District to release report on cheating investigation at 19 schools | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

District to release report on cheating investigation at 19 schools | Philadelphia Public School Notebook:

District to release report on cheating investigation at 19 schools

by Dale Mezzacappa on Jul 22 2013 Posted in Latest news

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The Philadelphia School District plans to release a report on its investigation of adult cheating on standardized tests in 19 city schools that will give a sense of the scope of the problem and say how many educators will face disciplinary charges. But the report, which will be released within the next three weeks, will not name names, sources have told the Notebook.

Sources indicated that infractions were found at most of the 19 schools. These 19 represent one of three groups of schools identified for further investigationthrough statistical anomalies, such as high numbers of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets that forensic analysis found were virtually impossible to occur by chance.

Altogether, 53 District schools and three city charters were flagged for investigation, with the state dividing them into three tiers. The state itself is investigating 12 Tier 1 schools, where the evidence was most egregious. It told the District to probe the 19 Tier 2 and 22 Tier 3 schools.

The District’s investigation of the so-called Tier 2 schools was primarily conductedpro bono by attorneys from the law firm Morgan Lewis & Bockius. Two partners and more than a dozen associates from the firm have been working for more than a year and provided a report of findings at each school. They interviewed 550