Just over a week ago, the federal government approved measures to address fraudulent corporate accounting and financial reporting activities, creating a regulatory board to oversee these practices and punish corrupt auditors, and establishing new procedures to prosecute dishonest executives. This follows a government-mandated pledge executives were expected to sign stating their company's financial books were accurate.
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| | | Gary J. Niels is the head of Winchester Thurston School, an independent school with campuses in Shadyside and Hampton. As a Klingenstein Fellow at Columbia University, he studied academic cheating; his paper "Academic Practices, School Culture and Cheating Behavior" can be found at www.winchesterthurston.org/cheating. | |
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I'm not a businessman, so I cannot speculate on how effective these measures will be in deterring corporate cheating. I am, however, an educator who years ago, as a high school principal in Florida, became dismayed by the rise in student cheating. This concern led me to work with students to institute an honor code requiring them to pledge they had completed their academic work without unauthorized assistance, and to establish an honor board to regulate violations.
As I've read about Enron, Tyco, WorldCom and Adelphia, I've wondered if the lessons we're learning about corporate fraud parallel what we learned at my Florida school -- that over time, instituting pledges and regulatory boards heightened awareness of cheating behavior but did little to deter it because deeper systemic factors were at play.
The vast majority of students believe cheating is wrong, yet nearly all polls indicate that most students cheat. In 1993, Who's Who Among High School Students conducted one of the largest polls of adolescent achievers ever undertaken. Paul Krouse, Who's Who director, reported, "Cheating is pervasive among the nation's top high school students. The results indicated that nearly 80 percent admitted to some form of dishonesty, such as copying someone else's homework or cheating on an exam."
This means that students who cheat behave in a way that is inconsistent with their stated beliefs. In 1910 two Yale psychologists quantified this reality. The Hartshone and May study (recently brought back to the public consciousness by Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling book "The Tipping Point") investigated the family background and beliefs of nearly 10,000 participants and placed the young people in a myriad of observed situations in which they could cheat to improve their standing. This study's data led Hartshone and May to their "Theory of Specificity": Cheating behavior was most often prompted by specific circumstances and less often by stated moral beliefs.
This realization led me to question my assumption that the cheater's moral shortcomings are the sole determinant in cheating. Apparently when certain conditions exist, students (and possibly corporate executives) will act in a manner at odds with their beliefs.
My investigation focused on the nature of these conditions, and led me to a series of reports documenting my own suspicions: As young people consider their futures, many feel afraid. Their optimism about the country's future is lower than in previous generations.
In a troubling New York Magazine article, Ralph Gardner observed, "The grueling competition has left teenagers, at an age when their idealism and sense of opportunity should be sparkling, cynical and pessimistic about their future. Rather than rejoicing in the freedom and adventure that college promised even a decade or two ago, they're worried about what's going to happen to them after they graduate." These and other fears amount to a palpable sense of threat -- of social embarrassment through failure to live up to their own, their friends' or their families' expectations.
Then there is the unfortunate but growing education trend: evaluation solely by scores. Shortly after they enter grade school, students discern that education is a stratifier, and stratification exists via scores and grades. These, they learn, will play a significant role in determining their educational and career opportunities.
Although schools have the best intention behind sorting students academically (i.e., "tracking"), young people discern that achievement has less to do with learning and more to do with scores, which they learn might be improved by implementing certain techniques or "test-taking strategies."
The combination of societal pressure, fear of failure and an educational system that is perceived as a cold numbers game spawns a climate in which the very soul of education -- that self-motivated quest to explore and understand -- is squelched. Young people conclude that they must survive, so they draw upon a survival ethic; the motivation to "save face" overrides long-held moral beliefs. Put crudely, if cheating enables the student to survive, then he or she will cheat.
At my Florida school, it became apparent that legislative and honor-based measures, though noble in purpose, did not address underlying systemic issues.
In tandem with these legislative responses, we needed to assess the conscious and unconscious ways in which our educational practices contributed to the culture of scores and numbers: calculation of students' grade point averages (GPAs); adding numerical value to courses perceived to be more rigorous than "regular" classes (i.e., "weighting"); and awards-day recognition of only high test scores.
In short, we needed to practice educational methods that instilled within our students a love of learning to perpetuate that self-motivated desire to grow. Our question needed to be, how can our curriculum and educational practices restore the soul to education?
I suspect the CEOs allegedly responsible for fraudulent practices were raised in moral households and believe cheating is wrong. Yet, I also suspect that their breakneck lifestyles are fueled by that same sense of threat that stimulates sweaty palms in the hands of Saturday morning SAT test takers. Corporate executives must "save face," too, and that means a survival ethic is called upon, which often leads to behavior inconsistent with stated beliefs.
Unfortunately, it seems the shift that occurred in education also occurred in business; each has become a system solely defined by and in service to numbers. I would hope that our corporations (and our schools) might look at their purpose and restore their souls. If they exist to offer a product to serve humans, then I hope service to humans would be the soul of their existence.
In recent years I found myself admonishing, reminding, imploring students to focus on learning and let the numbers take care of themselves.
For corporate America, I would issue a similar refrain: Focus on serving and let the numbers take care of themselves.
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