Cheating on NCLB tests? Maybe.

Some school districts and states appear to be cheating on test scores to meet achievement requirements under the No Child Left Behind law, and legislators will look into it when they consider reauthorization of NCLB this year.

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), new chair of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, feels the cheating issue "ought to be part of the mix" during the reauthorization debate, says his spokesman, Tom Kiley. "Any cheating is going to undermine the core goal of the law, which is accountability and making sure that every student is proficient," Kiley says.

But other authorities are more cautious about whether cheating is worthy of federal involvement. "It's up to the states to address it," says Chad Colby, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education. "It's the people who administer the tests who have to be vigilant."

"We haven't heard that this is a widespread issue in terms of NCLB or state accountability systems," declares Alex Nock, director of the independent, bipartisan Commission on No Child Left Behind. "We went around the country talking to a lot of folks about a lot of things and this wasn't one of the topics that anybody spent any time talking about."

Reports of manipulation of test scores have popped up across the country, although authorities are wary of calling it cheating. In New Jersey, state officials say administrators and teachers who ignored test rules caused numerous test violations at two Camden elementary schools in 2004-05. Violations included giving students more time on tests and letting them use calculators for math questions. The Camden School District has since developed a security plan to block "adult interference" in testing. The plan includes rigorous training for test administrators, more monitoring, and more attention to handling test booklets.

Meanwhile, the state attorney general is conducting a criminal probe of the issue as well as alleged fiscal irregularities in the district.

New Jersey is one of 12 states that have reported "significantly higher" percentages of fourth-graders proficient in reading and math compared with the percentages of students found to be proficient under the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The differences were revealed in a study by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), an independent research center at the University of California, Berkeley, UC Davis and Stanford University. "We did not look at the issue of cheating. We did look at how states try to game the system a bit. Part of it is probably due to teaching to the tests," says Bruce Fuller, a PACE director at UC Berkeley. But he acknowledges that "a little of it might be due to cheating."