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The state's Board of Regents is expected on Monday to approve recommendations drafted by a State Department of Education panel to forestall the kind of cheating scandals that erupted in Atlanta and Philadelphia this summer. Here, six experts weigh in on the problem and the panel's proposals, and offer solutions of their own.

This scandal should serve as a wake-up call to proponents of test-driven reform policies: it's time to abandon high stakes testing in our schools. Decades of high-stakes testing has not brought improvement but has corrupted our schools. The cost is too high.  However, the proponents are not reflecting. They try to minimize the problem and reduce cheating to a technical instead of policy issue, suggesting technical fixes.

"The answer here is very simple, you just have a culture of integrity and you have better security measures in place," said Secretary Arne Duncan in response to the Atlanta cheating scandal. Other testing proponents offered similar suggestions. "A culture of integrity" is not easy because of the corruptive power of test-driven accountability as I have discussed in previous posts and "better security measures" will only incur more costs to tax payers without stop cheating.

It's one thing to say there was widespread cheating on standardized tests in Atlanta public schools, as the newly released results of a state investigation showed. It's another thing to actually read the volunimous report. The details are shocking.

Student test scores from 100 D.C. public schools still under investigation for cheating were used in value-added calculations that were incorporated into some teachers' evaluations this year, according to DCPS spokesperson Fred Lewis. More than 200 D.C. teachers were terminated last week on the basis of their evaluation results. Only when "instances of cheating were confirmed" were affected student scores removed from the value-added model, Lewis said.

Every time I hear about a school where there are allegations or proof of cheating on standardized testing, I reflexively think about roaches, or, rather, the adage that if you see one or two of the pests running across the floor, there are probably an army of others having a party in the kitchen.

On July 5, Georgia released the results of a state investigation into suspicious test scores in the Atlanta public schools. The state reported that 178 educators in 44 of the district's 100 schools had facilitated cheating-often with the tacit knowledge and even approval of high-level administrators, including Atlanta's award-winning former superintendent Beverly Hall, who conveniently parked herself in Hawaii for the investigation's denouement.

Dozens of schools across the city and state were flagged in a study of 2009 state standardized test scores that sought to use statistical analysis to ferret out possible examples of cheating on the PSSA exam.

Last month, students at Great Neck North High School were accused of paying an Emory University student to take the SAT exam for them. A new report now says the investigation is expanding to two other Long Island School districts and a private school, and officials say they have identified at least one more student who may have impersonated students and taken SATs for payments. SchoolBook invited student journalists at city high schools to write about the cheating scandal. Students from Stuyvesant High School submitted a news article and an editorial from The Spectator, the Stuyvesant High School newspaper.

"The Washington, D.C. school system's failure to hold higher-ups accountable for their 2008-2010 test cheating scandal has led to more speculation that some are intentionally stonewalling attempts to get at the truth."

Value-added has been getting a lot of media attention lately but, unfortunately, most stories are missing the point.  In Gotham Schools I read about a teacher who got a low score but it was because her score was based on students who were not assigned to her.  In The New York Times I read about three teachers who were rated in the single digits, but it was because they had high performing students and a few of their scores went down.  In The Washington Post I read about a teacher who was fired for getting low value-added on her IMPACT report, but it was because her students had inflated pretest scores because it is possible that the teachers from the year before cheated. Each of these stories makes it sound like there are very fixable flaws in value-added.  Get the student data more accurate, make some kind of curve for teachers of high performing students, get better test security so cheating can't affect the next year's teacher's score.  But the flaws in value-added go WAY beyond that, which is what I've been trying to show in my posts - not just some exceptional scenarios, but how it affects the majority of teachers.

"The e-mail box runneth over with bad tidings. Teachers are reporting that cheating is rampant in New York City schools -- and they claim principals are the culprits. "

The Department of Education has ordered an investigation of 34 schools for possible cheating after an analysis of standardized test scores revealed irregularities.

The city has dropped key controls for detecting cheating on the state's high-stakes standardized tests, the Daily News has learned.

State Education Commissioner John B. King Jr. announced Monday that he has created a high-level board to crack down on cheating by teachers, administrators and students in standardized tests.

Citing heightened concerns about educators' cheating that have emerged after recent scandals in Atlanta and Philadelphia, a New York State panel has recommended an overhaul in how the state administers and grades its standardized tests.

There had long been suspicions that cheating on state tests was widespread in the Atlanta public schools, but the superintendent, Beverly L. Hall, was feared by teachers and principals, and few dared speak out. Last summer a supposedly Blue Ribbon Commission, headed by a businessman volunteering his time, produced yet another flimsy report, urging further investigation.

Georgia investigators have found evidence of cheating at close to 80 percent of the Atlanta schools where they examined the 2009 administration of state tests.

Former Atlanta Superintendent Beverly L. Hall wrote an editorial for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, responding to an 800-page bombshell of a report from state investigators that says cheating on state tests was widespread in the district, and that she had to, or should have, known about it.

This was written by Gary Miron, professor of education at Western Michigan University who has extensive experience evaluating school reforms and education policies. Over the past two decades he has conducted several studies of school choice programs in Europe and in the United States, including nine state evaluations of charter school reforms. Before coming to Western Michigan University, he worked for 10 years at Stockholm University in Sweden.