72 face possible sanctions in CRCT investigations

By Nancy Badertscher

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Thirty-three of 35 local school systems have resolved questions regarding alleged 2009 CRCT test tampering, and have turned in 72 employees to the state for possible disciplinary action.

Atlanta Public Schools and the Dougherty County School System in South Georgia continue to be investigated by 50 GBI agents and two special investigators.

In February, top state officials announced that suspicious erasure marks had been found on thousands of Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests from 119 schools in the 35 school systems. Atlanta had 58 schools flagged, the highest number of any district. Dougherty was second with 14.

The other school systems -- including metro Atlanta’s DeKalb and Fulton counties -- were given the results of the erasure analysis and asked to investigate.

“They have completed that work, and, from our perspective, their investigation has concluded,” Kathleen Mathers, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, said in a recent interview.

Some districts admitted to test misconduct and they collectively referred 72 employees to the Professional Standards Commission, the agency that licenses state educators, for possible sanctions, said Mathers and Gary Walker, Ethics Division director for the PSC.

“Some haven’t turned in anybody and some have turned in several,” Walker said.

Fulton school officialsidentified 16 staffers for test tampering, even though the school system’s internal review “did not reveal any intentional mishandling of testing materials or intentional disregard of testing practices,” said Susan Hale, a school system spokeswoman.

Other districts, including DeKalb, are withholding details, citing the pending ethics cases.

“We’ll be transparent with the results and answer your questions as soon as we’re given clearance to do so by the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement,” said Jeff Dickerson, a school system spokesman.

This is the second time in two years that CRCT results have been called into question.The statistically improbable gains that some Atlanta schools posted came to light in articles published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2008 and 2009. The tests, taken by students in first through eighth grades, help determine whether schools meet federal benchmarks.

Last year, two DeKalb County school administrators were discovered tampering with tests at four schools, including DeKalb County’s Atherton Elementary, in a groundbreaking audit by the Governor's Office of Student Achievement.

The school’s principal, James Berry, and the assistant principal, Doretha Alexander, admitted to erasing and replacing some of the answers on a CRCT summer retest and were given the harshest sanctions of 13 educators caught up in the scandal. Berry was banned from public schools for two years, and Alexander for one year.

There were several cases this year in which "circumstantial evidence would strongly suggest" there could have been blatant cheating, Mathers said.

“But those cases are few and far between," she said. "I wouldn’t want anyone to jump to the conclusion that there was widespread cheating across the state. And there was nothing like Atherton, where they wrote on a piece of paper this is exactly what we did.”

More common, Mathers said, were instances where the person administering the test would:

• paraphrase the questions to make them easier for students to understand;
• tell a student to check and recheck his or her work, the result being that the student would feel compelled to change the answer;
• read the question with a certain tone or inflection, again to tip off the student to the correct answer.

In August, Gov. Sonny Perdue named former state attorney General Mike Bowers and former DeKalb County district Attorney Bob Wilson as special investigators to determine whether officials illicitly boosted test scores on the CRCT in the Atlanta and Dougherty County public school systems.

Perdue recently signed an executive order authorizing the GBI to assist his special investigators, saying it was "necessary for the prevention and detection of whether any laws of the state were violated."

Mathers wasn't sure how long the investigations of Atlanta and Dougherty schools would last.

"The priority is to get the work done very well and in as short a timeline as possible,” she said.

As for the other investigations, only a few districts hired outside consultants to independently review their erasure analysis.

"The majority handled the investigation by themselves from their central office," Mathers said. "In general, people approached it with a great attitude, understanding there was some concerning irregularities in the data. They wanted to find the cause of that."