- D.C. charter board proposes closing Imagine Southeast for poor performance [Imagine Southeast PCS mentioned]
- D.C Public Charter School Board about to close Imagine Southeast [Imagine Southeast PCS mentioned]
- Principal slammed for cheating
- Examiner Local Editorial: Telltale signs of a cover-up at DCPS
D.C. charter board proposes closing Imagine Southeast for poor performance [Imagine Southeast PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
January 9, 2013
The D.C. Public Charter School Board is proposing to shutter a Ward 8 school for poor performance and will vote on the measure Thursday night.
Imagine Southeast, which serves more than 500 elementary and middle-school students, opened in 2008 and has since failed to meet four of the five goals laid out in its charter agreement, according to the PCSB.
Among the problems is a record of non-compliance with several laws and “dismally low” academic achievement, according to the PCSB.
The board reviews schools’ performance every five years and can close any school that fails to meet agreed-upon expectations or breaks laws.
“A school cannot simply make a promise to educate kids well and not deliver,” PCSB spokeswoman Audrey Williams wrote in an e-mail.
Leaders of Imagine Southeast protest that they are well aware of the need for improvement and have already begun making changes. They said they were shocked to learn that the school is in danger of closing — and deserve more time to show progress.
“We feel a little bit like the carpet’s being pulled out from under us in the middle of what’s going to take a little more time,” said Matt Engel, vice chairman of Imagine Southeast’s board.
If the PCSB votes to revoke Imagine’s charter, the school would close at the end of this school year. Families would have the aid of an enrollment specialist dedicated to helping them find a new school, Williams said.
Attendance rates at Imagine are among the lowest in Ward 8, and re-enrollment rates never rose above 70 percent — a sign, according to the charter board, that parents are not satisfied with the school.
While students’ reading performance at Imagine Southeast has improved in the last two years, the proficiency rate on standardized tests is far below the city average, at 36 percent, according to the revocation proposal.
The school’s math proficiency rate, 33 percent, is also lower than the city average.
The PCSB said that the school has broken several laws over the past five years, including establishing a discipline policy that didn’t provide due process for students and using an application form that asked “for information that was not allowable.” Charter schools must give equal-admission opportunity to all applicants and cannot screen out students with disabilities or other special needs.
Leaders of Imagine Southeast said they could not immediately comment on those allegations.
Imagine Southeast is part of a network of schools operated by Arlington-based Imagine Schools Inc., a for-profit company that operates about 70 schools in 12 states and the District, according to its Web site.
In Missouri, state officials last year closed six Imagine charter schools in St. Louis, citing academic failure and financial problems. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had written extensively about complicated real estate deals that left the city’s Imagine schools spending a disproportionately high amount on rent, leaving little for textbooks and other instructional necessities.
Another Imagine school, in St. Petersburg, Fla., also came close to being shuttered for poor performance, but was saved by parents’ pleas for a chance to improve. The school rated an “F” on Florida’s school report card.
A spokeswoman for Imagine Schools did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
D.C Public Charter School Board about to close Imagine Southeast [Imagine Southeast PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
January 10, 2013
On the agenda for the Public Charter School Board's January 10th meeting is to consider beginning the revocation process for Imagine Southeast PCS. This Performance Management Framework Tier 2 school, according to the Washington Post's Emma Brown, has over 500 elementary and middle school students. The reporter states that the charter has not been able to satisfy four out of five goals laid out in its charter.
Imagine Southeast says it is surprised by the move. “We feel a little bit like the carpet’s being pulled out from under us in the middle of what’s going to take a little more time,” Ms. Brown quotes the vice chairman of Imagine Southeast's board Matt Engel as saying in response. The charter has been in operation since 2008.
Perhaps the school was caught a little off guard. There are seven Tier 3 elementary and middle schools according to this year's PMF results and two Tier 3 high schools. You have to wonder why these facilities were not targeted first for closure. However, in fairness I need to point out that Imagine Southeast just barely made the Tier 2 category with a score of 35.6 percent. The floor of this category is 35 percent. The charter's rating was almost identical last year.
I do think it is important for the PCSB to offer criteria as to why this school was picked for closure compared to the ones on the Tier 3 list. This body should also move quickly to shutter these other facilities.
Principal slammed for cheating
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
January 9, 2013
If you were waiting as I was for a firsthand account of test tampering at a D.C. public school, it came this week. A 42-year-old former principal says she was reduced to tears and hounded out of her job after she reported cheating at her Northeast Washington campus.
Adell Cothorne was hired in 2010 by then-D.C. schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee to run the Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus. She had been an administrator in Baltimore and Montgomery counties. She was warmly welcomed by Wayne Ryan, the award-winning principal she replaced at Noyes. He was promoted to instructional superintendent and became her boss.
Cothorne was thrilled to land the Noyes job. Its test scores were among the best in the District, and it had been named a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence by the U.S. Education Department. But, just weeks into the school year, she couldn’t square those high test scores with what she says she saw in classrooms: mediocre teaching and faltering student performance. She began to worry that the scores were fraudulent.
On Nov. 3, 2010, just hours after her students took the DC-BAS test, a practice exam, she discovered three staffers with pencil erasers poised above test answer sheets, in the midst of what looked to her like changing answers, she told me. That night, she says, she called two D.C. school officials she trusted to report what she had found. She assumed they would report the matter to their boss, then-
acting schools chancellor Kaya Henderson.
Cothorne said she doesn’t know whether Henderson was ever informed. But on Nov. 19, according to Cothorne and documents she filed in federal court, Ryan ordered her to his office and said: “I heard that you don’t respect the legacy that has been built at Noyes.”
