Internal Report Of Success Acadmies Finds Cheating On Tests, Morale In The Toilet

I vowed not to do any education stories anymore unless they were linked to the corruption scandals facing de Blasio and Cuomo, but this one is too good to pass up:

Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz did not approve of the finding — made by an “ethnographer” she hired to study her rapidly expanding charter school network — that some teachers at the high-performing network might be responding to the enormous pressure placed on them by cheating.

So Moskowitz, Success's combative founder, deployed senior managers to inform the staffer, Roy Germano, that he was banned from visiting schools for the remainder of the year. Moskowitz disparaged Germano to other employees, according to a memo written by Germano in July 2015 and obtained by POLITICO New York, and he was told to halt his research projects immediately.

Germano was fired last August, approximately a month after the report was completed, and is now a research scholar at New York University.

Germano’s reports and memo, along with a trove of other documents obtained by POLITICO — a separately commissioned internal draft risk assessment report, a compilation of exit interviews, and internal Success staffing records, among other documents — paint a picture of a growing enterprise facing serious institutional strain in the form of low staff morale, unusually high turnover, and the kind of stress that could drive teachers to exaggerate their students’ progress.

“It seems possible if not likely that some teacher cheating is occurring at Success on both internal assessments and state exams,” reads the July report by Germano, which was titled “Research Proposal: An Investigation into Possible Teacher Cheating.”

While Germano did not conclusively prove that teachers were cheating, he reports multiple incidents of Success staffers informing him that Success teachers may have prepared students for specific questions on internal tests, allowed students to copy answers from each other, scored their own students higher than students in other classes, and pointed to incorrect answers on exams and warned students to rethink their answers.

He compared Success’s data-driven, high-stakes environment to the state of the Atlanta public school system when a widespread cheating scandal was uncovered there. Germano also suggested that Success introduce measures to spot check and prevent cheating, including regular reviews of exam scoring, interviews with teachers, a statistical analysis to track how often students changed incorrect answers to correct ones, and anonymous reporting channels.

“The credibility of the organization could be greatly undermined if a third party were to detect cheating among our teachers and leaders before we detected and began dealing with it ourselves,” Germano wrote. In that same report, Germano wrote, “there are no rewards at Success for ethical teachers who try their best and fail.”

Moskowitz did not react well to the report's findings, reportedly disparaging Germano, then firing him and banning him from Success.

Many of us have long questioned Success Academies test scores, especially on tests they grade themselves.

This report calls for much more scrutiny into the Success test score "miracle".

You can bet the powers that be won't like that because Moskowitz is the poster child for the "No Excuses!" charter sector.

As with Michelle Rhee and the cheating scandal that enveloped her in D.C., there will be powerful people who look to defend Moskowitz both in and out of public to make sure her scores never get the scrutiny they deserve.

That's why it's up to the press to dig into this story and talk to the teachers and staff, both current and former, to get to the bottom of the story.

The NY Post Gins Up The Great Teacher Scandal Of 2015

The following is a guest post by Harris Lirtzman, former Director of Risk Management for the New York City Retirement Systems in the NYC Comptroller's Office from 1996-2002 and former Deputy State Comptroller for Administration from 2003-2007.

The NY Post is having a case of the vapors bad by even Postian standards (here, here and here). Chalkbeat is in a tizzy. The only reason that the Daily News isn’t apoplectic is that the Post “owns” the story about the young woman who claims to have earned a high school degree without having done anything to “deserve” it. Carmen Farina must be summarily thrown to the wolves or, better yet, into the nearest volcano, for presiding over the scandalous practices in her very own schools that led teachers and administrators to begin “cheating” and “failing” their students. Thanks to the Post we even know the very minute when all this nefarious stuff began: 12:00:01 a.m., January 1, 2014—the millisecond after a Mr. William de Blasio became mayor of New York City and took control of the City’s school system.

We all have been told that education reformistas don’t do anything unless it is “data driven” and informed by “evidence-based practice.” Sadly, the media outlets that reformistas use to make their case to the public about the failures of public education, the “monopoly power” of teachers unions and the awfulness of bad, vampire teachers (“bad” because they belong to unions and “vampires” because they get health care and pensions) prefer to panic the public by telling stories using the old propaganda technique of the “Big Lie.” The “Big Lie” is something so astoundingly audacious that people believe it when they would dismiss a smaller lie as foolishness. We teachers, trained to value “facts” and “critical thinking,” try to refute reformista propaganda with evidence and reason and are surprised when the “Big Lie” sweeps away everything that stands before it. Our best bloggers are doing what they can but reformista propaganda is well-funded and tenacious. Public school teachers need to find an effective way to tell a counter-narrative that resonates with the public but which is true to our professional and personal values.

We all have “stories” to tell and it is only by weaving them together persuasively into a counter-narrative that we have any hope of countering the flood of “Big Lie” propaganda that washes over us each day. Here is my “story,” simply one of thousands that we can frame fully and quickly if we are going to defend public education and protect our profession.

I was a special education teacher in a high school in the Bronx from 2009-2012. During my tenure "conversation" with my principal in December 2011, which was an irregular one to say he least, I expected to be denied tenure because I had been raising serious questions within my school about widespread violations of student IEPs. I’m certain that my advocacy on behalf of my students was what precipitated the “tenure conversation” five months before anyone else in my school had the “conversation” that year but here’s what I was actually told:

Principal Grismaldy Laboy: "Mr. Lirtzman, your passing rates are low and are not consistent with the memo that I sent around to teachers last year that our school would have a 70% pass rate for each class."

Untenured Teacher Harris Lirtzman: "I have only failed two students for academic reasons in the last year. I have failed students who never attended my class. If a student came to class, made any reasonable effort to do the work and turned in anything that indicated some grasp of the basic elements of algebra, the student got at least a 65. Any student I failed was for attendance reasons."

Principal Laboy: "I don't, and the DOE doesn't, distinguish between absentee and academic failures."

Untenured Teacher Harris Lirtzman: "You are aware that I have a first period integrated algebra class. Several students never attended my class after the first week or appeared erratically during the term. They were "Long Term Absent." I worked closely with the attendance teacher here to get the kids to school on time. What else should I have done? Stand in front of their homes at 6:00 every morning and kidnap them?”

Principal Laboy: "Mr. Lirtzman, if you'd been able to make your classes more engaging they would have come."

