The funny thing is that, while the adults run around and look for a rational explanation for what happened, the kids themselves answered the question two years ago in an editorial in the school paper:
We are a school that puts far more emphasis on the quantitative value of numbers and statistics than on the importance of learning and knowledge. The work assigned in many classes reflects this approach to education. Busywork assignments asking students to perform onerous tasks, such as copying down physics problems verbatim from a Regents review book, send a clear message that deep, conceptual understanding of material is worthless when compared to high scores on a standardized test.Boom, done, QED. The kids knew it two years ago. Not only did they know it, but they wrote a beautiful, expressive, deeply analytical editorial and put it where everybody could see it. They gave the adults in their community every chance to know it too. Obviously, some—maybe even a majority—of the adults in the Stuyvesant community did know it. After all, somebody nurtured those young writers as they thought critically, wrote with voice, and bravely published it all in a school newspaper. Apparently, though, the key decision makers continued their emphasis on quantifying learning through empty performance measures and failed to lead—or even just allow—the faculty to teach a more honest, engaged curriculum.
I've taught at schools quite similar to Stuy, and I'd say a majority of my colleagues have gone for depth over quantity. Great teachers recognize that practice only matters in the context of purpose, and I've had the privilege to work almost exclusively with great teachers. I'm betting this is the case at Stuyvesant too. But the Regents exam, the place in which the most startlingly huge level of cheating came to light, is exactly the place where you'd expect it to if you only realized that the more empty and soulless the work, the more likely you are to inspire a student to cheat on it.
When 9% of your junior class is involved in a single cheating ring, it's not the students who created the problem. They're 17 years old. They're responding to their environment, one they didn't create. If 10% or 20% or 30% of your students are doing something, it's because they're being told to. You may not like the message they're getting, but when something like this happens, you need to tune into the signals you're broadcasting, whether you like what you're picking up or not.
Admission to Stuyvesant is based solely on students' performance on a single standardized test. The top performers on it are admitted, and the rest aren't. Unsurprisingly, it's a test that purports to measure aptitude in verbal and mathematical ability. So when you admit a group of students under these conditions to the "top" high school in the city, you've just told them what it takes to get ahead in life: the score. It doesn't matter if a kid has gamed the test, cheated, or whether he's simply been tutored half to death on the test format. If he scores that magic percentile, he's in.
According to the articles I've linked here, that mentality continues throughout students' time at Stuy. Like I said, I'm sure that many—my guess is most—members of the faculty there actually attempt to push kids away from the pursuit of excellent scores and towards the pursuit of excellence itself, but how effective can they be when a student's access to the school is based on a test score, a student's midlife at the school centers around the Regents, and a student's college access is largely based on SAT and AP test scores?
The school can say all it wants that students should be honest, and they can "redouble" their efforts to teach students to be more honest. They can say that "all students would have to review and sign an honor policy that promises punishment for those who fail to turn in cheats," which they're apparently doing for this year, but the music and the words don't go together. The system tells the kids what's really important, and the adults who offer an alternative simply sound like well-intentioned delusional idealists.
The school needs to reevaluate the work that is inspiring the cheating. If large numbers of students are cheating on an assignment, it's the assignment that needs to change, not the rules that already prohibit cheating. The vast majority of students default to honesty and only cheat when they feel lost, overwhelmed, or confused about the real message of their institution. But any change the faculty makes will quite likely fail to address the deeper issues, which begin with the whole premise on which the school is founded and are perpetuated by a state exam that the faculty can't do away with.
Until our whole institutions are designed around the idea of education as a process of helping minds develop, rather than helping kids perform on an abstract measurement (and the more abstract, the more destructive), we should expect the achievement gap to get worse as more low-performing students are alienated from the system and more high-performing students tweak their test scores ever higher with ever less focus on honesty and excellence.
