Dive Brief:
- New York City’s Department of Education announced Tuesday that it would establish a task force to find and report incidents of cheating on the part of teachers and administrators.
- The task force will be made up of administrators and auditors who will track school data and watch for irregularities, The New York Times reports.
- They will also train principals on regulations for appropriate grading.
Dive Insight:
The creation of the task force is a response to recent high profile cases of cheating on the part of city principals and educators. This spring, the principal of Teachers College Community School wrote in students’ answers after they left them blank. The city moved to fire another principal this summer after it became clear that she was allowing students to get credit for courses they barely attended.
It’s part of a pattern in the city and elsewhere — most notably Atlanta — as high-stakes testing environments provide educators with urgent incentives to raise test scores and graduation rates by any means available. New York City’s special commissioner of investigations found that allegations of cheating had more than tripled in recent years, largely due to ties between test scores and quality evaluations of teachers and schools. An NPR investigation into graduation rates found widespread cheating and number-boosting.