The star of this “underdog overcomes the odds” story is Janet Ham, Principal of Maplewood Elementary School in Indianapolis. But, after nine years of rising test scores and national recognition, allegations are forming that the Maplewood turnaround orchestrated by Ham may be more fiction than reality.

Saturday’s Indianapolis Star reported that Wayne Township School officials are investigating Ham in response to an anonymous call received by the district’s testing director. The caller accused Ham of giving inappropriate instructions to her staff regarding the time limits for the state’s ISTEP test. Since students across the state are to receive the same amount of time to finish their standardized tests, any additional time given to one group could cause an unfair advantage – and higher test scores.

Wayne Township School officials hope to conclude their investigation into Principal Ham’s actions by April 1^st. Even if she is found innocent of any wrongdoing, the shadow of doubt has already been cast.  Right or wrong, the public will now look at the dramatic improvement in Maplewood’s ISTEP scores (available here) with a certain degree of suspicion.

Ham’s story may serve as a cautionary tale of the hidden costs of school accountability. In an era where schools are punished or rewarded for their scores on high-stakes tests,  educators are not short on incentives to cheat. Further magnifying the incentive is the likelihood that cheaters will go undetected.

Economist Steven Levitt suggested in his book Freakonomics that educator cheating on standardized tests may be a common phenomenon, given the low risks and high returns involved. Levitt studied seven years worth of testing data – 700,000 sets of tests and nearly 100 million individual student answers -from the Chicago Public School (CPS) system. From the data, Levitt observed that students in certain CPS classrooms experienced a large spike in their test scores one year, followed by a dramatic drop the next. Upon further inspection, Levitt noted the presence of suspicious patterns – groups of eight to ten questions with the exact same student responses – in the tests from these same classrooms. These two red flags led Levitt to believe that some teachers were manipulating test results by directly changing answers on their students’ tests after they had been handed in.

Just how widespread was the cheating in CPS? Based on his study, Levitt believes that roughly five percent of CPS teachers were changing answers. Keep in mind that this estimate does not include other, more subtle, forms of test manipulation like giving students extra time.

As the push for increased school accountability through standardized testing continues, we could be seeing more instances of test rigging from schools throughout the country.

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