Of course, conversations like this have been going on all around the City for the last ten years. My chapter leader sent the “grade quota” memo the principal distributed to central UFT and the district
superintendent as evidence for teacher coercion by administration to pass LTA students and, well, just about any student. Nothing. Not a surprise.

Now I can think of many reasons why Carmen Farina should resign—primarily her abject failure to sweep Tweed clean of the nest of reformistas filling up every corner of the place. But because of her willingness to allow some teachers in some cases to use multiple measures to evaluate their students? Because administrators began to press teachers to pass students without regard to attendance or academic performance only eighteen months ago? I think not.

In a conversation I had this morning with Geoff Decker, the reporter at Chalkbeat writing the stories about Farina and the “cheating scandal,” he asked me whether I thought Farina was “lowering the stakes” in the schools. I tried to explain to him that Farina hasn’t lowered the stakes in City schools because she can't lower the stakes in City schools even if she wanted to: the State sets teacher and principal evaluation standards tied to student test scores and the Renewal and other schools on the State "struggling" school list all use graduation rates, credit accumulation and other accountability measures to assess performance.

The high stakes connected with reformista accountability—receivership, teacher reapplication to struggling schools and the specter of being dumped into the ATR, administrators with feudal power over professional staff—have resulted in jumped up graduation rates and student test scores for the last decade and forced credit-recovery miracles and minimum passing rates stipulated in contractually illegal quotas onto reluctant teachers since Mayor Bloomberg obtained control over the Department of Education.

When reformistas put teachers’ careers on the line but don't hold administrators accountable for the incentive structures they impose inside their own schools the result is what the Post thinks it “discovered” this week. Tweed spent ten years trying to convince the State that "everything's OK here" because Mayor Bloomberg needed to validate mayoral control. Tweed spent the last eighteen months trying to convince Governor Cuomo and the State Senate that “everything’s OK here” because Mayor de Blasio needed to keep them from taking away mayor control entirely.

At least Chancellor Farina has set up a “task force” to investigate the nonsense that passes for accountability in our schools—though Farina might have written one more “Chancellor’s Regulation” giving Richard Condon and his crew of investigators at OSI even more authority for all the good a task force will do. No one demanded a "task force" at any time during the twelve years that Michael Bloomberg controlled the schools because it served no reformista purpose to do so. My friend, James Eterno, has been calling for a "truth commission" which would expose the institutional corruption and fraud that has infested reformista accountability measures in the City since 2002. Don’t expect to have the “facts” about the Bloomberg administration’s management of the schools revealed any more honestly than the “facts” are being told now about the de Blasio administration’s management of the schools.

Reformista media will continue to tell the “Big Lie” in all its forms to the public. We teachers will try to refute the “Big Lie” with facts and counter-arguments. The audacity and power of the “Big Lie” is a ferocious thing to behold. We must tell ourselves and the public the truth and we must tell the public our stories.

But we always need to understand that our reformista adversaries do and say the things they want to do and say because they can—evidence, facts, truth, fairness and data be damned. Mayoral control of the schools was blissfully wonderful for the NY Post for twelve years. Mayoral control of the schools became a satanic plot that allowed New York City teachers to stop educating their students on January 1, 2014. It is useful for our adversaries to make it so.

The “Big Lie” is powerful and reformistas will continue to use the “Big Lie” against us until we teachers can create a story—a deep and coherent counter-narrative—that the public is willing and able to hear. I don’t yet know how we do that but I do know that if we don’t do it quickly we will become spectators spouting “facts” that no one wants to hear while our schools and our profession are swept away by the “Big Lie” before our very eyes.

NY Post Runs Damaging Stories On Carmen Farina, NYCDOE, As Part Of "Massive Agenda" To Destroy De Blasio

This is Bob Hardt, the NY 1 Political Director, writing about the NY Post's jive coverage of crime stories in New York City, but it could just as well be about their jive coverage of the cheating scandals at the NYCDOE:

There was an alarming spate of shootings over the weekend and one New York City tabloid quickly does what it does best:  pointing its finger – and I'm not saying which one – straight in Mayor de Blasio's direction.

The New York Post rang its alarm bell yesterday with this crime story that quickly veered into the paper's political playbook: "Brooklyn residents said Sunday that they fear the return of the bad old days of 'Crooklyn' — and placed the blame squarely on Mayor Bill de Blasio — after a bloody weekend in which at least 19 people were shot in the borough."

As a former reporter for the paper where I proudly worked for nine years, it's not hard to smell a rat somewhere high up in the Post's production line. This story could have been written before any reporter was sent out to find the quotes that would damn City Hall back to Dinkinsville.

While everyone should be concerned and worried over a weekend of violence, it's also important to actually look at some numbers provided by City Hall. As of yesterday, there were five fewer shooting incidents in the city than in 2014 and there have been seven more additional shooting victims than last year. More alarmingly, homicides are up by ten percent but the numbers are still lower than they were for almost any year in the Bloomberg administration.

But perception and reality have been divided by a blurry line for the tabloid's City Hall coverage for some time now – dating back to the paper's slanted coverage of the mayoral race in 2013.

And witness the newspaper's recent obsession with a homeless man who has been wandering the streets and urinating in public for more than a decade – dating far back into Michael Bloomberg's administration.

None of this would matter if the paper was on its angry little island – but a screaming front-page headline in the Post still has influence on some radio and TV stations. And it still pressures City Hall to jump – from releasing crime statistics yesterday to having the mayor quietly visit Tompkins Square Park after the Post made it sound like it's reverted back to the bad old anarchic days of the 1980's.

Clearly, the de Blasio administration has plenty of work to do and some of the work it has already done has been far from perfect. But as journalists, it's also important to try to focus on things fairly and objectively without putting your finger on the scale. In the Post's case, it's more than a finger. It's a massive agenda.

The massive agenda the Post has against de Blasio is not only playing out in crime and quality-of-life stories, it's playing out in education stories too.

The Posties would have New Yorkers believe there is a systemic cheating scandal going on in the New York City school system that was ushered in by Chancellor Carmen Farina, that it is a "growing trend" and is only being exposed because the intrepid reporters at the Post are on the case.

As I posted yesterday, the truth is cheating has being going on for years in the NYCDOE, long before Carmen Farina became chancellor, and if anything was more prevalent during the Bloomberg Years when there was untold pressure for schools to improve their statistics and be shut down.

