High-Stakes Testing – where are we going? Pressure, manipulation and cheating

I've written before about the huge pressures on teachers, school leaders and governors, and local authorities and academy chains, caused directly by high-stakes testing – where the results of tests and examinations are used directly and immediately to make public judgments on schools.

We have now reached a stage where any new tests are used directly as a management tool - so the pressure is on for teachers to “teach to the test”. The phonics screening results show a typical progression over time – when a new test is introduced, no-one knows how it will work, and the first year shows a low score – and in future years, as people know more about what is being tested, scores improve, until they start to level out, when everyone is working optimally.

Of course, “optimally” in this case usually means one or both of two things – teachers may be teaching better and more efficiently, leading to improved underlying learning; or teachers may simply be teaching short-term tricks to maximise scores, without consideration of sustainable development. I suspect that in the case of phonics, there is a bit of both – the test will be whether the learning is shown to “stick” into later primary and secondary school, and of course the jury is out on that, as the first children are not yet old enough.

However, there is an alternative strategy for dealing with high-stakes testing, and that is, simply, to cheat. There have been examples in the UK, but in Atlanta last week 35 teachers were either convicted of cheating, racketeering and conspiracy or reached a plea bargain before conviction.