- D.C. test-security discussions focus on current and future school exam policy
- D.C. rolls out new security measures for standardized tests
- Charter Schools' Funding Lags, Study Finds
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
April 18, 2013
Chancellor Kaya Henderson and members of the D.C. Council’s education committee agreed Thursday that no one knows for sure whether D.C. schools’ 2008 test scores were inflated because of cheating. It’s a question that has never been fully investigated, they said at a hearing devoted to examining test security in the city’s schools. It is also a question that appears unlikely to be resolved now. Key council members and Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) have said they do not plan to launch a full-scale investigation into the five-year-old tests. David A. Catania (I-At Large), chairman of the education committee, said the effort would be prohibitively labor-intensive for a council that can better spend its energy improving test security — and schools — in the future. “We may never really know what happened in 2008,” Catania said. Catania has introduced a bill that puts certain test-security protocols into law and would make cheating on D.C. tests — which are used to evaluate teachers and schools — illegal. That bill on Thursday drew support from Gray administration officials.
“We are focused on moving education in the District forward,” Gray spokesman Pedro Ribeiro said. “We’re confident that the systems and policies that we’ve put in place will help ensure the integrity of the test system.” Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) agreed that it makes more sense to focus energy on improving education in a city where too many children are chronically truant and too few read on grade level. But “there is a moral in this story,” Mendelson said, “and that is that while tests are important to measure progress, it’s counterproductive to put too much weight on the tests.”
Questions about cheating in the District have lingered for years and emerged again last week when journalist John Merrow unearthed a 2009 memo indicating that as many as 191 teachers at 70 schools might have been implicated in cheating on tests in 2008, during the tenure of former chancellor Michelle Rhee. Rhee, who offered hefty bonuses to staff members in schools that made big test-score gains, now lobbies states around the country to adopt education policies she implemented in the District. She has said she doesn’t recall receiving the 2009 memo. Henderson said under oath Thursday that she first became aware of that memo in January. The document — prepared by a consultant based on an analysis of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets — was based on incomplete information, she said.
Officials of the Office of the State Superintendent of Education told school officials not to investigate the 2008 scores further because the erasure analysis was inconclusive, Henderson said. Since then, the school system has taken additional steps to tighten security each year, she added, and multiple investigations have found no evidence of systematic cheating. The document has raised questions about whether D.C. officials, including Inspector General Charles J. Willoughby, adequately investigated long-standing suspicions of cheating. Willoughby conducted a probe that found no evidence of widespread cheating between 2009 and 2011. His investigation lasted 17 months and focused on one school, Noyes Elementary, even though Willoughby had a copy of the memo alleging wrongdoing at dozens of schools.
Council Member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5) questioned the inspector general Thursday about why he had limited his investigation to Noyes. “We weren’t going on a fishing expedition,” Willoughby said, explaining that his investigators found no evidence of cheating at other schools while interviewing Noyes teachers, parents and students. “I don’t think anybody expects you to go on a fishing expedition, but I do think folks expect you to conduct a thorough investigation,” McDuffie said. “Your investigation was woefully limited and relied too heavily on people who had an interest in not discovering cheating.”
McDuffie has requested permission to review Willoughby’s investigative file. The council member said in an interview that he does not intend to call for a new investigation, but he wants to ensure that future probes are thorough enough to inspire public confidence. There are still questions about whether city officials are aggressive enough about investigating cheating now. The Office of the State Superintendent of Education released areport last week showing that teachers in 18 classrooms had cheated on 2012 exams, “proof that 99.4 percent [of teachers] are following the rules,” according to a news release. Some said the office’s review was too lax. Classrooms were fully investigated only when they met two of four criteria. That amounted to a 41 classrooms, a tiny fraction of the 2,688 where tests were administered.
The Washington Examiner
By Rachel Baye
April 18, 2013
D.C. teachers will not supervise standardized testing in their own classrooms during this year's testing period in an effort to reduce their chances of tampering with students' answers, DC Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced Thursday. The tests will be sealed, and teachers will have contact with the tests for less time, Henderson told the D.C. Council's Education Committee. Education Committee Chairman David Catania has introduced a bill that would force teachers or administrators caught cheating to lose their teaching credentials and pay up to a $10,000 fine. The measures are among new efforts that city and schools officials are making to stop teachers from cheating or helping students cheat on standardized tests. Cheating has been a persistent problem in the city since at least 2009, shortly after the city's school system began using students' performance on the tests to rate teachers' effectiveness and determine whether they get to keep their jobs.
Last week, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education announced that cheating likely occurred in 18 testing groups -- classrooms or groups of classrooms -- in 11 schools and that those classes would have their 2012 DC Comprehensive Assessment System test scores invalidated. Because the cheating was apparent in less than 1 percent of the testing groups and at 4.5 percent of the District's traditional public and charter schools, DC Public Schools pointed to the data as evidence that cheating is not a widespread problem. That announcement closely followed the release of a 2009 memo from a DCPS-hired consultantsuggesting that cheating may have occurred at more schools than the city has let on. On the heels of these two seemingly conflicting reports, D.C. Council members on Thursday told Henderson, Inspector General Charles Willoughby and the OSSE to do more to find out if cheating is happening and, if it is, put a stop to it.
Both of last week's reports are just the latest in a series of cheating scandals in major cities, from Atlanta to Los Angeles. In August, Willoughby's office announced evidence of cheating at Noyes Education Campus in 2010.
On Thursday, Catania criticized DCPS and the IG's office for making past investigations too narrow to accurately detect the scope of the problem. He suggested the school system test classrooms at random for signs of cheating. "We narrow ourselves into the conclusion that we don't have a problem," he said. "There is a weakness in this system that must be ferreted out and strengthened."
Education Week
By Katie Ash
April 17, 2013
Charter school students receive about $4,000 less in per-pupil funding than their regular public school peers according to an analysis of five regions across the U.S., a new report has found.
The report, conducted by the University of Arkansas and funded by the Walton Family Foundation, compared per-pupil funding rates between charter and regular public schools in Denver, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Newark, and the District of Columbia from 2007-2011. The Walton Family Foundation has been a major backer of school-choice, including charters and private school vouchers. (The Walton Family Foundation also supports coverage of parent empowerment issues at Education Week.)
Over the past four years, the funding gap between the two types of schools narrowed in the District of Columbia and Newark but increased in Denver, Los Angeles, and Milwaukee.
As of 2011, the amount of per-pupil funding for charter schools in the five regions are as follows:
Denver—$11,139; $2,684 less than regular public schools in the area
Los Angeles—$8,780; $4,666 less than regular public schools in the area
Milwaukee—$10,298; $4,720 less than regular public schools in the area
Newark—$15,973; $10,214 less than regular public schools in the area
District of Columbia—$16,361; $12,784 less than regular public schools in the area
The research evaluates federal, state, local, and non-public revenue for charter schools, and is a precursor to a larger study that will analyze funding trends for charter schools in 30 states and the District of Columbia, to be released in the spring of 2014.The study produced similar findings to an analysis published by Ball State University in 2010 which analyzed charter school funding rates in 24 states and the District of Columbia and found thatcharter school students received, on average, 19.2 percent (or $2,247) less per-pupil funding than students in regular public schools. Many of the same researchers that conducted the Ball State University study participated in the University of Arkansas research. The research will appear in the September issue of The Journal of School Choice.
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