Test Score Cheating Scandal In Philly

Politicians and the media love to point out these stories about Title 1 schools with huge gains in test scores and say this proves that education reform works.

They did this Rod Paige's Houston Miracle, they did this with Bloomberg's and Klein's Children First reforms, Michelle Rhee's "sweeping" reforms in Washington DC and the reform movement in Atlanta.

But you know, all of those reform miracles, all of the test gains in those cities, were fake - either phonied up by inflation (as happened in NYC) or phonied up by cheating (as happened in Houston, DC and Atlanta.)

Now Philadelphia is the next city to see a test score scandal:

The principal hailed the test-score gains as a "miracle" - evidence that disadvantaged students could overcome enormous challenges to realize their full potential.

In just two years, the 400 seventh and eighth graders at Theodore Roosevelt Middle School in East Germantown had jumped a stunning 52 points in math on a 100-point scale and 51 in reading on the statewide assessment known as the PSSA. The improvement was the best - by a considerable margin - of any comparable school in the School District of Philadelphia.

At a ceremony in August, Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, then-Gov. Ed Rendell, and other luminaries heaped praise on principal Stefanie Ressler for turning around Roosevelt - deemed persistently dangerous by the state, with nearly nine of 10 students living in poverty and 25 percent needing special-education services.

But a group of Roosevelt teachers told The Inquirer that they believed the rise in scores had been achieved in part through cheating.

Several said they had witnessed apparent breaches in test security - from answers written on a blackboard to senior staff's encouraging teachers to drill certain concepts they knew appeared on the exam. One teacher reported seeing students, with test booklets and answer sheets out, all engaged in conversation with the principal.

Ressler, a veteran educator who has also been praised by district leaders for reducing violence at the school, did not respond to multiple requests for comment beginning Friday morning, and district spokeswoman Shana Kemp declined to answer specific questions about possible test breaches. "The district has a very robust test-monitoring system in place," she said.

Allegations of testing irregularities at Roosevelt have been reported to the state, according to the teachers, who said the complaint had triggered a district investigation that will begin as early as this week. A spokesman for the state Department of Education declined to confirm or deny an investigation, but said complaints were "taken seriously."

In addition to interviews with Roosevelt teachers, an Inquirer analysis of the school's data revealed a number of discrepancies between the PSSA results and other measurements of student performance, including report cards and "benchmark" tests given in district schools every six weeks.

For example, 66 percent of the school's seventh graders read below grade level in the 2009-10 school year, according to school records, but 73 percent were proficient or advanced on PSSA reading tests. Eight students tested advanced in reading on the PSSA but were on a third- or fourth-grade reading level according to a test administered at the school.

Other Inquirer findings include:

Roosevelt's scores in reading and math were far below district and state averages as recently as two years ago. Now they easily beat the district average and exceed the statewide average.

Roosevelt students taking the eighth-grade math test during the last five years made enormous gains, from 14 percent passing to 76 percent. Much of that was in the last two years. Reading scores also soared the last two years, to 83 percent from 28 percent.

The school's performance on state science and writing tests - which, unlike reading and math tests, do not trigger sanctions for poor performance - was abysmal, and out of sync with reading and math results. On the 2010 science exam, for instance, just 4 percent of eighth graders passed; on writing, the figure was 23 percent. Those numbers significantly lagged district and state averages.

Roosevelt report-card grades and state test scores often do not match up. Among 201 middle and high schools, it has the biggest discrepancy between grades and state test scores, according to an Inquirer analysis of the district's data.

Briefed about the Roosevelt data and teachers' accounts, Gregory J. Cizek, professor of educational measurement and evaluation at the University of North Carolina, said the school's scores were questionable.

"You've got multiple independent sources of information," Cizek said. "To me, the conclusion is their scores aren't credible."

Allegations of cheating on state exams are not new, and The Inquirer also received information about a breach in test security at FitzSimons High in North Philadelphia, suggesting a broader problem. Elsewhere, districts in Atlanta and Washington have investigated suspected widespread test improprieties recently. And an 2006 Inquirer investigation revealed cheating in the Camden school system.

To be sure, Cizek said, "miracles do happen." But, he said, it's unusual that large numbers of students at a single school have such dramatic improvement.

"These kids should be retested under state-monitored conditions to confirm the validity of their scores," Cizek said.

How could scores that go from 14% proficient to 76% proficient on a test that triggers state sanctions for low grades but abysmal scores on other tests that do not trigger state sanctions for low grades NOT raise red flags with people in power?

How did this school become the model of reform and progress when even a novice educator could look at those kinds of scores and say, "Uh, something's fishy..."?

The truth is, the corporate education reform movement has failed - whether it's the charter schools movement (which STILL does not educate the same kinds of students as traditional public schools and STILL doesn't outperform those schools), merit pay (which has been shown ineffective in the Vanderbilt study), high stakes testing (which promotes cheating and grade inflation, but no improvement in education), online instruction, or a host of other myriad reforms that the corporate pols, corporate media and corporate reformers love to promote, they have ALL failed to do what they are supposed to do.

And that is, help students to become better educated and help schools handle all the problems that they are having to deal with these days.

Unfortunately, I have a feeling that when Obama gets his NCLB redo through, we're going to get one last wave of test score mania, merit pay insanity, and charter school hysteria, one last wave of teacher demonization and school closure craziness before a lot of people in this country say "Hey, NONE of this stuff is working! Maybe the problem isn't schools and teachers, maybe the problem is the reform movement itself!"

The evidence is there for all to see - the preponderance of cheating scandals in so many of the cities that have seen "reform" shows just how phonied up and fake the reform movement results are.