As we all wait to see how this election shakes out, I keep thinking about what teaches us all to be honest people with integrity -- or not. As Elizabeth Hemmerdinger writes on our site today (excerpt below), those questions cut to the quick of how we function as a society:

In “Digging Out Roots of Cheating in High School.” Maura J. Casey reports that cheating in schools has been rising at an alarming rate since the mid-1960s. In 1963 (the year I graduated from high school), 26 per cent of students copied answers from one another during tests. Citing a study done by Donald McCabe of Rutgers University, the editorial reports that by the mid-1990s, only a small percentage of students in high school said they never cheated on a test.

But there are many varieties of cheating, including plagiarism, collaboration on homework that is not permitted, copying homework, and turning in work as your own that was actually done by a paid tutor.

Casey’s editorial goes on to report that Dr. Jason Stephens of the University of Connecticut has embarked on a pilot program in six schools to reduce cheating, which, even to those who do it, experience as a “corrosive force.”   Students’ behavior is most influenced not by their parents, which surprises me,  but by the “bad soil” in schools. Students are pressured to get good grades and teachers are pressured to see their students achieve them, by any means. I suspect this could be at least partially attributed to the complications involved in No Child Left Behind. Is there hope for these kids?

I don’t know about you, but I’d have been thrown out of the school I attended if I’d been caught cheating. No cheating was a law; but it was also doctrine.

Teachers patrolled the classroom rows during a pop quiz and the finals. In ninth grade, my miserable (good teacher, miserable person) science teacher, Mrs. Hatcher, the most righteous person I had ever met, officiated over our biology final in the lunchroom. The one-armed, desky-chairs were spread out so far apart we were each a weird little island unto ourselves, or so I thought. I must have looked up at some point, and Mrs. Hatcher pounced on me...

Now, says Casey, “Schools will be asked to consider an honor code,” to encourage honesty and integrity — not only as values, but also as good habits. So here’s the “sweet spot” of the problem and my big question. How did we as a nation allow the concept of honor, integrity, honesty to drift off the radar screen in even a single school?

For the rest, check out Women's Voices for Change...

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