There were cheating scandals in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 - many reported by the NY Post, btw - and the scandal of Chancellor Klein's credit recovery scam that allowed schools to give students semester credits for watching movies or reading comic books.

Limits were placed on credit recovery programs in 2012, after Klein was gone, but the Bryant scandal is a vestige of the old Bloomberg/Klein credit recovery program -  they were the first to hand out semester credits for minimal work in order to juke the overall stats.

How cheating has suddenly becoming a "growing trend" (as somebody who didn't know better and was buying the Post coverage put it on Twitter yesterday) when it's been around since the Bloomberg Years is beyond me - but that's how it's being framed in the Post.

And just as the crime stories are full of hyperbolic language meant to scare the city into electing a new mayor (crime stats are done across the board and as, Hardt noted in his NY1 piece, the homicide rate, while up, is still lower than almost any year during the Bloomberg administration) and the quality-of-life stories are meant to make people think the social fabric of the city is unraveling (as Hardt notes, the Post is using a guy who's been urinating in the streets since the Bloomberg Years as the emblem for what's wrong with "De Blasio's New York"), they're using the cheating stories at Bryant and Dewey High Schools to smear Farina and de Blasio as cheaters.

If the Post wants to do some intrepid reporting, they ought to go back to the Bloomberg/Klein Years and dig into some of the statistics to see how they got so good - how the test scores rose so high (they were inflated), how the grad rates rose so high (credit recovery, cheating.)

But of course Rupert Murdoch does not have a massive agenda to destroy his fellow oligarch and media mogul Michael Bloomberg, so the Posties never tied the cheating incidents under Bloomberg to a larger narrative of "NYC Unraveling" as they do now with the cheating incidents under de Blasio, and they'll never go back and look at the old scandals to show how bad things were in the Bloomberg Years.

The whole thing is jive and it needs to be called out as such, as Bob Hardt did in his NY1 piece about the Post coverage of the crime stats.

At Gotham Schools, one teacher puts the whole cheating scandal into perspective by noting that there's less incentive to cheat in the de Blasio Years than during the Bloomberg Years:

Michael Dowd, a social studies teacher at Midwood High School, said schools under Fariña feel less frenzied to show gains, reducing the worries that can fuel grade inflation and inappropriate credit-recovery schemes. The city has removed two of the big sources of pressure, he said: “The closure threat — coming from the city, anyway — and the progress reports, which reward you for credit accumulation.”

That's exactly right.

Alas, New Yorkers will never know that if they're only reading the Post or getting radio/TV news as influenced by the Post coverage.

Instead they'll think the cheating just started and was fanned by Farina and de Blasio.

Grade Fixing, Cheating Took Place Under Bloomberg Too

I'm not out to defend the grade fixing at Bryant High School, but I am pointing out the double standards with which the NY Post (the newspaper that reported the sandal) and Albany politicians treat Mayor de Blasio compared to Mayor Bloomberg when it comes to the allegations.

Today the Post reports that two Assembly members - Simcha Felder and Ed Ra - say the grade fixing at Bryant will be the death knell for de Blasio's control of NYC schools:

State Sen. Simcha Felder (D-Brooklyn), who leads a committee with oversight of city schools, has already said de Blasio won’t get an extension without appearing before his panel for a grilling in Albany.

Felder didn’t return requests for comment Monday following Mejia’s explosive exposé and her teacher’s admission she felt pressured to pass her.

But Assemblyman Edward Ra (R-Nassau County) wasn’t shy with his condemnation of de Blasio.

“This is the type of thing the Legislature is going to get into when we get into the next session and next June when mayoral control comes up for renewal,” he said.

Ra added the scandal “is likely to come up even before mayoral control, as we go through the budget” and de Blasio and Fariña appear in Albany to lobby for state funding.

“It’s a clear question that’s going to be asked: What’s going on in the system, from the chancellor on up to the Mayor’s Office?” Ra said, calling Mejia’s diploma “a symptom of a lot of what’s going on in education the last few years.”

Since Ra is the one quoted in the article, let me ask him, where was he during the Bloomberg Years for these grade fixing scandals?

Take this one at Lehman in 2009:

Teachers are accusing a Bronx high school principal hired with a $25,000 bonus to improve the school’s academics of instead transforming the school into a “diploma mill.”

Transcripts given to GothamSchools by current and former teachers show that in the last year, dozens of students at Herbert Lehman High School have been given credit for courses they failed or never took.

In some instances, a student failed a class, passed the Regents exam by a slim margin, and then had his failing grade overturned. In others, students were given two credits for a class they passed once, or for classes that never appeared on their schedules.

Changing students’ grades is commonplace in the city’s schools and is often done by principals and teachers for legitimate reasons. In some cases, students are given credit recovery, meaning they complete a project, make up work, or re-take part of a class in order to get a passing grade. Other times, students who are on the cusp of passing a class can receive a boost from a Regents exam they passed by a substantial margin.

But teachers said that at Lehman, students are getting credit without doing any work. Dozens of students have had their failing grades overturned without their teachers’ knowledge.

Or this one from 2010:

A Queens high-school principal is under investigation for allegedly granting students more than 1,000 extra credits for phantom classes — and then deleting all records of his actions.

The city Department of Education called for the probe a day after The Post reported that Jamaica HS Principal Walter Acham gave foreign students up to 10 extra credits each for classes purportedly taken in their native countries.

His motive? To improve promotion and graduation rates, said staffers, adding that the credits were given “to every kid who had a foreign last name.”

The DOE at first denied any wrongdoing but “took a closer look at the school’s data” after The Post’s report, said a spokesman.

It found that the school had recently erased some 1,100 credits to about 150 students for 606 “foreign transfer courses.”

Jamaica HS’s progress-report score then fell from 46.4 to 45 — which equals a “D.”

Staffers said Acham’s credit scheme was conducted with assistant principal Denyse Prendergast, a DOE liaison assigned to assist the struggling school, which serves a large number of students learning English.

Some experts blame such shenanigans on DOE pressure to boost data. Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters said, “I’m sure it’s happening throughout the city, but teachers are too scared to speak out because they don’t want to see their schools closed down.”

Or this one from 2011:

Four city high schools have been under investigation since as far back as January 2010 for alleged Regents tampering or scoring inflation that could have fraudulently boosted their graduation rates, The Post has learned.

