More administrator/teacher cheating in Georgia

by David Safier

Atlanta had a huge standardized test cheating scandal that rocked the city's schools. Now it's the turn of the Dougherty school system, also in Georgia, according to an Education Week story (subscription only).

The investigation showed cheating took place in at least 11 of 26 schools in the district, which is located about 170 miles south of Atlanta. The report was released in two volumes: Part I and Part II. Eighteen educators acknowledged they cheated, and implicated many others.

Teachers and administrators who cooperated with the investigation cited the usual reasons for cheating: fear of failure and the pressing need to make NCLB "adequate yearly progress."

Let's not forget, the tests are more often "high stakes" for educators than for students. It would be surprising, even in a profession like teacher where people tend to be moral and idealistic, if some didn't succumb to the temptation of cheating to make themselves and their schools look better.

Arizona has done no in depth checking for cheating on standardized tests, even though investigative reporters have shown the strong possibility that some scores have been altered. One glaring example pointed out by the Republic back in March is the surprising and statistically unlikely rise in scores at Yuma's Carpe Diem charter school.

In spring 2010, the company that administers the AIMS test, Pearson Education, flagged Carpe Diem's sophomore AIMS reading test for having a higher-than-average number of erasure marks. Flagging means the state gets an alert. Pearson's report said a group of 27 Carpe Diem students who took the AIMS reading test had a total number of wrong-to-right erasure marks seven times as high as the state average. [boldface added]

Carpe Diem is the darling of Ed Supe Huppenthal as well as the Goldwater Institute, so they're unlikely to look at the school's unlikely jump in its scores. Huppenthal didn't even send in proctors during the exams at Carpe Diem this spring, which would have been a modest precautionary measure. After all, what if that led to further questions about one of their favorite charters?