Teacher cheating: Are students affected by teachers who cheat? Evidence from a predominately Black district

Abstract

As the evidence linking test scores to long-run student outcomes has grown, standardized assessments have become a widely used management tool in education including addressing the racial education gap. One of the concerns with the use of standards tests is the perverse incentive for teachers to alter test scores. The consequences for educators found cheating can be substantial, although little is known about how students are impacted by cheating. Using an 11-year panel of individual-level data on students and teachers from a predominantly Black urban school district where widespread test-score manipulation occurred, we investigated the impact of teacher cheating on subsequent student test scores. To access the impact, we used school-grade and classroom fixed effects as well as measure potential omitted variable bias (OVB). We found that for each additional wrong-to-right altered test question it is associated with a reduced future achievement of between 0.003 and 0.014 standard deviations depending on the specification. Although the evidence from OVB analysis does not suggest that test-score manipulation itself harmed or benefited students. Our evidence also contributes to a growing literature on the importance of sensitivity tests for OVB. We show how failure to conduct such tests could lead to erroneous findings.