At least one of the schools being eyed, Bronx Expeditionary Learning HS, was flagged by a state Education Department review that found staffers had awarded too many points for students’ answers to open-ended questions in the August 2010 integrated-algebra test.

Probes of the other schools — the American Sign Language and English Secondary School in Manhattan, Science Skills Center HS in Brooklyn and Lehman HS in The Bronx — were alluded to in a follow-up audit of Regents scoring practices that was released this week by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

The initial audit had found that many schools “tended to award full credit even when answers were vague, incomplete, inaccurate or insufficiently detailed, and as a result, their scores tended to be higher than the scores awarded” by a team of independent reviewers.

...

The allegations of Regents misdeeds at Lehman HS — which sources said include charges that scores on the January 2009 living-environment, Earth-science, English and chemistry exams were changed after staffers had graded them — are part of a second long-running cheating probe at the embattled Bronx school. 

Or the "credit recovery" practices under Bloomberg/Klein from 2008:

Dennis Bunyan showed up for his first-semester senior English class at Wadleigh Secondary School in Harlem so rarely that, as he put it, “I basically didn’t attend.”

But despite his sustained absence, Mr. Bunyan got the credit he needed to graduate last June by completing just three essay assignments, which he said took about 10 hours.

“I’m grateful for it, but it also just seems kind of, you know, outrageous,” Mr. Bunyan said. “There’s no way three essays can possibly cover a semester of work.”

Mr. Bunyan was able to graduate through what is known as credit recovery — letting those who lack credits make them up by means other than retaking a class or attending traditional summer school.

Although his principal said the makeup assignments were as rigorous as regular course work, Mr. Bunyan’s English teacher, Charan Morris, was so troubled that she boycotted the graduation ceremony, writing in an e-mail message to students that she believed some were “being pushed through the system regardless of whether they have done the work to earn their diploma.”

Throughout the city, an ad hoc system of helping students like Mr. Bunyan over the hump is taking root in public high schools, sometimes over the protests of teachers, who call credit recovery programs a poor substitute for classroom learning and say they ultimately devalue the diploma. In interviews, teachers or principals at more than a dozen schools said the programs ranged from five-day crunch sessions over school breaks, to interactive computer programs culminating in an online test, to independent study packets — and varied in quality.

Top officials with the city’s Education Department say good principals have always found creative ways to help struggling students make up missed work, describing such efforts as a lifeline for students who might otherwise never earn their diplomas. And across the country, school systems confronting abysmal graduation rates are turning to online credit recovery courses, which roughly a third of states have either developed or endorsed in recent years, according to the National Dropout Prevention Center at Clemson University.

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, in a statement, called credit recovery “a legitimate and important strategy for working with high school students.” He said there was “no indication” that the practice “has been abused more in recent years.”

“If credit recovery is not conducted properly, just as with any other required course, we will take appropriate action,” he added. “We do students no favors by giving them credit they haven’t earned.”

But city officials acknowledged that credit recovery programs are neither centrally monitored nor tracked. 

Ah yes - no chance that "credit recovery" will be abused when the DOE wasn't monitoring or tracking the programs, is there?

I don't recall the Assembly calling Bloomberg up to Albany to explain the cheating allegations in the system under his control?

I also don't recall Bloomberg being called up to Albany to defend unmonitored, untracked "credit recovery" programs in city schools that essentially gave students semester credits for watching movies and reading comic books.

Did I miss that performance or did it not happen?

Is de Blasio getting targeted because he's, well, de Blasio, and Bloomberg got the kid glove treatment because he's, well, a billionaire who gave a lot of money to Albany politicians?

This grade fixing scandal is another example of the NY Post going hard and heavy at de Blasio, looking to damage him and take him out from re-election.

They've been doing it with high profile crime stories (claiming there is a "crime wave" in Central Park when there is nothing of the sort) and they're doing it with the grade tampering story.

Cheating took place under Bloomberg too but somehow the newspapers and Albany politicians didn't decide it was Bloomberg's fault, unlike now, with de Blasio.

That's not to excuse the cheating - just to point out the double standard with which the media and politicians treated had when the cheating took place under Bloomberg.

The Convoluted Disciplinary Process For Two New York Teachers Accused Of Cheating On State Tests

Somebody explain to me what's going in this story:

WHITEHALL | Two tenured Whitehall teachers have been suspended with pay, as the district seeks to fire them for their role in causing a security problem with Common Core state tests.

Interim Superintendent William Scott announced Wednesday that the teachers were placed on paid leave effective Tuesday.

The state Education Department has invalidated Whitehall students’ scores for the grades seven and eight English language arts exams because of an unspecified issue with security of the exams.
...

Scott said Thursday he was not able to specify the allegations against the teachers because he was not involved in the investigation. He does not believe any disciplinary actions will be brought against other employees, he said, unless other allegations are brought up during this process.

Whitehall will continue to pay the salary and benefits of the teachers, whose names were not released, as it pursues a formal process known as 3020-a to fire tenured teachers.

Scott said new legislation took effect on July 1 to expedite the hearings to fire tenured teachers.

“It’s speeded up the process much more than it used to be. Before, it could take two or three years,” he said.

Now, hearings are conducted before a single hearing officer. Also, the teacher must disclose witnesses that will be called in his or her defense, according to the New York State Education Department website.

The district is also paying the salary of former Whitehall Junior-Senior High School Principal Kelly McHugh, who agreed to resign for her role in this incident. As part of a settlement, McHugh will be paid until her resignation takes effect on March 1 and will continue to receive benefits. McHugh’s annual salary is $92,596, so that means she will be paid about $62,000 for nine months of not working.

Scott said, contrary to what school officials believed before, the state Education Department is not going to provide the district with a completed report about the investigation at this point.

“We keep waiting for the report and that’s not something they do,” he said.

Instead, the state is pursuing a parallel disciplinary process called a Part 83.

“Part 83 addresses morality, so it could be any range of interpretation of morality — lying and cheating,” he said. “They’re two separate laws and separately addressed.”

The law (Part 83) states a person’s teaching certificate can be suspended or revoked if there is information indicating the person "has been convicted of a crime, or has committed an act which raises a reasonable question as to the individual’s moral character.”

The matter can then be referred to the State Education Department’s Office of Teaching Initiatives for a professional conduct officer to review. A hearing may also be held on the issue if requested by the teacher or the school district.

The law states that teachers are presumed to lack good moral character if they are convicted on a drug charge, any crime involving the sexual abuse of a minor or student, or a crime conducted on school property while teaching. The teacher is free to rebut that during a hearing.

