I'm doing a total drive-by here, and I apologize for that. I could very well be wrong, but the cheating we're talking about here, a lot of it's more than two kids deciding to cheat on a test, right? It's cases where classrooms were flagged for having a bunch of erased answers on their sheets, or a bunch of students who have a bunch of identical answers-- things that would indicated class-wide cheating, which would either have to be orchestrated by a teacher or at least tolerated by the teacher . . . because the higher the number of students that pass the TAKS, the better they (and the school at large) look. It's not all about individual students' motivations-- it's about their teachers', too. And so it seemed to make sense to me: teachers in high performance schools (which are often schools where the students don't have to worry about after school jobs, or having enough money to eat, and who value the educational system because it succeeded for their parents and that's what they were taught-- thus, high income schools) don't have to worry so much about their students failing the TAKS test, so there's a lot less motivation to cheat, or to allow cheating to take place.
Not a random drive-by at all. That's exactly what I'm getting at in my two posts on this subject.
If school districts adopt merit pay, and it's based in part on TAKS scores, this problem will mushroom.
Also, superintendents? Do they have possible financial incentive for schools to look good? This goes on and on.
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