Erasure-gate in D.C. schools?

by David Safier

This is a very long story, but I'll try to make it short. Washington D.C. school administrators and/or teachers may have cheated big time on standardized tests over a period of years. It's possible to probable the city's test score "gains," which helped push former D.C. Superintendent Michelle Rhee to national conservative prominence as the savior of public education, were the result of massive erasures of students' wrong answers and bubbling in the right ones.

USA Today, which has done the hard work on the "Erasure-gate" testing scandals around the country (who would have thought USA Today would do all that investigative work and take the national lead on this story?), published an exhaustive series of articles with strong evidence pointing to the probability that many D.C. schools faked their test score improvements.

One school the series spotlights is Noyes Education Campus. Twice, teachers got $8,000 bonuses and the principal pulled down a $10,000 bonus for the school's stellar scores. Rhee regularly cited Noyes school as the standard of excellence at the same time the school's tests had been flagged for their abnormal pattern of erasures.

In 2007-08, six classrooms out of the eight taking tests at Noyes were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of high wrong-to-right erasure rates. The pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, when 80% of Noyes classrooms were flagged by McGraw-Hill.

On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.

To repeat: The potential cheating problems were hushed up while Rhee & Co. bragged about the school's "successes."

When the first indications of cheating arose, Rhee stopped an investigation in its tracks. Even some parents complained about their children's scores being higher than they should have been. (One father said his daughter tested proficient in math in the third grade at a time she was still struggling with addition and subtraction. After he complained, he was barred from the school.) The current Superintendent, who had served under Rhee, also refused to look into the possible cheating. But now, thanks to the articles, D.C. may finally take a look at what was going on.

It's hard to prove cheating in the past. The best thing to do now is, carefully monitor this year's tests. Don't give the tests to schools beforehand. Have a neutral party hand the tests to the students, sit quietly in the back of the room, and pick up the tests when the students finish. If students do as well on the monitored tests as they did in the previous years, that would indicate there probably wasn't wholesale cheating. If the scores drop significantly, the fix was probably in.

THE ARIZONA CONNECTION: An Arizona charter school in Yuma, Carpe Diem, has its own test erasure problems. But the school happens to be the darling of conservatives like Ed Supe John Huppenthal and the Goldwater Institute's serial exaggerator, propagandist and liar, Matthew Ladner. So Huppenthal isn't calling for Carpe Diem's testing to be monitored. He doesn't want to know that his poster child may deserve to have its picture on a Wanted Poster.