There is a phenomena in social sciences called, “The law of unexpected consequences.” This means that no matter how carefully you plan, events will occur that you never expected. In 2002, President George Bush signed into law “No Child Left Behind.” This legislation tied standardized testing with Federal funding, using financial incentives to improve school performance. By having national standards for content and testing, America could drive out inadequate measures and standards for education.

By creating a link between test scores and funding, schools would push for ever higher performance. That was the plan, and it looked like the plan was working. Atlanta and other cities were showing significant, even dramatic, improvements. Now we find that the biggest improvements were fraudulent, award winning educators are headed to jail and new questions have been raised about the American School system. What went wrong? How do we fix it? And what role should outsourcing play?

It’s no surprise that there are a lot of problems with the American educational system. Parents, teachers, and government leaders have been writing and talking about this for decades. America has the highest cost of education per student, yet in test after test, American students test as mediocre or failing compared with other countries. Worst still, the students who do the best are often from countries that pay the least for education. However, there is one area on which American students consistently come out on top: confidence about their abilities.

By now, it is almost a cliché that American students are unable to find most countries on a map. In a survey in 2011, 75% of American students failed basic geography tests. In math, American students score even more poorly. Seven percent of students tested as meeting standards for “advanced level” in eighth-grade math. Compare that with 48 percent in Singapore and 47 percent in South Korea. Math abilities are critical for many of the professions that will drive the 21st century economy, yet other countries that pay a fraction of what the US pays for primary education get far better results.

Let’s examine that high confidence level. Where does this come from? In part, it is our current culture of “nobody loses” in school. Pressure from parents has changed school culture, de-emphasizing winning and therefore being the student with the highest grade. Today, when students fail, their parents sue the school, which does little to make students believe in the importance of high grades. However, “helicopter parents," in themselves, are not enough to explain the amazingly poor performance of American students. For this, we need to look at the peculiarly American institution of relying on local rather than national educational standards.

In most developed countries, and in many undeveloped countries, educational standards are developed at the national level. In America, we depend on local standards for education. This has resulted in individual states and school boards removing evolution and climate change from text books, lowering of math standards, elimination course materials that teachers don’t want to teach, etc. The creation of national standards under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has shown just how deficient some local standards have been. Children who scored well in local tests, were finding they could not get even a minimal passing score on national tests. Given the easy tests and high scores that so many American students received, it shouldn’t be surprising that they have had such an inflated view of their knowledge. More difficult tests and harder coursework in other countries gave these students a much more realistic (and lower) view of their own success. That may explain why students have such a high self-opinion, but NCLB has been in place for more than a decade. Shouldn’t students have adjusted their opinions of their abilities when they received lower scores from a national testing system? Perhaps they would have, if the scores had not been tampered with. You see, when student grades improve, both schools and individual teachers can receive significant bonus money from NCLB. There are enormous incentives for teachers and school boards to cheat. And cheat they did!

The teachers who administered these tests could alter the test forms before they were sent back for scoring. The Atlanta school system, which won awards for improvements in educational achievement, achieved improved scores through wide-spread corruption. The tests were often of the “fill in the oval with a #2 pencil” sort. School board members and teachers regularly met and used template stencils to quickly change wrong answers and raise scores. Parents with children who could not read, but received spectacular test grades, questioned the school board but were rebuffed. Whistleblower teachers who were not part of the corruption, were fired. And the teachers who were changing the scores? They were winning national achievement awards for their “extraordinary work” with students. Clearly, leaving the administration of the testing process in the hands of teachers is a very bad idea. Of course, the problem of cheating is not unique to public school teachers. Any system where the recipient of rewards can alter the reward system tends to become corrupted over time. On Wall Street, regulators are hitting the world’s largest banks with a record number of fines due to banks cheating on financial regulations. Banks are now changing the way that they work in order to prevent future cheating. School systems need to look at a complete overhaul of how they administer tests. School systems with the worst scores and the least capable teachers, are the ones that need to change the most, and that have the greatest incentive to cheat. The testing process NEEDS to be outsourced.

