Deniability and Tests

Many years ago, I worked for a major Milwaukee corporation which became the subject of a criminal investigation of its sales practices. The company eventually went out of business--not primarily due to the fines it paid but because the years of investigation took a huge toll in creativity and decisiveness.

One conversation early in the investigation still haunts me. Two of my colleagues agreed that there was a tacit agreement between management and the sales people. The sales people understood that they should do whatever was required to gain an account, while protecting management's deniability. When pressed, management needed to be able to deny it knew how the sales were made. Several recent events recall that conversation--including prisoner abuse in Iraq, the recent firing of police officers in Milwaukee, and cheating on standardized tests in schools.

The basic characteristic of the deniability culture is a wide gap between the official rules of conduct and the implicit rules. The assumption is that the official rules are useful for public consumption but that anyone following them will be at an advantage. In this view, scruples are for losers. Changing this culture can be very difficult even if management desires to do so; it is assumed that management will loudly proclaim its adherence to the highest principles even while benefitting from corner-cutting within the organization.

In the recent Jude beating case, by firing not only those officers who took part in the beating but also those who refused to report their fellow officers, the Milwaukee police chief does seem to be making a major effort to change the culture. How successful she will be may depend in large part on whether officers view it as simply an attempt by the chief to burnish her image. In a culture of deniability, the boss is expected to express outrage when the facts come out.

There has been a deal written recently about the attempts by lawyers in the Bush administration to exempt the United States from the Geneva convention and to relax the strictures against torture. Most discussion, however, has concentrated on the validity of the legal arguments. What is surprising is that there appears to have been little concern by those involved in the changes about the signal that was being sent to people in the field. The clear message was that scrutiny and oversight would be lessened and that many of the old rules would no longer apply.

If education is to improve, accurate assessment of learning is a prerequiste. Otherwise, schools will continue to invest money and effort into programs that are not effective. Yet there is a culture that accepts efforts to artificially inflate test results. Despite teachers' interest in discouraging cheating by students, some forms of cheating by teachers are obvious to students, such as signaling to the student that an answer is wrong or preparing lessons based on advanced knowledge of the tests.

Other kinds of cheating, such as erasing and correcting students' answer sheets, are not done in front of students. But it is possible to develop measures that detect many of these kinds of cheating, including looking for sudden growth in student scores followed by declines in later years or students getting the hard questions right and the easy questions wrong.

Every superintendent will denounce cheating by teachers. But is this simply part of the deniability culture? That such detection measures are not more widely used suggest that it is. Superintendents' talk about test scores as an end in themselves rather than a measure of learning reinforces the idea that any means of increasing the scores is desirable.