- Kaya Henderson: National Standards Needed to Guide Educators in Detection, Investigation of Cheating
- GOP Legislators in the House Approve Bills Lessening Federal Reach into Schools
Kaya Henderson: National Standards Needed to Guide Educators in Detection, Investigation of Cheating
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
February 28, 2012
Chancellor Kaya Henderson has made a practice of avoiding the national spotlight, but Tuesday morning, at an U.S. Education Department symposium on cheating, she stepped up.
Henderson called for a set of national standards to guide educators in the detection and investigation of cheating on standardized tests, contending that without them school districts will be subject to second-guessing of their efforts to probe and punish such misconduct.
“Because there is no standard either for identifying potential wrongdoing or for investigating once cheating is alleged, we are left with a fuzzy picture of what reliable outcomes are,” Henderson said.
DCPS is under investigation by District and federal authorities for alleged cheating by staff on the DC CAS between 2008 and 2010. Henderson asked the D.C. Inspector General to investigate after USA Today published a lengthy investigation last March that showed elevated levels of wrong-to-right answer sheet erasures in classrooms at more than 100 D.C. schools since 2008. The Education Department Inspector General later joined the inquiry.
But Henderson seemed to be saying that without clearer standards, even these probes will not resolve questions from the public or media about the sharp growth in D.C. test scores under former chancellor Michelle Rhee. It will also continue to render DCPS and other school systems vulnerable to what she described “those who would like to tear down outcome-based education reform.”
Henderson said DCPS took every conceivable step in response to questions about test security, including hiring a private firm, Caveon, to investigate high-erasure classrooms flagged by state authorities in 2009 and 2010. But Caveon founder John Fremer said last year that DCPS asked for a limited inquiry that didn’t involve all the forensic tools at its disposal.
“It was easy sport for the press to play the what-more-could-be-done game,” she said. “Couldn’t we have looked at right-to-wrong erasures in more schools? Wasn’t there more that our vendor could have done to identify inconsistencies? Couldn’t investigations have been more thorough? Can we release the information to the press so that press and the public could decide for themselves?”
Henderson said the answer to all the questions was “yes.” Caveon could have looked at patterns of answers within classrooms, annual score growth of students, or how results may have deviated from predictions based on interim tests.
“But there was no reason to believe that any of these actions would have yielded more reliable results or more accurate results,” she said. “It was clear to me it would be very easy for a district like ours to fall down a rabbit hole of testing investigations only to find out that because there are no widely accepted standards there is no agreed upon result that would have satisfied the press or the public.”
Henderson also referred to Monday’s column by New York Times education columnist Michael Winerip challenging the propriety of Education Secretary Arne Duncan sharing a panel with Rhee while the school system was under investigation. He also called the department’s selection of Henderson as one of the conference’s opening speakers “disheartening.”
“More generally the press has framed the challenge of test integrity as their struggle to out deceitful school districts,” Henderson said. “This approach is exactly wrong. Schools districts like ours struggle with these issues constantly.”
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
February 28, 2012
Republican lawmakers on a House committee, after hours of pointed debate with their Democratic counterparts, approved two bills Tuesday that would shrink the federal government’s involvement in education.
“I would get the federal government completely out of the education business if I could,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), hours before the straight party-line votes. “But this goes in the right direction.”
Most observers consider it unlikely that Congress will pass a new education law, which it has been trying to do for five years, until after the November election. A Senate committee approved bipartisan legislation last year, but that bill has yet to come to the floor.
One of the most controversial provisions of the Republican bills would gut the current requirement, known as “maintenance of effort,” which says states must maintain a certain level of education funding in order to receive federal dollars to help educate low-income children.
Republicans argue that the requirement discourages states from looking for ways to become more efficient. Democrats worry that losing it will lead to serious cuts in primary and secondary education budgets and disproportionately affect low-income children.
Democrats on the panel repeatedly mentioned that the federal role in education has been rooted in concerns about inequality that span decades.
“Yes, it is a national priority,” said Rep. Robert E. Andrews (D-N.J.). “If groups of children are consistently deprived of an education, we’re going to fix it.”
Democrats offered their own proposal, but it was defeated.
“Since 1965, every reauthorization (of federal education law) has been bipartisan, and this is not,” said Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) “And that makes this difficult.”
The GOP bills also would give school districts greater discretion in spending federal dollars to educate English-language learners, disadvantaged students and others who require additional help.
The bills would do away with “Adequate Yearly Progress,” a major tenet of the current law, which requires states to set achievement goals for students and then measure their performance against those goals.
When Congress passed No Child Left Behind in 2001, it marked a bipartisan effort to hold schools accountable to parents and taxpayers and a federal commitment to attack student achievement gaps.
For the first time, the law required schools to test all children in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school, and report results by subgroups — including race, English learners and students with disabilities — so that it was clear how every student was faring.
The law also required states to set goals for adequate yearly progress, including the expectation that all students tested show proficiency in math and reading by 2014. Schools that fall short year after year face escalating penalties.
Educators and public officials have complained for years that the goals under No Child Left Behind are unrealistic, and they claim an inordinate number of schools are being mislabeled failures as a result.
The Republican bills would do away with adequate yearly progress and instead require states to develop a system for improving low-performing Title I schools while leaving the remedies to localities.
The committee action came as more than two dozen states — including Virginia and Maryland, as well as the District of Columbia — formally asked the Obama administration to exempt them from some of the more onerous requirements of No Child Left Behind. The administration has already issued waivers to 11 states.
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