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The darling of education reformers insists she welcomes a probe of student scores during her tenure as D.C. schools chancellor-but admits to no mistake. Rita Beamish on how it's complicating her legacy.

Is New Jersey headed for the same kind of massive school cheating scandal that thrust Atlanta into the headlines across the nation? If so, will the state try to cover it up instead of going public as they did in Georgia?

There's been a hot debate raging over in the higher education world about plagiarism, and who really suffers from efforts to stamp it out.

In recent years there seems to have been a surge in academic dishonesty across many high schools (a lot of it has been showing up in the last few weeks). No doubt this can be explained in part by 1) increased vigilance and reporting, 2) greater pressure on students to succeed, and 3) the communicable nature of dishonest behavior (when people see others do something, whether it's tweaking a resume or parking illegally, they're more likely to do the same). But, I also think that a fourth, and significant, cause in this worrisome trend has to do with the way we measure and reward teachers.

Never before have so many had so much reason to cheat. Students' scores are now used to determine whether teachers and principals are good or bad, whether teachers should get a bonus or be fired, whether a school is a success or failure.

Scandal is the news, but it's not always the story. I know, because the Atlanta public schools, which I ran for 12 years until I retired in June, are embroiled in cheating allegations that rightly are the focus of extraordinary media coverage. Yet there is a growing danger that this disgraceful situation will set back national educational reform, when it could ironically advance it.

Annual allegations of test-tampering and grade-changing by educators have more than tripled since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of New York City's school system, outpacing a broader increase in complaints of adult misconduct in schools during the same period, according to the special commissioner of investigation.

We have read about all of the "cheating scandals" across our nation and how the tests need to be made more "secure." I want to take a moment of your time and tell you about a lesson that a handful of students taught me two years ago and it is a lesson that I believe can absolutely destroy the push toward using student standardized test scores to evaluate schools and individual educators because it shows that the test can never be truly "secure."

It wasn't the tests that made the Atlanta teachers and principals go insane with cheating. But they did go insane.

...officials revealed this week that the State Education Department had quietly been conducting erasure analysis on some high school Regents exams for more than three years, a process that red-flagged 64 incidences of possible problems, including one that led to the ouster of an assistant principal in the Bronx.

Jeff Pfeffer and I had a piece appear today in The New York Times "Preoccupations" column called "Trust the Evidence, Not Your Instincts."  We are pleased with the points it makes and how it reads, but as is inevitable given the space constraints in newspapers, the final version is a bit shorter than the piece we submitted. In particular, we wish there had been space to include our point that, not only has linking incentives to standardized test scores been generally ineffective, a nasty side effect is that such programs often drive teachers and administrators to cheat (giving students the right answers or erasing wrong answers and replacing them with right answers).

A Board of Regents committee unanimously agreed on Monday to appoint an independent investigator to search for shortcomings in how the state responds to complaints of educator cheating on standardized tests.

"Everybody was in fear," another teacher said in the report. "It is not that the teachers are bad people and want to do it. It is that they are scared."

Ditch Testing (Part 5): Testing Has Not Improved Education The evidence is clear. Test-score cheating is not isolated to Atlanta, Baltimore, and a few other schools, as testing proponents tend to suggest. It is not a problem that can be fixed with technical measures such as tightened security. It may be human nature but it is the high and unreasonable pressure of high-stakes standardized testing that leads to corruption. Thus, we cannot minimize the problem, trivialize potential solutions, or blame a few educators who have been caught. The Atlanta scandal should serve as a wake-up call to all of us, especially to those who continue to promote testing as a necessary and effective way to improve education.

Not an Anomaly: Systemic Ills Caused by Test-based Accountability Policies Secretary Duncan is not the only who tries to minimize the scale of the problem and reduce it to a technical issue. Chester E. Finn, a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is a former assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education under President Ronald Reagan, tries to do same.

An even hotter spot should be reserved for those adults who knowingly cheat children out of a decent education and lie to them about their achievements.

Although it may be satisfying to blame the individuals involved, doing so frames the problem as one of individual personality and moral character, ignoring a critical fact: These are examples of organizational misconduct-when individuals acting in their organizational roles violate internal or external rules, regulations or laws in furtherance of organizational goals.

If there is any silver lining to the APS cheating scandal, it may be the greater scrutiny of testing and its increasing role in American education.

A charter school teacher warned her third graders that a standardized test question was "tricky," and they all changed their answers. A high school coach in Brooklyn called a student into the hallway and slipped her a completed answer sheet in a newspaper. In the Bronx, a principal convened Finish Your Lab Days, where biology students ended up copying answers for work they never did.

New York Board of Regents Chancellor Meryl Tisch recently announced that beginning next year, the state Education Department will institute a test-security unit that will look for cheating on standardized tests. The chancellor stated that, "This was not done in response to a widespread epidemic. This is about preventing rare and unfortunate cases and ensuring systemwide we have a testing system that works." In other words, the state Education Department will now spend at least $1 million a year to solve a problem that does not exist.