Bob CollinsThe usual data privacy cone of silence has dropped around one of the teachers who cheated students taking the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments tests.
St. Paul school officials won’t say anything about the teacher they’ve suspended at Linwood Monroe Elementary, where he/she apparently helped the students with the answers, the Pioneer Press reports today.
In Cannon Falls, Minn., a 16-year teacher has resigned for providing clues to the answers. We don’t know his/her name.
The two cases are among 91 reports of “test security” in the tests that have been or are being investigated by the state Department of Education.
The newspaper points out that the online tests don’t affect a student’s grade, but they’re used to grade the quality of teachers.
Many of the instances of cheating were on the part of students; that’s to be expected. But there’s a particular violation when teachers run a scam.
The teachers are lucky they don’t work in Atlanta. In April, several educators were convicted of racketeering for inflating test scores of kids who were struggling in school. They actually changed test answers to make the kids look smarter than they really were.
Some of them went to prison.
That corruption, too, took a newspaper to ferret out.
