Law on honest testing sought

By KRISTINA TORRES

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In the wake of a test cheating scandal that led to state sanctions against 13 educators, the Governor's Office of Student Achievement wants to make it a crime to alter test results.

Early next year, the agency expects to propose a law "that would make it criminal for any educator to tamper with state standardized assessments," Kathleen Mathers, the office's executive director, said last week.

She said details of the proposed legislation are still being worked out, including what criminal penalties educators would face.

The expected action comes as Mathers and her team prepare to investigate more tests, this time from 2009 results on tests students took earlier this year in first through eighth grade.

A just-finished preliminary review raised suspicions at several schools, which Mathers would not identify. She said her office is looking at data statewide.

The Georgia Professional Standards Commission, a separate state agency that polices state teaching credentials, banned seven Atlanta and Fulton County educators Thursday from state public schools for as much as a year, in the last of the cases brought by the state against people it believes changed students' answers in 2008 to falsely increase test scores.

Uncovered by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution a year ago, the testing scandal heated up this summer after Mathers' office released an audit naming four schools that turned in questionable results for tests taken in the summer of 2008.

Those results were from fifth-grade math retests on the state's Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, taken by students from DeKalb County's Atherton Elementary, Fulton County's Parklane Elementary, Glynn County's Burroughs-Molette Elementary and the city of Atlanta's Deerwood Academy.

The audit found evidence of an abnormal number of erasures at those schools on those retests, in which the wrong answer often was replaced by the right one. The state investigation came after an analysis last December by the AJC showed improbable gains at some schools on tests taken first in spring and then in summer.

Since September, the commission also banned four Glynn educators and a former DeKalb assistant principal for a year as punishment in the scandal.

It suspended former DeKalb principal James Berry for two years and indicated he received a harsher sanction because he confessed. Sanctions can range from a reprimand to loss of license.

Those punishments were among the toughest officials had seen by the commission, which typically sanctions about 50 educators a year for cheating — less than half of 1 percent of educators statewide.

However, according to Gary Walker, director of educator ethics for the commission, those numbers may be increasing. The commission acted on 20 testing cases last week alone, including the seven from Fulton and Atlanta.

"There were some systems that were not taking testing seriously," said Walker, whose agency has issued new guidelines that specifically assign testing responsibility to system superintendents and principals. "Some of the people who were not believers now believe."

No law in Georgia makes it a crime to cheat on state academic tests, although one of the scandal's outcomes was creative use of another law by DeKalb authorities. They charged Berry and former assistant principal Doretha Alexander, both sanctioned in the scandal, with falsifying a state document, a felony that carries a potential two- to 10-year prison term. Berry pleaded guilty to that charge Wednesday. He was sentenced to two years' probation and a $1,000 fine. Alexander's case is still pending.

Meanwhile, a second investigation published in October by the AJC showed that 19 schools statewide reported extraordinary gains or drops in state test scores between spring of last year and this year.

A dozen of those schools are in Atlanta and include schools where students went from among the bottom performers statewide to among the best over one year.

According to the AJC analysis, the odds of making such a leap were less than one in a billion.

As a result, city officials this month began handing over data to two experts: Andrew Porter, education dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, and Douglas Reeves, a nationally recognized consultant on improving student achievement in k-12 schools, to conduct a review of those 12 schools.

They are expected to finish their work early next year.