The teacher has 30 days to appeal any decision of the hearing officer or board.

Scott said he believes a report will be provided when everything is concluded. He said the state has told the district that Whitehall needs to pursue its own charges against these employees. State officials will use then use the local findings in its own report.

OK, so here's what I gather from this story:

Two teachers were accused of cheating on the state tests.

They've been removed from the classroom but are still on the payroll.

There was an investigation by NYSED, which then invalidated the test scores, but NYSED is not going to provide the report of that investigation to the local district.

For some reason, the district "keeps waiting for the report" but that isn't something NYSED will give them.

Gee, that makes sense.

Instead there are "parallel"disciplinary processes, with the local district pursuing expedited 3020a removal for the teachers while the state pursues a Part 83 disciplinary process, which addresses the "moral character" of these teachers.

Despite the state pursuing the Part 83 disciplinary process, the state says the local district must still pursue its own charges against these teachers - thus the parallel 3020a proceedings.

Once the 3020a proceedings are completed, the state will then use that "report" as part of the Part 83 process.

After everything is said and done the interim superintendent says "he believes a report will be provided when everything is concluded."

Gee, I'm so glad that's all clear now.

Franz Kafka, party of one, we have your cell.

How Rahm Emanuel Got Chicago's Crime Rate Down

To quote from The Sting, it's simple - he cheats:

It was a balmy afternoon last July when the call came in: Dead body found inside empty warehouse on the West Side.

Chicago police officers drove through an industrial stretch of the hardscrabble Austin neighborhood and pulled up to the 4600 block of West Arthington Street. The warehouse in question was an unremarkable-looking red-brick single-story building with a tall barbed-wire fence. Vacant for six years, it had been visited that day by its owner and a real-estate agent—the person who had called 911.

The place lacked electricity, so crime scene technicians set up generators and portable lights. The power flickered on to reveal a grisly sight. In a small office, on soggy carpeting covered in broken ceiling tiles, lay a naked, lifeless woman. She had long red-streaked black hair and purple glitter nail polish on her left toenails (her right ones were gone), but beyond that it was hard to discern much. Her face and body were bloated and badly decomposed, her hands ash colored. Maggots feasted on her flesh.

At the woman’s feet, detectives found a curled strand of telephone wire. Draped over her right hand was a different kind of wire: thin and brown. The same brown wire was wrapped around each armrest of a wooden chair next to her.

The following day, July 24, a pathologist in the Cook County medical examiner’s office noticed something else that had been obscured by rotting skin: a thin gag tied around the corpse’s mouth.
Thanks to some still-visible tattoos, detectives soon identified this unfortunate woman: Tiara Groves, a 20-year-old from Austin. She was last seen walking alone in the wee hours of Sunday, July 14, near a liquor store two miles from the warehouse. At least eight witnesses who saw her that night told police a similar story: She appeared drunk and was upset—one man said that she was crying so hard she couldn’t catch her breath—but refused offers of help. A man who talked to her outside the liquor store said that Groves warned him, excitedly and incoherently, that he should stay away from her or else somebody (she didn’t say who) would kill him too.

Toxicology tests showed she had heroin and alcohol in her system, but not enough to kill her. All signs pointed to foul play. According to the young woman’s mother, who had filed a missing-person report, the police had no doubt. “When this detective came to my house, he said, ‘We found your daughter. . . . Your daughter has been murdered,’ ” Alice Groves recalls. “He told me they’re going to get the one that did it.”

On October 28, a pathologist ruled the death of Tiara Groves a homicide by “unspecified means.” This rare ruling means yes, somebody had killed Groves, but the pathologist couldn’t pinpoint the exact cause of death.

Given the finding of homicide—and the corroborating evidence at the crime scene—the Chicago Police Department should have counted Groves’s death as a murder. And it did. Until December 18. On that day, the police report indicates, a lieutenant overseeing the Groves case reclassified the homicide investigation as a noncriminal death investigation. In his writeup, he cited the medical examiner’s “inability to determine a cause of death.”

That lieutenant was Denis Walsh—the same cop who had played a crucial role in the alleged cover-up in the 2004 killing of David Koschman, the 21-year-old who died after being punched by a nephew of former mayor Richard M. Daley. Walsh allegedly took the Koschman file home. For years, police officials said that it was lost. After the Sun-Times reported it missing, the file mysteriously reappeared.

But back to Tiara Groves. With the stroke of a computer key, she was airbrushed out of Chicago’s homicide statistics.

The change stunned officers. Current and former veteran detectives who reviewed the Groves case at Chicago’s request were just as incredulous. Says a retired high-level detective, “How can you be tied to a chair and gagged, with no clothes on, and that’s a [noncriminal] death investigation?” (He, like most of the nearly 40 police sources interviewed for this story, declined to be identified by name, citing fears of disciplinary action or other retribution.)

Was it just a coincidence, some wondered, that the reclassification occurred less than two weeks before the end of the year, when the city of Chicago’s final homicide numbers for 2013 would be tallied? “They essentially wiped away one of the murders in the city, which is crazy,” says a police insider. “But that’s the kind of shit that’s going on.”

 

For the case of Tiara Groves is not an isolated one. Chicago conducted a 12-month examination of the Chicago Police Department’s crime statistics going back several years, poring through public and internal police records and interviewing crime victims, criminologists, and police sources of various ranks. We identified 10 people, including Groves, who were beaten, burned, suffocated, or shot to death in 2013 and whose cases were reclassified as death investigations, downgraded to more minor crimes, or even closed as noncriminal incidents—all for illogical or, at best, unclear reasons.

This troubling practice goes far beyond murders, documents and interviews reveal. Chicago found dozens of other crimes, including serious felonies such as robberies, burglaries, and assaults, that were misclassified, downgraded to wrist-slap offenses, or made to vanish altogether. (We’ll examine those next month in part 2 of this special report.)

Many officers of different ranks and from different parts of the city recounted instances in which they were asked or pressured by their superiors to reclassify their incident reports or in which their reports were changed by some invisible hand. One detective refers to the “magic ink”: the power to make a case disappear. Says another: “The rank and file don’t agree with what’s going on. The powers that be are making the changes.”

Read the rest of the Chicago Magazine piece to see how Rahm and his crime lieutenants got their drop in crime stats and think about this the next time you hear Rahm Emanuel or one of his corporate cronies tout his "leadership" in Chicago.

