Posted on 06/14/2009 3:54:49 PM PDT by Oshkalaboomboom
A gathering at an Atlanta elementary school last summer planted the seeds for a cheating scandal.
Fifth-graders from five public schools had attended summer classes together at Deerwood Academy in southwestern Atlanta. Then they all had retaken the standardized test each had failed in the spring: the math portion of the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, or CRCT.
Officials from the five schools came to Deerwood to collect answer sheets from their respective students and send them off for automated grading. But state investigators say the test papers from one group of students apparently took a detour.
When the results came back, students from four of the five schools posted modest gains, on a par with others around Georgia. But for Deerwood students, scores surged. The Governor’s Office of Student Achievement last week released preliminary conclusions from an investigation revealing someone erased incorrect answers and penciled in correct responses.
The cheating at Deerwood and three other public elementary schools in Georgia, documented in the state report, underscores the desperation of some teachers and administrators to avoid the embarrassment of failing to meet the requirements of the decade’s overarching education reform effort, No Child Left Behind. In each case, scores increased enough to reverse the schools’ first-ever failures to make “adequate yearly progress” toward student achievement goals.
More surprising than the cheating, perhaps, is the brazenness with which it was carried out, interviews and state records suggest.
At Atherton Elementary in DeKalb County, for instance, 32 fifth-graders retook the math portion of the CRCT. All 32 passed, 26 of them with scores in the top tier. In fact, after the summer retest, every single Atherton fifth-grader had passed the math exam. In other grades at Atherton, no more than two-thirds of students met or exceeded the test’s standards.
State officials have not determined who is responsible for the alleged cheating at Deerwood, Atherton, Parklane in Fulton County and Burroughs-Molette in Glynn County. Any school employee found to have participated in a cheating scheme could be fired and could lose his or her state certification as a teacher or school administrator.
Atherton’s principal, James Berry, resigned Thursday and DeKalb school officials transferred an assistant principal after preliminary results from the state’s investigation were released. The other school districts say they are reviewing the state’s findings. But how thoroughly the districts intend to pursue the matter remains uncertain.
At first, a spokeswoman for the Atlanta Public Schools said it would conduct its own investigation. By late Friday, however, the system had decided to defer to the state Professional Standards Commission, which polices educator credentials.
“We’ll take appropriate disciplinary action if it is warranted,” said Su Yeager, a spokeswoman for the Atlanta schools. “We will look to find out exactly what happened in that classroom.”
The state identified 11 Deerwood tests as possibly being tampered with.
Asked whether the district is investigating Deerwood’s principal, Lisa Smith, Yeager answered, “Absolutely not.”
The state investigation began last December after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution disclosed improbably steep gains in CRCT retest scores at a handful of schools. Officials commissioned a sophisticated study of test papers, widely known as “bubble sheets” for the small ovals where students mark answers with No. 2 pencils. The analysis of the four schools’ papers showed that both the number of erasures and the number of answers changed from wrong to right far exceeded any statistical likelihood.
Another indicator of cheating: A large proportion of students from the four schools had more erasures on their answer sheets than 98 to 99 percent of all students who took the test, documents show. All 32 Atherton fifth-graders fell into the top percentile of changes, as did four in five Parklane students. The state’s research showed that no more than 1 in 20 students should make enough erasures to reach that level.
“Data like that cannot possibly exist in a valid testing environment,” said Kathleen Mathers, executive director of the student achievement office. “It is statistically impossible.”
The investigation’s findings suggest that whoever was behind the cheating didn’t fear getting caught, despite their obvious tampering with test papers, Mathers said.
“If you thought you had done it in complete privacy and no one saw you do it and you didn’t know such a thing as erasure analysis existed, that puts things in a different context.”
‘Not adequate’
Deerwood opened in 2004, the first new public school in southwestern Atlanta in decades. It quickly became a fixture of the Deerwood Park neighborhood, its students’ achievements a source of community pride.
Enough students qualified for free or reduced-price meals that the federal government designated Deerwood a Title I school, making it eligible for additional funding. After making “adequate yearly progress” — the performance target based on standardized test scores and other factors, such as attendance rates — for three consecutive years, Deerwood earned an additional accolade: “Distinguished.”
But several fifth-grade students failed the CRCT’s math exam in the spring of 2008, causing Deerwood to lose its elite status. For the first time, they failed to make adequate progress.
Deerwood could reverse its fortunes only if the low-scoring students did better in summer school.
“A Title I Distinguished school has pride in being a Title I Distinguished school,” Mathers said. When a school loses that title, she said, “I would guess it’s an embarrassing situation.”
At Deerwood, as at other schools named in the cheating probe, testing procedures often seemed lax, investigators found.
A recently retired educator supervised Deerwood’s summer retesting program last year, Mathers said. Early in the summer term, she asked for an assistant — another retired educator who agreed to work for free.
The volunteer helped administer the CRCT retests, the investigation determined. In addition, Mathers said, investigators were told a volunteer proctor may have pulled students out of the classroom where the retest was taking place and given them the exam elsewhere in the school.
Both situations violate state regulations for CRCT security, Mathers said; only paid school employees, accountable to their supervisors, are supposed to so much as touch testing materials.
