- D.C. Council bill would make cheating on standardized tests illegal
- Why U.S. schools are better than we think
- New York Times editors get it right on charters [Imagine Southeast PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
Emma Brown
February 5, 2013
Cheating on standardized tests in the District would be illegal under a bill introduced in the D.C. Council, and a teacher or principal found guilty of violating the law would lose his professional license and face a fine of thousands of dollars.
The measure — which council member David A. Catania (I-At Large) and colleagues Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3) and Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) introduced Tuesday — comes in response to persistent allegations that cheating led to inflated scores in some D.C. public schools between 2008 and 2010.
“District parents deserve a testing system where cheating does not occur and, more importantly, where cheating cannot occur,” Catania said. “And our educators deserve to have student gains beyond dispute or reproach.”
Eight other council members signed on as co-sponsors, and a spokesman said Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) supports the measure.
The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) publishes testing guidelines that require the D.C. Public Schools system and each independent charter school to create a test-security plan and outline sanctions for employees who violate procedures.
The bill introduced Tuesday would for the first time turn those expectations into law. The OSSE would be responsible for enforcement.
OSSE officials said the proposal does not appear to depart significantly from current guidelines. D.C. school system officials said they were still reviewing the legislation and declined to comment.
The D.C. Public Charter School Board is not opposed to the bill, spokeswoman Audrey Williams said. The charter board monitors security protocols at some schools, and if the bill transfers that responsibility to the OSSE, “we have no problem with that,” Williams wrote in an e-mail.
Suspicions of widespread cheating in D.C. schools have simmered since 2011, when USA Today published an investigation showing that more than 100 schools had an unusually high number of wrong-to-right erasures on student answer sheets. Such erasures, experts have said, could indicate cheating.
Several investigations followed, including by D.C. Inspector General Charles Willoughby and the U.S. Education Department’s Office of the Inspector General. Those probes found isolated instances of cheating but cleared the school system of widespread wrongdoing.
Skeptics have continued to question whether the investigations were thorough enough to find the truth. Questions intensified last month after news that a former principal had filed a federal whistleblower complaint alleging “systemic” cheating at her school, Noyes Elementary.
The principal, Adell Cothorne, also alleged on national television that she witnessed suspicious behavior among teachers at Noyes. When she tightened test security out of concern about cheating, the school’s test scores fell by more than 25 percentage points.
The revelations led to calls for the council to investigate further. Catania, chairman of the council’s Education Committee, said in an interview that he doesn’t have the staff or resources to replicate the work of previous investigators and that he would rather concentrate on ensuring that future tests are secure.
The bill specifies behaviors that would be illegal, including changing students’ answers, looking at test questions before the test is administered, coaching students toward correct answers, possessing test materials outside of specified testing times and leaving secure test materials unattended.
Violators would not be subject to criminal charges but to administrative sanctions that the OSSE would impose. Such sanctions could include a fine of up to $10,000 for each violation, having to pay any costs the city incurs while dealing with the security breach, and revocation or suspension of an employee’s professional credentials.
At least 10 states have test-integrity laws on the books, Catania said. Among them is Virginia, where teachers caught violating test-security measures can lose their licenses or be fined.
The D.C. measure was referred to the Education Committee, as were two other school-related bills introduced Tuesday.
Wading into the battle over Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s plan to close 15 city schools, Barry introduced a bill to give the council say over school closures. He said the measure would “provide for more checks and balances” on the chancellor and mayor, who have unilateral authority to close schools.
It’s not clear that Barry’s colleagues want to enter the school-closure fray. Only one member — Yvette M. Alexander (D-Ward 7), who has called for a moratorium on closures in her ward — joined as a co-sponsor.
Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) introduced a bill that would require all D.C. public schools to employ a full-time librarian as well as art, music and physical education teachers.
“We are spending far too much money to not have these available to our children,” said Evans, who was joined by seven co-sponsors.
A similar bill Evans proposed last year went nowhere.
A spokeswoman for the school system said officials were reviewing both bills and could not comment.
The Washington Post
Jay Matthews
February 6, 2013
Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein, research associates at the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, have no respect for American cultural and political tradition. Their latest paper challenges one of our most cherished beliefs, that foreigners are threatening our future by producing much better schools.