Adding A 5th Reason To Why Kaya Henderson Won't Be NYCDOE Chancellor

Valerie Strauss lists four reasons why she thinks DCPS chancellor Kaya Henderson won't be NYCDOE chancellor despite rumors that her name is on Mayor-Elect Bill de Blasio's short list for the job.

The four reasons are 1) Henderson's staunch support of charter schools 2) Henderson's emphasis on standardized tests as the most important measure of educational achievement 3) her antagonism toward the union and 4) her dismissal of class size as an important component of reform.

I would add a fifth reason - Henderson's part in the Michelle Rhee testing scandal in DC.

When Rhee was allegedly informed about widespread allegations of cheating at DCPS schools, Henderson's was said to be present.

Both Rhee and Henderson deny ever having been told about widespread cheating allegations.

So far, the news media has seemed complacent to let that cheating story die without checking much into Rhee's or Henderson's stories.

If Henderson is offered the NYCDOE chancellor job, that cheating allegation story will resurface and get much more rigorous coverage from the media this time around.

I bet that's something that neither Henderson's old boss and pal in crime, Michelle Rhee, nor Henderson herself want.

I bet it's something the education reform establishment doesn't want either.

The Myth Of Michelle Rhee must not be exposed.

Now We Know What Tony Bennett Means By "No Excuses!"

Another education reformer exposed as a cheater and a liar - Chiefs For Change chief, Tony Bennett:

INDIANAPOLIS — Former Indiana and current Florida schools chief Tony Bennett built his national star by promising to hold "failing" schools accountable. But when it appeared an Indianapolis charter school run by a prominent Republican donor might receive a poor grade, Bennett's education team frantically overhauled his signature "A-F" school grading system to improve the school's marks.

Emails obtained by The Associated Press show Bennett and his staff scrambled last fall to ensure influential donor Christel DeHaan's school received an "A," despite poor test scores in algebra that initially earned it a "C."

"They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work," Bennett wrote in a Sept. 12 email to then-chief of staff Heather Neal, who is now Gov. Mike Pence's chief lobbyist.

The emails, which also show Bennett discussed with staff the legality of changing just DeHaan's grade, raise unsettling questions about the validity of a grading system that has broad implications. Indiana uses the A-F grades to determine which schools get taken over by the state and whether students seeking state-funded vouchers to attend private school need to first spend a year in public school. They also help determine how much state funding schools receive. A low grade also can detract from a neighborhood and drive homebuyers elsewhere.

GOP donor's charter school is getting a "C" instead of an "A" on its school report card?

"No problem!" says Chief For Change chief Tony Bennett, "we'll change the formula and make sure that donor - who's given over $2.8 million since 1998 - gets his A"!

The change in formula still doesn't get the school an A?

"No problem!" says Chief For Change chief Tony Bennett, "we'll just change the formula again and make sure it's an A!"

I'd say this story is unbelievable, except that it's not.

Another education reform "hero" exposed as a crook and a liar.

Rhee and Bennett - Chiefs For Cheating.

Michelle Rhee Still Trotting Around The Country Without Her Accountability Moment

Beverly Hall is under indictment and out on bond.

Michelle Rhee is still basking in the glow of corporate deform politicians and the ed press shills.

When will Rhee be called to account for ErasureGate?

When will she be put her under oath and asked her if she saw the cheating memo?

Jay Matthews: Ask The Students In D.C. How Many Erasures They Made On Rhee's Tests

From Jay Matthews at the Washington Post:

Five years ago, analysts found statistically improbable numbers of wrong-to-right erasures on D.C. test answer sheets. Several investigations have failed to determine the cause. But those investigators never asked students with many changes on their answer sheets what they remembered doing.

Did they really make as many as 10 wrong-to-right erasures each? D.C. data shows the average student rarely makes more than one or two. What led students to make so many mistakes and then switch to the right answers?

This year — finally — investigators from the Alvarez & Marsal consulting firm, hired by the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), tried to find out. They spoke to 16 students at Meridian Public Charter School whose answer sheets were full of changes on the 2012 D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests. The school had 1,807 wrong-to-right erasures, an average of eight per student.

When asked what happened, the Alvarez & Marsal report said, “most students initially indicated that they had changed only a couple of answers.” Their recollections led investigators to conclude that administrators had gone rogue. Four Meridian administrators were asked how so many corrections were made. They offered no explanation.

Why didn’t investigators in earlier probes ask students how many answers they erased?

An Alvarez & Marsal spokeswoman said this was the first time OSSE provided erasure data for each student. OSSE officials have not said what took them so long.

...

There are thousands of other D.C. students whose answer sheets were full of corrections. If you have such kids at home, e-mail me at mathewsj@washpost.com. Does your child remember erasing any answers? When? Where? Maybe we can find a way to take their memories and illuminate events at your school.

For instance, was your child at the Community Academy Public Charter School in spring 2012? There were 214 wrong-to-right erasures in just one third-grade classroom, with one student’s answer sheet showing 17 such erasures on the math test.

At Langdon Education Campus in 2012, 11 students had 10 or more wrong-to-right erasures on a reading test.

During the 2011 D.C. tests, one classroom at J.O. Wilson Elementary School — the grade was not specified — averaged more than nine wrong-to-right erasures per child, a rate higher than all the other schools investigated that year. At Langdon in 2011, one classroom had nearly that many.

Ludlow-Taylor and Martin Luther King Jr. elementary schools each had a classroom averaging more than six wrong-to-right erasures in 2011.

If your child’s memory of such tests doesn’t jibe with the score sheets, that merits more investigation. Maybe students can help us uncover the truth.

It seems D.C. politicians, Obama administration officials and many in the mainstream media aren't all that interested in getting to the bottom of Rhee's ErasureGate.

Will anybody take Jay's suggestion or will this continue to be swept under the rug?

The High Stakes Testing Disease

John Merrow:

When I was a kid and when my now-grown children were kids, tests were designed and used to assess student performance and make judgements about school quality.  Now, however, tests are all about holding teachers and principals ‘accountable.’  We have lost our way, and the cheating epidemic is the clearest sign of that.  Principals and teachers know that their livelihood depends on rising test scores, and so the curriculum has been narrowed; adult energy is focused on the so-called ‘cusp kids’ who are just a few points shy of making it over the bar; music, theatre, and field trips have disappeared; children are objects to be manipulated, not living, breathing human beings with individual needs, strengths and weaknesses; and morally weak adults are cheating.

