D.C. test tampering hurting teachers, poisoning schools
Written by Jay Mathews for The Washington Post. Read the entire article here.
“When J.P. Cotton began teaching at Davis Elementary School in Southeast Washington in August 2010, he puzzled over the scores of his fifth-graders on the previous spring’s D.C. tests. They were doing poorly in his class, as were most of the children at a school long plagued by low expectations and teacher turnover.
Yet several of them had scored proficient as fourth-graders on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System exams. How could that be?
Cotton was dismissed last summer as the result…. of events he had nothing to do with. Many incidents of possible test manipulation in the District — as indicated by large numbers of wrong-to-right erasures detected by the test company, CTB/McGraw Hill — have gone mostly uninvestigated and unpunished. These questions are poisoning the system.
The vast majority of possibly tainted test scores have been ignored. The new teacher evaluation system could be using distorted numbers.”
“When J.P. Cotton began teaching at Davis Elementary School in Southeast Washington in August 2010, he puzzled over the scores of his fifth-graders on the previous spring’s D.C. tests. They were doing poorly in his class, as were most of the children at a school long plagued by low expectations and teacher turnover.
Yet several of them had scored proficient as fourth-graders on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System exams. How could that be?
Cotton was dismissed last summer as the result…. of events he had nothing to do with. Many incidents of possible test manipulation in the District — as indicated by large numbers of wrong-to-right erasures detected by the test company, CTB/McGraw Hill — have gone mostly uninvestigated and unpunished. These questions are poisoning the system.
The vast majority of possibly tainted test scores have been ignored. The new teacher evaluation system could be using distorted numbers.”
