High CRCT test scores trumped 
honesty

By Alan Judd

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

When a teacher at Venetian Hills Elementary School heard that two other educators had helped students cheat on a standardized test, she went straight to an administrator.

The administrator’s one-syllable response: “Shhhh.”

With that, the teacher said nothing more — until this spring, when she was interviewed as part of an investigation into possible cheating at Venetian Hills and 57 other Atlanta schools.

Her tale, like dozens of others sprinkled through an investigative report released last week, provides new insight into a culture of dishonesty that apparently existed at many of the schools, where student achievement was sometimes promoted by any means necessary.

Teachers at some Atlanta schools, according to the report, whispered into students’ ears and pointed to correct answers on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test. At some schools, administrators grabbed stacks of test papers and changed wrong answers to right. Two schools kept students’ test papers in their possession for three extra days; both later posted statistically improbable increases in CRCT scores, as did many other schools under scrutiny.

“The odds of the outcomes that were produced on those tests are so long, and so hard to believe, something had to have happened,” Gary Price, chairman of a commission chosen by the Atlanta school district to investigate cheating allegations against Atlanta schools, said at a news conference last week.

The commission focused on what seemed to be pervasive cheating at 12 schools, including Venetian Hills.

“There were multiple classrooms in those schools, multiple grades in those schools,” Price said, “many more indications of potential issues.”

But investigators conducted only cursory reviews of most of the other 46 Atlanta schools flagged by the state last February for suspicious scores on the CRCT, the all-important measure of student achievement and school effectiveness.

State officials had ordered a full investigation in Atlanta and 34 other Georgia districts where an analysis of erasures on test papers showed an unusual number of wrong-to-right changes. Of the 191 schools statewide with questionable gains from erasures, by far the most were in Atlanta, even though it has just the sixth-largest enrollment among Georgia districts.

The state could invalidate CRCT results for Atlanta schools where cheating occurred. Individual educators could face penalties as severe as revocation of their teaching licenses. The Atlanta commission recommended that sanctions be considered against 109 educators, who were not named in the report released to the public.

State officials indicated last week the investigation may be unsatisfactory because it did not address irregularities in hundreds of classrooms.

Regardless, the report offers a glimpse into the world of high-stakes testing and the lengths to which some educators go to achieve the desired results.

At Parks Middle School, for instance, a teacher was observed using voice inflection to signify correct answers on the CRCT, according to the report.

At Cascade Elementary, a teacher told investigators that colleagues sometimes pointed to correct answers as students took tests.

At Kennedy Middle, investigators were told that an administrator, two teachers and an assistant removed test papers from a “secure location” and changed answers.

“These students passed the CRCT exams,” investigators wrote, even though “these students were not capable of passing.”

The schools cited in the cheating investigation serve mostly poor neighborhoods and have long histories of substandard academic performance. Many of their students come from single-parent homes and lack support from family members in pursuing their studies. But their higher scores of recent years gave credence to a view promoted by Atlanta’s superintendent, Beverly Hall, that all children, even those from the poorest homes, are “educable.”

Now, emerging evidence of widespread cheating suggests some Atlanta educators either were determined to prove Hall right or were convinced that, without cheating, they couldn’t.

‘Better not tell’

Venetian Hills Elementary occupies a tidy brick building in a shady residential section of southwest Atlanta.

It is, the school’s slogan asserts, “where success starts.”

Indeed, CRCT scores in 2009 gave the impression that Venetian Hills was succeeding, even though each of the 386 children enrolled there was, to use state government’s euphemism, “economically disadvantaged.” Eighty-eight percent of Venetian Hills students passed the CRCT’s language arts exam last year. The same proportion passed reading, and 85 percent passed the math test.

The school made “adequate yearly progress,” as required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, scoring high enough to earn a rating of “distinguished.” And it met enough of its performance goals that the school district awarded bonuses ranging from $50 to $500 to each employee — administrators and teachers, bus drivers and custodians.

But Venetian Hills’ accomplishments, according to the report on Atlanta’s cheating investigation, may have been illusory.

One student, who spoke to investigators with his mother, said that during the 2009 CRCT, his teacher pointed to specific lines on his test sheet and then whispered that he should erase his answers. The student said he saw the same teacher using similar techniques to give answers to others.

