Veteran WaPo reporter sees cover-up in Rhee’s DC cheating scandal
Written by Jay Mathews for the Washington Post. Read the entire article here.
“The biggest cheating scandal in the D.C. schools began March 28, 2011, with this headline in USA Today: “When test scores soared in D.C., were the gains real?” The newspaper revealed that over three years, more than 103 D.C. schools had unusual wrong-to-right erasure rates on annual tests, a possible sign of tampering. Administrators and teachers at some of those schools got big cash bonuses for their students’ improved scores. [Full disclose: My wife Linda conceived and edited the USA Today series that exposed the scope of the D.C. erasures.]
D.C. school leaders have now released the results of the second independent investigation of the scandal. (We are still waiting for a third probe by the D.C. Inspector General.) Once again we are not told who made those erasures, or why, on the annual D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests. Instead we learn that one teacher at King Elementary School and another at the Langdon Education Campus will likely be dismissed for helping students with their answers on the 2011 test, similar to last year’s finding of illicit help to students at three other schools.
What about all those erasures? D.C. schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson seems uninterested in the question. “I am pleased that this investigation is complete and that the vast majority of our schools were cleared of any wrongdoing,” she said.
I have been a reporter for 45 years. I have seen many cover-ups. This looks like one to me, and to many educators I have spoken to. D.C. officials have never investigated in any depth the wrong-to-right erasures that the District’s testing company began reporting in 2008. …
The failure to do the kind of thorough inquiry that revealed massive test tampering by principals and teachers in Atlanta after high numbers of erasures will leave many people here in doubt. The latest investigation, which cost $400,000, has done the children of D.C. no good at all.”
“The biggest cheating scandal in the D.C. schools began March 28, 2011, with this headline in USA Today: “When test scores soared in D.C., were the gains real?” The newspaper revealed that over three years, more than 103 D.C. schools had unusual wrong-to-right erasure rates on annual tests, a possible sign of tampering. Administrators and teachers at some of those schools got big cash bonuses for their students’ improved scores. [Full disclose: My wife Linda conceived and edited the USA Today series that exposed the scope of the D.C. erasures.]
D.C. school leaders have now released the results of the second independent investigation of the scandal. (We are still waiting for a third probe by the D.C. Inspector General.) Once again we are not told who made those erasures, or why, on the annual D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests. Instead we learn that one teacher at King Elementary School and another at the Langdon Education Campus will likely be dismissed for helping students with their answers on the 2011 test, similar to last year’s finding of illicit help to students at three other schools.
What about all those erasures? D.C. schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson seems uninterested in the question. “I am pleased that this investigation is complete and that the vast majority of our schools were cleared of any wrongdoing,” she said.
I have been a reporter for 45 years. I have seen many cover-ups. This looks like one to me, and to many educators I have spoken to. D.C. officials have never investigated in any depth the wrong-to-right erasures that the District’s testing company began reporting in 2008. …
The failure to do the kind of thorough inquiry that revealed massive test tampering by principals and teachers in Atlanta after high numbers of erasures will leave many people here in doubt. The latest investigation, which cost $400,000, has done the children of D.C. no good at all.”