Often, the reason for outsourcing is to lower cost. Arguably, when outsourcing is done correctly, regardless of the motivation, the price point of the service does improve. In this case, though, it is a question of quality. Cheating has been so wide-spread in Atlanta, that some teachers can expect to spend years in jail. We don’t know how many other school boards have widespread corruption or cheating by individual schools or teachers. But it does look like there is a lot of cheating out there. By outsourcing we not only create a degree of separation between the teachers and the testing process, we also inject some expertise in test taking. When you use a commercial testing service, here is what you can expect:

ID VERIFICATION: Professional testing facilities always check IDs. In the past, few 1st and 2nd graders would have had IDs, but with the current heightened security requirements, all students have (or are supposed to have) ID’s. In addition, digital photographs are taken of every student for post testing verification. In the past few years there have been a number of high profile student cheating scandals, usually with unprepared students trading identities with better performing students. The use of ID’s and on-site photographs are a start. But matching of photos will identify widespread cheating. By assigning specific seats, and placing cameras at every location students are prevented from switching identities within the facility. Today’s NCLB testing sites have varying rules (and enforcement) for identifying student identities. ON-SITE CHEATING: A typical testing facility requires that you carry nothing on you, and that you turn out all pockets before you enter the testing room. Not even a tissue is allowed in. And your hands and arms are checked (for writing). If you have anything on you, it is placed in a temporary locker until you leave. Public schools, on the other hand, have varying rules on what you can take with you during a test. You may be able to use a calculator, or you can carry in your cell phone (but may or may not be able to use it). Students are rarely checked for scraps of paper, or notes, and teachers rarely have the authority to separate them from phones and other electronics.

TEST FACILITY: The test room typical cannot be accessed from the outside (i.e. no one can pass you notes from outside). There is only one door into the room and a security guard outside of the room. You cannot leave the room without permission, and you will go through another check when you re-enter the room. The test itself is performed on a computer, to reduce the chance of any alteration of test forms. Public schools may have a proctor, but they rarely do physical checks of the test takers when they enter the room, and may test room are on the ground floor where they can be accessed from the outside. The scandal in Atlanta was only possible because paper forms were used extensively.

MONITORING: Each test taker is constantly monitored via individual cameras, and hands are to be on the desk at all times. A single proctor in a large class at a public school leaves a lot of room for cheating, or at least uneven testing.

INDEPENDENCE: In the most corrupt school districts, it is possible that an outsourced testing firm might still work with the local school board to cheat, especially if the local board selects the outsourcer. However, by following the other steps in this process (especially testing on a computer instead of outdated paper forms) it becomes more difficult to cheat on the test.

America spends over $800,000,000,000 annually on education. We need to get better results for what we spend. The NCLB program can deliver better results, IF the test results are fairly scored. In order to drive out the corruption that has been seen in the testing process, we need to move control away from local supervision of the tests and local standards for education. The Federal government should continue to develop and maintain standards for education, AND it needs to develop strong standards for the testing process itself. We have seen that local authorities are tempted to alter the test results, and we know that more federal staff will be cost prohibitive (pensions, federal pay scales, etc.). Monitoring and administration of the tests need to be managed by outsourcers. Private testing and training providers can cost effectively perform these functions, and eliminate issues of cheating.

If America wants to continue its role as the most advanced country in the world, developing new patents and creating new products that the world wants to buy, we need an educational system that provides the skills we need. Our current educational system falls short in many key areas of education. The No Child Left Behind initiative can fix a lot of our systemic educational problems, IF we are willing to put the processes in place that will prevent corruption in the systems and the alteration of student grades that we saw in the first decade of NCLB. If we outsource the test-taking process, we can bring in vendors with much greater expertise in testing security, who are not biased by the incentives that are paid to schools and individual teachers. In this case, outsourcing isn't a matter of lower cost, it’s a matter of improving and ensuring the quality of the process. Which is why Washington needs to give a lot of thought to outsourcing!