Ryan did not respond to requests for comment, and a man who answered a phone listed in his name declined to comment.
Cothorne first told her story to education correspondent John Merrow in a PBS Frontline documentary scheduled to air again Thursday. She also gave a detailed account in a two-hour telephone interview with me and my wife, Linda Mathews, who conceived and edited a March 2011 series in USA Today that revealed widespread wrong-to-right erasures at several D.C. schools, particularly at Noyes.
Cothorne also filed a federal complaint against the D.C. government in May 2011, alleging that the awards Noyes and the school system had won had been obtained fraudulently by faking test scores. That lawsuit, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, was unsealed in December and was publicly reported this week, after the U.S. Education Department and the U.S. Justice Department decided against joining it.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, in a statement, said Cothorne’s lawsuit was based on “fictitious claims.” She said “there is no widespread cheating at DCPS.”
What is most striking about Cothorne’s account, which fits with testing data and previous reports about Ryan’s methods, is that no D.C. official with the power to investigate her complaints ever bothered to interview her about them. In the federal complaint, she identifies Josh Edelman and Hilary Darilek, then both prominent D.C. school officials, as the persons she called on Nov. 3 after accidentally discovering the apparent erasures.
D.C. schools spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz said Edelman and Darilek said they “never heard from Ms. Cothorne about these specific cheating allegations.” They said they were in frequent conversation with her but that she never told them about the erasing incident.
While what happened at Noyes could be seen as a he said, she said incident — and it is certainly possible that Cothorne misinterpreted what she saw — Henderson’s rejection of Cothorne’s account is in tune with her dismissal of other evidence of cheating at Noyes.
The school had 75 percent of its classrooms flagged by the testing company CTB/McGraw-Hill for unusual numbers of wrong-to-right erasures in 2008, followed by 81 percent in 2009 and 80 percent in 2010. At least five Noyes classrooms had wrong-to-right erasure rates of more than 10 per child, while the D.C. average was fewer than two.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill testing expert Gregory Cizek, who worked on the investigation of similar erasures in Atlanta, said only test tampering could produce so many changes from wrong answers to right ones.
At a time when test security was tightened system-wide, Cothorne changed the locks on the Noyes room where answer sheets were kept for tests in April 2011. The result: Scores dropped dramatically. The portion of Noyes students proficient in reading fell from 61 to 32 percent, and in math from 54 to 28 percent.
By the end of the 2010-11 school year, Ryan had left the district. D.C. officials never made clear whether the most highly touted principal in the district was fired or resigned. Despite the decline in scores at Noyes, Cothorne was asked to stay. But, in the summer of 2011, she quit to start a cupcake shop in Ellicott City and recover from what she said was her worst year in education.
No one in power ever explained to her what happened. The subject of cheating was toxic. Cothorne’s next supervisor told her to focus on “moving forward.”
Isn’t anyone in the D.C. government curious about what happened at Noyes, and why? Don’t they want to know why scores so quickly peaked, then immediately plummeted? Perhaps the D.C. Council or a congressional committee can find a way to take testimony from all involved, under oath, and get to the truth.
Cothorne, who wants to return to education, said she still thinks of how much more she could have done if the test scores had accurately reflected her students’ achievement levels, or if headquarters had exposed the lying and cheating she says she saw at Noyes. “The kids did not get the caliber of instruction that they needed” — remedial work, extra tutoring, perhaps counseling, she told me.
Cothorne was trying to protect the students and the system, while it appears the system is just trying to protect itself.
Examiner Local Editorial: Telltale signs of a cover-up at DCPS
The Washington Examiner
January 9, 2013
A PBS documentary that aired Tuesday featuring former DC Public School principal Adell Cothorne raises the specter of a possible cover-up. Cothorne alleges that former Chancellor Michelle Rhee and her former deputy, Kaya Henderson. ignored evidence of widespread cheating on high-stakes standardized tests in order to fraudulently collect millions of dollars in federal funding and provide teachers and administrators with $1.5 million in financial incentives.
A 2011 investigative series by USA Today first reported that testing firm CTB/McGraw-Hill found abnormally high levels of wrong-to-right erasures on tests administered to DCPS students between 2008 and 2010. But investigators from the D.C. Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Department of Education and a private consulting firm all assured the public that any cheating was isolated and there was nothing to worry about.
But details revealed on "Frontline" and in Cothorne's previously sealed federal complaint about the inadequacy of those investigations cast new doubt on their conclusions.
In 2006, only 24 percent of students at Noyes Education Campus were proficient in reading and only 10 percent mastered grade-level math. By 2009, "84 percent of Noyes students were proficient in reading and 63 percent in math," earning the staff big bonuses and a dinner at Ruth's Chris Steak House and the school a coveted designation as a Blue Ribbon School. That same year, 80 percent of Noyes' classrooms were tagged for abnormal erasure rates.
Shortly after Cothorne was named principal, guidance counselor John Edwards was assigned to investigate the erasure scandal, but never produced a report. On "Frontline," Cothorne said she personally observed staff members changing test answers in Edwards' office on Nov. 3, 2010. One reportedly told her: "I can't believe a kid drew a spider on his test and I have to erase it." She reported the incident to the central office, but nobody ever followed up by interviewing her. The following spring, after test security was beefed up, scores at Noyes plummeted 25 points.
One agent from Inspector General Charles Willoughby's office assigned to conduct the 17-month probe admitted it was limited to Noyes because Henderson did not provide any more "investigative leads to pursue," and the IG's office "believed news coverage of the scandal would limit future cheating." So, after erecting a firewall around Noyes, further evidence of test tampering at the dozens of other schools flagged by McGraw-Hill was never found because nobody ever bothered to look for it.