Whodunit?

CONTINUED

Like investigations in most criminal cases, the district's probe will eventually have to explore the question of motive. If tampering occurred, someone spent hours dragging an eraser across hundreds, perhaps thousands, of answers. But why? Why risk a career by committing what amounts to educational malpractice?

The most likely answer has something to do with the new duties assigned to standardized tests. Responding to the perceived crisis in education, state policymakers are building carrot-and-stick accountability systems that reward schools where academic achievement is high and punish those where it is low. Frequently lawmakers make standardized-test scores the yardstick of achievement in these systems. That's a task that even test makers say their products aren't designed for. Scores are valuable diagnostic and instructional tools, they say, not batting averages to be used to bully and cajole teachers and administrators to shape up. "There's little doubt that there's much more pressure for them to improve scores," says H.D. Hoover, a senior author of the Iowa tests. "And a lot of this pressure is generated by politicians and the media that keep saying our schools are crappy. This is not true. Kids today are scoring the highest they've ever scored. But so many of these things happen because teachers and school administrators feel pressure because it's in the media that schools in the...