Here’s the rub: Cheating is not the problem that must be addressed. It is the most visible and disturbing symptom of the disease, but the disease itself is our excessive reliance on high stakes testing.

This disease will eventually pass, but in the meantime there are going to be quite a few careers and reputations destroyed by it before it's all said and done.


As Michael Fiorillo noted in a comment:

the Common Corporate Standards and the tests they are a vehicle for will quite likely collapse of their own unworkability and rising parent opposition. In that sense, think Carol Burris is probably right. However, in the meantime, thousands of teachers will be chewed to pieces, and millions of students will be abused and turned off to school by this malign nonsense. And then it will take years, perhaps decades to undo the damage caused by these social vandals.

We won't mention how some education reform cheerleaders, by uncritically waving their pom-poms at so many of the reforms over the last few years, helped bring about the disease of high stakes testing that is ravaging schools all across the nation.

Still, it's nice to have them awakening to the mess, even if they're still having some difficulty with the "Come To Jesus" moment and admitting to their own complicity in this mess. 

If Only Bankers Were Treated Like Teachers...

From NBC News, an administrator is arrested for cheating on Regents exams:

A department head at a New York high school has been accused of changing two students' answers on state tests to give them a passing grade.

The Westchester County district attorney says 54-year-old Allison Risoli of Peekskill was arraigned Monday on false-document charges.

A call to Risoli's attorney was not immediately returned.

The district attorney said Risoli altered answer sheets for January exams in history and geography several days after the tests were taken at Peekskill High.

Meanwhile in the HSBC money laundering case:

BILL MOYERS: You’re working on a story right now that’ll come out in a couple of weeks on the HSBC settlement. That’s the, tell me about that, why it interests you.

MATT TAIBBI: Well, the HSBC settlement was a really shocking kind of new low in the history of the too big to fail issue. HSBC was a serial offender on the money laundering score. They had been twice given formal cease and desist orders by the government. One dating back as far as 2003, another one in 2010 for inadequately policing the accounts in their system. They laundered over $800 million for cartels in Colombia.

BILL MOYERS: Drug cartels?

MATT TAIBBI: Drug cartels in Colombia and Mexico. They laundered money for terrorist connected banks in the Middle East. Russian gangsters. Literally, you know, I talked to one prosecutor who’s, like, “They broke basically every law in the book and they did business with every kind of criminal you can possibly imagine. And they got a complete and total walk.” I mean, they had to pay a fine.

BILL MOYERS: $1.9 billion, a lot of money.

MATT TAIBBI: It’s a lot of money. But it’s five weeks of revenue for the bank, to put that in perspective. And no individual had to suffer any consequences at all. There were no criminal charges no individual fines, which was incredible. Incredible.

Incredible indeed.

If only these bankers who laundered the drug money had changed some answers on a Regents exam - then they'd face some accountability.

Rhee Still Using Flawed Caveon and USDOE Investigations As Proof No Cheating Occurred In D.C.

Michelle Rhee has learned her political lessons well from her time in Washington.

Repeat a deception often enough and maybe it will be reported as truth.

To wit, she defended herself to the LA Times editorial board against the cheating memo accusations with the two flawed investigations that were done in D.C. that have been debunked by Jay Matthews at the Washington Post.

She also did this in her official statement in response to John Merrow's release of the cheating memo.

First, here's her defense:

In an interview with The Times editorial board, Rhee said that although she "didn't see the memo" at the time, consultant Sandy Sanford "was just writing a memo based on something that we already broadly knew." She noted that the testing company had expressed reservations about the erasure analysis the memo relied on, and she added that later investigations found no widespread wrongdoing.

Usually Rhee gets away with repeating a lie and never getting called on it by the press.

But the L.A. Times does a good job of calling her on the deception:

Similar allegations about erasures that surfaced in Atlanta recently resulted in a grand jury indictment against former schools Supt. Beverly Hall and others.Authorities have alleged that Hall conspired to cheat or conceal cheating. The result was fraudulent bonuses for employees and a false read on student achievement, prosecutors said.

Some education activists and journalists have alleged serious flaws in the investigations cited by Rhee. They noted that early probes in Atlanta also turned up limited wrongdoing. At one point, Rhee hired a firm to conduct a narrow review in D.C. — the same company whose findings Atlanta officials cited in their defense.

There have been sharp drops in test scores at some D.C. schools that were flagged in the past for high erasure rates, according to the Washington Post. Such declines could indicate cheating, but are not proof of it. To date, no in-depth erasure analysis of the 2008 answer sheets has been conducted.

Let's repeat that last sentence - "To date, no in-depth erasure analysis of the 2008 answer sheets has been conducted."

That's the L.A. Times' way of saying, Rhee's defense, based upon the two D.C. investigations that were both limited in scope and flawed, doesn't hold water.

D.C. City Council Will NOT Investigate Rhee

I'm not surprised by this news:

The chairman of the D.C. Council’s education committee said Sunday that he has no plans to reinvestigate allegations of widespread cheating on standardized tests during the tenure of former Chancellor Michelle Rhee.

Council member David Catania (I-At Large) said he will instead focus on improving the integrity of future tests, which are used to evaluate schools and teachers.

Catania’s statement came three days after the public airing of a 2009 memo indicating that as many as 191 teachers in 70 D.C. public schools may have committed testing infractions in 2008.

The memo, based on an analysis of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets, contained no proof of cheating and warned that there wasn’t enough information to draw firm conclusions. But it stoked questions about whether Rhee and other school officials, including current Chancellor Kaya Henderson, were aggressive enough about responding to suspicions of cheating.

Rhee and Henderson both said they did not recall receiving the 2009 memo, and school system officials pointed to multiple investigations — including by local and federal inspectors general — that found no evidence of widespread cheating.

Catania said that in light of the 2009 memo, he is “bewildered by the narrow scope” of a investigation by the D.C. Inspector General, which lasted 17 months and focused only on one school. But he said reinvestigating five-year-old allegations “would be impractical and would yield little in terms of accountability.”

“Among other things,” he said, “simply identifying and interviewing the hundreds of witnesses would overwhelm the Council’s limited staff and resources.”

It makes more sense to focus on tightening test security and strengthening efforts to identify cheating in the future, the council member said.