People like me sometimes exploit this fear of global inferiority. To grab reader attention, I have pointed out, as U.S. business leaders and political candidates do, how far behind parts of Europe and Asia our students are in international tests. Carnoy, also a Stanford Graduate School of Education professor, and Rothstein undermine that argument by examining the test databases and discovering that when student results are broken down by social class, our schools are doing comparatively better than we thought.
Because, in every country, “students at the bottom of the social class distribution perform worse than students higher in that distribution, U.S. average performance appears to be relatively low partly because we have so many more test takers from the bottom of the social class distribution,” they write in their report, titled “What do international tests really show about U.S. student performance?”
They say “if U.S. adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar to the distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently compared, average reading scores in the United States would be higher than average reading scores in the similar post-industrial countries we examined (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), and average math scores in the United States would be about the same as average math scores in similar post-industrial countries.”
Having a higher proportion of poor people is nothing to brag about. Our efforts to get more people into better jobs have not been as effective as we would like. But that difference means our lower scores should not be blamed so much on our schools.
Low-income children around the world perform worse than high- and middle-income children on average in reading and math. And, if you look closely, Carnoy and Rothstein say, you see our poor kids getting better. “The performance of the lowest social class [of] U.S. students has been improving over time,” they write, while the performance of such students in both top-scoring and similar post-industrial countries elsewhere “has been falling.”
The scholars say they also found a mistake in the calculation of U.S. scores in the Program for International Student Assessment test in 2009. Students from the most disadvantaged schools were over-represented in the testing, aggravating the distortion in our average scores caused by our relatively large number of low-income students.
The full report reveals the exhaustion and frustration of Carnoy and Rothstein’s journey into the deep jungles of PISA data. The quick official reactions to these reports, such as U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan calling the 2009 PISA results “disturbing . . . for America,” stick in our minds. The deeper analysis weeks later makes less of an impact. “Analysis of the international database takes time,” the scholars say. The database’s complexity and size is so great that the two scholars so far have been able to analyze only six other countries besides the United States.
Trying to compare one country’s poverty rate with another’s, when the politically influenced measurements often differ, makes their work that much harder. Carnoy and Rothstein decided the best method was to use the data in the report that gives the number of books in the homes of the 15-year-olds who take the PISA. “Children in different countries have similar social class backgrounds if their homes have similar numbers of books,” they say.
By their reckoning, a fairer calculation of the PISA data would raise the United States from 14th to sixth in reading and from 25th to 13th in math. We should do better, but in the meantime, we should not exaggerate our failings as much as we have.
New York Times editors get it right on charters [Imagine Southeast PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
Mark Lerner
February 6, 2013
The editors of the New York Times had an editorial the other day on the subject of the national charter school movement that made some important points. Their conclusions come as a result of findings by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes. The Center for Education Reform is highly critical of the methodology utilized by CREDO to reach its conclusions. But the fundamental issues raised by the Times are still valid.
First, the editors state that poorly performing charter schools should be quickly closed and that in most jurisdictions this is not happening. While I am not an expert at what is taking place across America I have a strong suspicion that this is the case. The experience with charters in D.C. informs my opinion.
While the D.C. Public Charter School Board has been groundbreaking in their oversight of these alternative schools those at the lower end of the academic achievement scale have not been shuttered with sufficient speed. Fortunately, we have the Performance Management Framework. By this time in our history when a school spends more than two years at Tier 3 and is not improving then the revocation process must be started no matter where the institution is in their review period.
It is possible that the PCSB is concerned about the disruption to students such closings would cause. One way to minimize this impact, according to previous PCSB chair Tom Nida, would be for the board to have a pool of existing charters that have been pre-approved for emergency replication. This would be extremely helpful, for example, when it comes to Imagine Southeast, a school about to be closed which has an enrollment of over 600 students. I think this is an extremely fascinating concept that should be developed.
The other point made by the New York Times editors is that only charters with demonstrated high academic (and I would add governance) performance should be permitted to expand and replicate. Here in D.C. we have no issue with this argument as we have been adhering to it for years. However, one caveat that perhaps should be added to the criteria for adding more students is that the school has a plan in place for training future school leaders in the specific program that has led the charter to be successful. In a conversation the other evening Mr. Nida mentioned this training as a crucial element to the future success of our movement. As usual, it is probably extremely prudent to follow his advice.
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