During the week the CRCT was administered, investigators found, Deerwood stored testing materials in a room that wasn’t secure. No school employee was assigned to make sure the door was locked or even closed.
Test security was even looser at Burroughs-Molette Elementary in Glynn County. Test papers were not collected promptly from classrooms, investigators found, and they were left with clerical workers until a courier came to pick them up. The supervisor of the summer retesting program had neither a school administrator’s license nor training for the job.
Atherton and Parklane both posted improvements in test scores that defied logic, the state determined. Like Deerwood, Parklane taught summer classes for students from several schools — but only the Parklane students made great strides on the test. Like all other DeKalb schools, Atherton used a scripted curriculum called “Ladders to Success” – to a much greater degree of success than others.
“If ‘Ladders to Success’ were in and of itself a truly remarkable program, [the student achievement office] would expect to see similar gains across all summer school programs in DeKalb,” the state report said. “That did not happen.”
‘High stakes’
The importance attached to standardized testing — the CRCT is almost universally described as “high stakes” — may explain why some teachers or principals would be tempted to manipulate the scores, educators say.
“There are so many pressures from so many directions,” said Tim Callahan, spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, the state’s largest teachers’ group. “This, at first blush, appears to be well organized, goal-oriented and rather on a large scale.”
Principals of the schools where cheating appears to have occurred did not respond to messages. Deerwood’s Lisa Smith referred questions to the school district’s public relations staff.
In early 2005, a few months after Deerwood opened, Smith was quoted in an AJC article about the school’s meaning to its neighborhood.
“It brings hope and opportunity to families,” she said. “I like to think of the school as the pulse of the community, where parents, community representatives, business partners and all other stakeholders share in the accountability of student success.
On the one hand, the Leftist MSM claims conservative media causes (or will cause) massacres, even though they create whole movies about assassination and have been spewing grotesque hate speach for a decade.
Then Obama fires one of his own oversight administrators for catching an Obama crony.
Now we're supposed to be suprised at the "brazenness" of cheating fifth graders?
It reminds me of the massive trashing of childhood and teenage sexuality that happened when Clinton and Monica's exploits were exposed (so to speak).
The Left methodically attacks the very structures of civilization. If Obama has any flaw, it's that he's going too fast - he's tearing so much down, so rapidly, that the people can't stay asleep while it's going on. He even makes liberals nervous with how fast he's going - they can't update their talking points fast enough to feel safe from having to make personal explanations of their positions.
It’s just insane to have personnel who have any vested interest whatsoever in the test results, having any role whatsoever in administering the test. I’m all in favor of standardized testing because when done properly it’s a great way to find out what students have really learned. But it needs to be administered by people who don’t know the students or the school administrators, and have no vested interest in anything except the integrity of the test.
I blame the counselors. They’re the ones in charge of the whole testing process.
Geeze! Is this the wonderful “socialization” homeschoolers are missing? ( Just wondering.)
Actually, from experience the whole process works wonderfully when ONE overseer from the state comes by to watch the process. There are two teachers in every room - one proctor and one administrator, neither leaves w/o a replacement. Both teachers present DO NOT teach the proctored subject area. The tests are kept in a case locked by a district official who locks and unlocks the box containing the test. A state official is present.
I have heard rumors of very questionably things happening in some local counties in Mississippi as well, where a high school went from a level 1 (utterly failing) to a 5 (exceptional) in one year and nothing was said about it. Apparently the principal allowed teachers to stand next to problem students and nod or shake their heads as each student went through the answers. State testing law states that teachers are NOT ALLOWED to look at the testing booklets until after the test has been graded by the state.
Someone should lose their head over something like this. At one school I taught at, we had an administrator that was incarcerated for sucking a students toe and a supervisor who was sued by a principal who he was hitting on (both male) and the district paid $800,000 in legal fees for his case. He resigned but was given a one year “best practices” job for $200,000, the same amount he was getting per year.
ONE MILLION DOLLARS COULD HAVE PUT A LAPTOP IN EVERY CLASSROOM IN ONE OF THEIR HIGH SCHOOLS. I agree, homeschool.
Your daughter’s teacher is creating a hostile learning environment.
You need to call the principal tomorrow morning and tell him/her that the teacher called your daughter a racist in front of the class, and you wish to discuss this ASAP, as you will only extend this offer once before a lawyer is consulted.
This teacher should be made to apologize to your daughter in front of the class and should also attend sensitivity training as she has trouble with diversity.
She also should attend retraining for her subject, as she doesn’t know what a socialist is.
It’s the end of the school year, so you can wait until the finals are graded before you have the meeting, but this person should not be allowed to do this to anyone’s child.
To label someone a racist is a loaded charge today, and is usually the last resort of someone who is losing the debate on ideas.
Good luck.
Teachers are not only too stupid to teach, they're too damn stupid to cheat!!
Your daughter is wrong, Obama is technically a fascist.
I know...Some of the black students in my classes were really jazzed about Obama, but by Feb/March many of them were not so endearing of him because there parents were complaining about him...
The 5th graders weren't the ones cheating, it was the teachers.
Okay, thanks for the correction. But I still stand by my point.
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