Harold J. Noah (emeritus professor at Teachers College, Columbia) and Max A. Eckstein (emeritus professor at Queens College, CUNY) have written this disturbing book about education fraud and chicanery. They spotlight student cheating, credentials fraud and misconduct by professionals. The first of those topics regularly makes it into the news, but they also offer alarming and less familiar examples under the second and third headings. Most of their evidence of credentials fraud involves diploma mills, but they also illustrate forgeries and falsifications. Professional misconduct includes helping students cheat, plagiarizing other scholars' work, fabricating research findings, and suchlike. Noah and Eckstein do a better job of spotlighting these problems than of explaining their origins and devising solutions. Progressive educators both, they track the rising incidence of fraud to the intensifying of "competitive pressures," notably mounting emphasis on test scores, which boosts the incentive to cheat, etc. But that's not all. They even finger the local property tax as a source of this problem! As expected, they urge a lessening of competitive pressure by reducing the importance of test-driven accountability. They tread very lightly on other possible solutions, such as more rigorous enforcement of standards, better proctoring of tests, more careful checking of credentials, etc. But even if you don't find merit in their explanations and remedies, you will very likely widen your eyes at the evidence they uncover of the incidence of education fraud. The ISBN is 0-7425-1032-8. The publisher is Rowman & Littlefield, 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, MD 20706. They can be phoned at (800) 462-6420 and found on the web at www.rowmanlittlefield.com.
