CRCT cheating: Districts to conduct internal test probes

By Margaret Newkirk

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

When Gov. Sonny Perdue’s Office of Student Achievement released its devastating report on suspected test tampering in Georgia schools last week, Perdue said the state was serious about getting to the bottom of the problem.

“We will not allow this to be whitewashed,” he said.

But even a testing expert who praised the state’s actions last week said the state may have a problem going forward.

Both the OSA and the state Board of Education have ordered investigations at the 191 schools statewide — more than half of them in metro Atlanta — where an audit found erasure marks on 2008 standardized tests unusual enough to suggest the possibility of cheating.

But the investigations will be handled by the school districts themselves, even in districts where the state found multiple schools with questionable erasures in 25 percent or more of classrooms.

“There’s really no strong incentive for the locals to do a searching investigation,” said Gregory Cizek, of the University of North Carolina. “It really would be best for everybody if the state was able to assign some independent agency to look into this.”

Both the OSA and state Professional Standards Commission, which licenses educators, said the state will insist on rigorous investigations by districts.

Gary Walker, the director of educator ethics at the PSC, said his phone was already ringing the morning after the state released its audit results.

Superintendents “were calling looking for suggestions on how to best investigate their schools,” he said, adding that he advised them to hire outside experts.

Walker’s office will investigate if the districts find evidence of tampering and file complaints against individual educators, he said.

But “right now, they don’t have enough information to file a complaint with us,” he said.

The OSA audit of 2009’s Criterion-Referenced Competency Test followed more than a year of stories in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about statistically improbable test scores.

The OSA looked at erasures where answers changed from wrong to right.

It found that more than half of Georgia’s elementary and middle schools had at least one classroom where erasure marks were unusual enough to suggest cheating.

The 191 schools singled out for further investigation were classified as either moderate or severe concerns.

Schools marked moderate had unusual erasure patterns in 11 percent to 24 percent of classrooms. Those marked severe had suspicious test results in 25 percent or more of classrooms.

Forty-three of the 74 schools marked severe were in the Atlanta district.

They included 21 schools where suspicious erasure patterns were found in tests for more than half of the schools’ classrooms.

The OSA also recommended, and the state school board approved, mandatory monitoring of testing at the schools on the severe concern list and random monitoring at those on the moderate concern list.

Teachers will also be rotated at the questionable schools, so that teachers will not be testing their own classes.

Outside Georgia

Other states play more aggressive roles in ferreting out tampering, in part because they’ve been at it longer.

The OSA audit was the first of its kind for Georgia.

Texas, by contrast, has been monitoring testing for several years and recently approved new guidelines to make that monitoring even tougher.

South Carolina has been sending monitors to schools during tests and analyzing erasure patterns afterwards since the 1980s, said Elizabeth Jones, assessment director for the state’s Department of Education.

The South Carolina audits began long before the emergence of federal No Child Left Behind accountability standards, often blamed for pressuring teachers and administrators handling standardized tests.

Jones said her state began auditing possible tampering because test scores were publicly reported.

“The test scores were considered high stakes back then,” she said, “although compared to now, it really wasn’t.”

The state education department works with districts if it suspects cheating.

But the districts don’t handle the investigations themselves.

The state’s version of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, called the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, conducts investigations, including interviews with teachers, administrators and children.

In South Carolina, it’s not only a crime to tamper with a test but a crime not to report information about others tampering with tests.

Both are misdemeanors.

Limited resources

Georgia lawmakers are now considering a bill making tampering with standardized tests a misdemeanor. Prosecutors used a law against altering any state document last year when it brought a felony charge against a DeKalb County principal who admitted changing answers on tests.

OSA Director Kathleen Mathers said the decision to allow flagged school districts to investigate themselves stems in part from the state’s limited resources.

The OSA has a staff of seven.

The state Department of Education also does not have the resources to investigate what happened at the challenged 191 schools.

Mathers said the state also believes districts should get a first crack at investigating their problems.

“It’s not just a matter of resources,” she said. “This is the first time we’ve looked at this across the state. Since they are responsible for the functioning of those schools, we’re going to work very closely with them.”

If the state doesn’t believe a district has taken an investigation seriously, “we’re automatically going to turn it back,” Mathers said.

Officials at the metro area schools on the investigation list either didn’t return calls or said they did not yet know how they planned to conduct their probes. Atlanta has said it plans to bring in outside experts.

What’s next

Late Friday, the OSA sent superintendents a general outline of what it considers a rigorous self-investigation.

The list said schools should describe their testing training, identify untrained staff that may have handled tests, track who handled tests and “determine whether any employee altered student responses on test documents at each flagged school,” among other requirements.

The state Department of Education will handle the new monitoring requirements for the next round of tests.

DOE spokesman Matt Cardoza said the department doesn’t yet have a monitoring plan but is unlikely to release its plan in any case, to protect the integrity of the process.

The next round of testing begins this spring.