Another Venetian Hills educator gave investigators an audio tape on which students said their teacher had given them homework before the CRCT that matched questions on the actual tests.

“You all better write down this question,” one child quoted the teacher as saying, “because I know what the [test question] is.”

Another student said on the tape that a teacher simply announced the correct answers during testing.

“For example,” the child said the teacher told the class, “No. 35 is ‘A.’”

Yet another student said on the tape his mother — a teacher at Venetian Hills — instructed him to keep quiet about the cheating in his classroom.

“I better not tell anyone else” or his teacher “could get fired,” the boy said his mother told him.

The report did not address the tape’s origin.

Another teacher told investigators that “a select group” of staff members returned to Venetian Hills after hours during the week of CRCT exams so they could correct students’ answers.

It is not clear from the investigators’ report the extent to which they tried to verify such allegations. However, they did find documents supporting one teacher’s example of the pains school administrators took to avoid attracting attention to cheating.

In the spring of 2009, the teacher said, an administrator asked her to change students’ final grades from failing to passing — so the grades would conform to the students’ strong CRCT scores. The teacher noted the request in an e-mail exchange with administrators on May 26, 2009, in which she reported she had raised two students’ grades from F to C-minus so their CRCT scores would not raise suspicions.

When investigators went back to the 2009 CRCT answer sheets from Venetian Hills this year, they found unusual numbers of wrong-to-right erasures on language arts and reading exams in grades 2 through 5, and on fourth- and fifth-grade math tests. And when Venetian Hills students took the 2010 CRCT, under close observation by outside monitors, scores plummeted.

In 2009, 84 percent of Venetian Hills fourth-graders passed the math test.

In 2010: 54 percent.

‘Not very forthcoming’

As much as some teachers said about their colleagues’ and their bosses’ inappropriate actions, no one admitted to wrongdoing. Many educators gave “non-responsive” answers during interviews, investigators said, or looked for creative means to explain away unlikely test performances.

At Perkerson Elementary, investigators noted excessive erasures on CRCT papers across all grades and all subjects. At the same time, the percentage of students passing each section of the test soared.

But a school administrator told investigators that many factors could account for the erasures and the higher scores: reading programs, for instance, or the school’s active PTA. It is not clear whether investigators asked him why the same programs didn’t have the same effect in other schools.

At Parks Middle School, where extensive erasures coincided with more than 90 percent of students passing the CRCT, an administrator appeared “nervous,” investigators wrote,” and was “not very forthcoming.”

The administrator not only denied he had been told about cheating in 2009, he told investigators he “had never heard of cheating nor had any idea of how cheating could occur.”

The Parks teacher accused of using voice inflections to give answers to her students was similarly adamant, investigators wrote: “She stated she has never been aware of, witnessed, or heard of any cheating occurring at Parks Middle School.”

Educators at these and other accused schools spent last week dealing with the investigation’s findings while preparing to begin the fall term on Monday.

At Venetian Hills, where more allegations were noted than at any other school, teachers readied their classrooms one afternoon last week. The lobby and hallways were all but silent.

The principal, Clarietta Davis, was among the 12 reassigned late Friday for the duration of the school district’s investigation. Davis did not respond to messages left for her Thursday and Friday.

The school’s website reflects nothing of the cheating scandal. It says Venetian Hills students are “eliminating the achievement gap” by “wearing their school uniforms, integrating technology, active listening and working cooperatively.”

“Our school’s programs are designed to maintain, improve and enhance the academic and social growth of the students,” Davis wrote on the site.

She signed an online letter to parents, “Your dedicated principal.”

It is not clear whether it was Davis or another administrator who purportedly shushed a teacher reporting allegations of cheating. Regardless, investigators said the administrator in question denied ever hearing that teachers in her school were cheating.

“Who,” she wondered aloud, “would have said such a thing?”

How we got the story

Most of the information in this article comes from an investigative report prepared by a commission appointed by the Atlanta Board of Education to look into allegations of cheating in 58 city schools. Citing due process rules and other privacy provisions, officials did not identify the teachers and administrators implicated in the report. Nor did they name the educators, parents and students who are quoted.

Check our sources

To view a copy of the report, go to www.atlanta.k12.ga.us.

To view information on the state’s analysis of suspicious erasures on test papers, go to www.gaosa.org.