Arne Duncan: No Conflict Between Teaching and Testing

Recent cheating scandals in Atlanta has revived discussions about whether too much focus and pressure has been placed on test performance in U.S. education.

Arne Duncan is the current Secretary of Education in the Obama cabinet.  Before moving to Washington to serve the president, Duncan was the head of the Chicago Public School System.  Last week, in an Op-Ed in The Washington Post, Secretary Duncan shared some of his thoughts on the recent cheating scandal in Atlanta and the on-going debate over how worthwhile standardized testing may be.

Recent news reports of widespread or suspected cheating on standardized tests in several school districts around the country have been taken by some as evidence that we must reduce reliance on testing to measure student growth and achievement. Others have gone even farther, claiming that cheating is an inevitable consequence of “high-stakes testing” and that we should abandon testing altogether.

Duncan continues by acknowledging that there are lessons to be learned from these recent, disappointing incidents.  But, he says, the existence of cheating says nothing about the merits of testing. Instead, cheating reflects a willingness to lie at children’s expense to avoid accountability.  This approach is rejected by the vast majority of educators, who Duncan claims would never participate in or excuse cheating.  The Atlanta cheating scandal has been described as the worst known incident of systemic cheating, and so it is worth noting that even there investigators found cheating in 44 out of 2,232 schools in Georgia.

Unfortunately, cheating does happen. The 1990s saw a rash of cases where state and school officials masked underperformance of low-income or minority students or students with disabilities by excluding or hiding their test results. No Child Left Behind helped address this problem by requiring transparency around achievement gaps, but it prompted another form of cheating by setting rigid pass/fail targets based on test scores that failed to measure progress. Several states, including my home state of Illinois, simply lowered their standards to claim “better” test scores as success—essentially lying to children and parents. Now as NCLB’s deadline for 100-percent proficiency approaches and performance goals grow steeper, we learn of egregious, systemic cheating in Atlanta and suspected cheating elsewhere.

Duncan acknowledges that there is no way to motivate teachers and students. Teachers often say that their primary incentive is seeing their students learn.  Sec. Duncan believes that good, effective teachers deserve much more than that.  They need real autonomy to apply their expertise in the classroom, a greater role in decision making that affects their schools and students, and rewards.  These rewards must include salaries commensurate with their contributions.

It is time for a thorough and thoughtful reevaluation of the incentives, economic and otherwise, required to support the current generation of teachers and attract the next one.