Michelle Rhee kinda admits there may have been test cheating in D.C.

by David Safier

Forgive all the "insider baseball" stuff about education, readers, but what goes on in standardized testing, and what goes on with Michelle Rhee, the darling of educational conservatives who has bamboozled lots of progressives into thinking she has "the answer," is important to the future education here and nationwide. And when cheating and Rhee are in the same sentence, the importance shoots up exponentially.

USA Today published a detailed, lengthy report on the probability of systematic cheating by administrators and/or teachers on D.C. standardized tests. This happened while Michelle Rhee was superintendent, conducting all kinds of conservative-friendly experiments on the school system and using the increased scores to prove she was making progress. But statisticians say, patterns of erasures on the student tests indicate someone with the answer key was changing answers, not the students. So the much-touted improvements in student achievement under her reign are very possibly a fiction. And she may have known at the time the scores were doctored.

Rhee, who is no longer superintendent, responded in typical conservative fashion: ignore the allegations and blame the messenger. She said USA Today's reporting "absolutely lacked credibility," and

"It isn't surprising that the enemies of school reform once again are trying to argue that the earth is flat and that there is no way test scores could have improved for DCPS students unless someone cheated. . . . This story is an insult to the dedicated teachers and schoolchildren who worked hard to improve their academic achievement levels."

Then, unlike most conservatives, she realized she was making a fool of herself and pulled back. Jay Mathews, an ed writer at WaPo who is a Rhee supporter, got a call.

Wednesday morning, I got another surprise in the form of a phone call from Rhee. She told me that what she said Monday — her word, repeated often in our conversation — was “stupid.”

But keeping with the conservative playbook (think Rumsfeld and Abu Ghraib), Rhee said there might have been a few bad apples, etc. But even Mathews sees indications Rhee may have papered over the problem when it was brought to her attention in 2008 and 2009.

After stonewalling for awhile, current Superintendent Kaya Henderson says she's planning to investigate to see if there was systematic cheating in D.C. schools. If she's serious about this, she'll have the next standardized testing carefully monitored in schools where red flags were raised. Comparing this year's proctored results with past years' [possibly] doctored results would reveal a great deal.

LOCAL NOTE: One of the two lead reporters on USA Today's investigative stories about D.C. cheating is Jack Gillum. I learned he worked at the Star recently, in the business section.

UPDATE: For more background on this story, read Trulee Pist's comment at the end of the post. Interesting analysis.