misconduct by teachers, Virgil will lose their Academic Performance Index (API) rating and possibly $3.5 million in state grant funds due to the actions of one teacher who has since retired.
The money, which pays for about a quarter of the teaching staff, requires schools to reach improvement targets. How much the school has improved is determined by its API scores.
This year, Virgil’s API score would have been 714. That would have meant a sharp 51-point increase from the previous year.
“It is ethically and morally wrong for teachers to help students cheat,” math teacher Gerald Pattinelli said. “I think those scores are the students’ responsibilities, but the system has turned it around into the teachers’ faults when the students don’t take charge of their education.”
Teachers feel constantly pressured to make sure their students perform well on these high-stakes exams for various reasons; for example, if students receive low scores, their teacher would be forced to defend their competence and teaching capabilities.
This pressure is only intensified by measures such as the No Child Left Behind Act, which was passed in 2001 under the Bush administration. Under this law, all government-run schools that receive federal funding must administer an annual state-wide standardized test to determine how well the school has taught its pupils.
If the school’s results are consistently poor, then steps are taken to improve the school.
As a means of ensuring that their students receive test scores that surpass the average of other students in the school system, some teachers have resorted to measures such as reading off answers during a test, creating study guides with the actual test questions, sending students back to correct answers and inflating scores, among other things.
“I don’t see how [teachers helping students on standardized tests] will help students in their future careers if they don’t have the necessary skills [to] actually learn the material for themselves,” junior Jay Chang said.