A pandemic is sweeping across the US, damaging the reputations of teachers and schools. The education sector has been rocked this summer by a string of high-profile cheating scandals surrounding Standardized Tests with cases in Long Island, New York, Georgia and California, and many more suspected.

While it's clear there's definitely a problem–23 schools in California alone have been stripped of their Academic Performance Index rating due to suspected cheating–less obvious are the reasons why.

As Lisa Guisbond explains in the Washington Post, this is an on-going issue. Ms Guisbond is a policy analyst for the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), a non-profit group that advocates against standardized testing. In the past three years, her organization has documented confirmed cases of cheating in 30 states and the District of Columbia.

Some students have been caught and charged for paying others to sit SATs on their behalf, but what's alarming is that it seems teachers and schools are also complicit in the wrong-doing. Nearly 180 teachers in Atlanta public schools have been accused of inflating student test scores, allegedly correcting false answers during the marking process. Sadly, it appears this is far from being the only case of its kind.

With Atlanta, there's also an insinuation that administrators at a senior level may have at worst encouraged and at best willingly covered up the cheating while silencing whistle-blowers. A report by Georgia Governor Nathan Deal went so far as to suggest that a "widespread" conspiracy by teachers, principals and administrators had been responsible for the record-breaking gains seen in results on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test.

Education secretary Arne Duncan–and proponents of standardized testing as a means of measuring student performance and holding teachers and schools accountable–believe that what's needed are better checks and balances.

But for Ms Guisbond, it is this high-intensity, pressure-cooker environment that is driving educators to take such extreme and dishonest action. She points out that most people acknowledge teachers have an impossible task in trying to meet the national No Child Left Behind targets, which stipulate that most children must be performing proficiently at math and reading by 2014.

Her colleague Robert Schaeffer, public education director at FairTest, said earlier this summer: "When test scores are all that matter, some educators feel pressured to get the scores they need by hook or by crook. The higher the stakes, the greater the incentive to manipulate, to cheat."

For some, this scandal is symptomatic of a situation whereby teachers feel they are fighting insurmountable odds. A growing number of states are switching to performance-based reviews and pay for their educators, with results attained by students in standardized tests given a heavy weighting.

States such as Florida are also doing away with tenure altogether in favor of annual merit-based contracts, meaning teachers whose students perform poorly at tests could find themselves under even more severe pressure.

What is clear is that any sort of testing is rendered worthless if it is not a true reflection of student performance and cheating of any kind should not be tolerated, even if the possible reasons behind it are considered and understood.

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