El Paso Times: TEA hasn’t policed cheating on TAKS or STAAR
The El Paso Times uncovered a pervasive cheating scandal in 2010 in the El Paso school district. The scandal led eventually to the state taking over the district to clean up the mess. State education commissioner Michael Williams commissioned an internal investigation to see why the Texas Education Agency didn’t catch the problem earlier. The agency gave the Times an advance copy of the report. The Times reports that the results aren’t pretty:
The Texas Education Agency lacks the ability to detect cheating on school accountability measures, and instead relies on school districts to police themselves, the State Auditor’s Office said in a report to be released today.
Williams blamed his predecessor, Robert Scott, who stepped down in 2012:
“This was an entire organizational breakdown and I think, quite frankly, it started at the top of the organization,” Williams said in an interview with the Times. “It started with the old leadership team, who failed this agency, failed the people of the city of El Paso and failed this state.”
It’s not like the TEA didn’t get plenty of warning. Back in 2007, the DMN’s Holly K. Hacker and Joshua Benton produced an award-winning series that uncovered cheating on the TAKS test. One story started like this:
In 1975, a social scientist named Donald Campbell came up with the idea that would