Unless the clamor for an investigation grows, Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson are going to skate on this.

It has been quite clear previous to this that the fix is in when it comes to Rhee.

The powers that be do NOT want to know anything about Michelle Rhee and cheating - not Barack Obama, not Arne Duncan, not the D.C. City Council, not the elite media.

And it looks, at least for now, as if that impunity for Rhee is going to continue.

Both Kaya Henderson And Michelle Rhee Deny Seeing The Cheating Memo

The Associated Press reports that both Henderson and Rhee claim in statements they have never seen the internal DCPS memo from 2009 that pointed to possible widespread cheating on high stakes standardized tests in the school system.

Henderson also said in her statement through a spokesperson that the memo was based on incomplete information and flawed methodology.

She didn't say how she knew the memo was based on incomplete information or flawed methodology since she claims she doesn't remember seeing the memo, but I guess that's neither here nor there.

John Merrow, the reporter who broke the story about the memo, says he has a highly placed and reliable source who told him Rhee spoke about this memo at DCPS brass staff meetings.

It is clear that neither Rhee nor Henderson are going to be forthcoming about the memo or their actions after they were made aware of potential cheating DCPS in 2009.

The only way to get these women to, perhaps, come clean on the matter is to put them under oath in a criminal investigation.

Certainly the only way to hold these two purveyors of teacher accountability accountable themselves is to put them under oath in a criminal investigation.

Anything less will mean the powers that be in D.C. do not want to get to the bottom of the matter.

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2013/04/13/2722899/the-buzz-the-bee-eater-was-here.html#storylink=rss#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2013/04/13/2722899/the-buzz-the-bee-eater-was-here.html#storylink=rss#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2013/04/13/2722899/the-buzz-the-bee-eater-was-here.html#storylink=rss#storylink=cpyThere were also some tweets on the Students First twitter account on Thursday April 11, but then everything went silent right around 1 P

Michelle Rhee Attacks Teachers For Living On The "Gravy Train"

You just can't make this stuff up.

At one of Michelle Rhee's final, pre-cheating memo appearances, she attacked teachers for being greedy, lazy and, you know, unaccountable:

COLUMBIA , SC — Former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee had trouble recalling the names of South Carolina’s “key players” after a quick visit to the State House on Wednesday. But state lawmakers may want to take note of hers.

Rhee’s education advocacy group, StudentsFirst, is lobbying in 18 states, including South Carolina. The group says it backed 105 legislative candidates in 2012 – 91 Republicans and 14 Democrats – and 86 won.

 ...

So what are Rhee and her advocacy group doing in South Carolina?

Meeting with teachers, now a part of the 25,000 members that StudentsFirst claims in the state, and meeting with education leaders, including S.C. schools Superintendent Mick Zais.

Rhee’s group supports bills in the S.C. Legislature aimed at strengthening the state’s charter-school law, helping parents mobilize to force reforms in failing schools and allowing students to enroll in neighboring school districts.

A top goal is backing the S.C. Department of Education’s plan to evaluate teachers based on how much students improve on test scores.

Educators make excuses for failing schools, Rhee said. But, she added, “The bottom line is: The system did not become the way that it is by accident. It operates exactly the way it was designed to operate, which is in a wholly unaccountable, dysfunctional manner.

“So when you seek to change that dynamic” – including going after “low-performing” teachers – “you’re gonna have a whole lot of unhappy people on your hands. When you stop that gravy train, somebody is going to be unhappy.”

Yeah, there are so many teachers in South Carolina, where the average teaching salary is $46,306.67 a year, who are on the "gravy train."

And Rhee, who charges a $50,000 speaking fee plus first class expenses, is just the person to get those lazy, greedy teachers off that gravy train and of course, she's doing it for the kids.

Oh, and herself, since she pays herself somewhere between $125,000-$200,000 a year for running her corporate education reform PAC, Students First.

And that's just the money she's making on the books.

You can be sure there is a lot of other wingnut welfare she's receiving outside of the Students First salary and the speaking fees for pushing the corporate education reform agenda.

Now I'm pretty sure that Michelle Rhee believes her own b.s. and isn't in this just for the money.

But I'm also pretty sure that someone who pays herself between $125,000-$200,000 a year for her day job and charges $50,000 + first class expenses every time she speaks somewhere sure does like the money and first class things and, dare I say, some gravy train living herself.

We'll just have to see if she can maintain her gravy train lifestyle post-cheating memo.

If the D.C. cheating scandal continues to snowball, she may find herself off the gravy train too.

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2013/04/13/2722899/the-buzz-the-bee-eater-was-here.html#storylink=rss#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2013/04/13/2722899/the-buzz-the-bee-eater-was-here.html#storylink=rss#storylink=cpy

D.C. City Council To Hold Hearings On Rhee Cheating Memo Revelations

Well, this is at least something:

The City Council in Washington will hold a hearing next week after a memo warning officials of cheating on standardized tests during the chancellorship of Michelle A. Rhee surfaced Thursday night. 

Allegations of cheating have dogged Ms. Rhee — now a lightning rod in education circles for her advocacy through StudentsFirst, a nonprofit group she founded — since an investigation by USA Today found high rates of erasures on standardized tests at a Washington elementary school. 

Although subsequent investigations by both the city’s inspector general and the federal Education Department concluded that widespread cheating had not occurred, a memo that said 191 teachers in 70 schools were “implicated in possible testing infractions” in 2008 has ignited calls for further inquiries. 

The memo, disclosed by John Merrow, the education correspondent for “NewsHour” on PBS, was written by a consultant hired by the Washington school system to investigate data that showed a high number of test answer sheets on which wrong answers had been erased and changed to correct answers. The memo, which Mr. Merrow said had been written by Fay G. Sanford, a consultant, offered a detailed discussion of a high number of erasures at Aiton Elementary School. But the memo noted that “Aiton is NOT the only school in this situation.” 

Ms. Rhee issued a statement saying that she did not recall receiving the memo. She added that both the city inspector general and the Education Department had already “reviewed the memo and confirmed my belief that there was no widespread cheating.” 

Blanche Bruce, the deputy inspector general in Washington, declined to comment on whether her office had reviewed the memo. 

A spokeswoman for the Education Department’s Office of Inspector General confirmed that the agency had reviewed the memo.

The Washington D.C. City Council hearing is a good start at getting to the bottom of this mess, but it certainly is not enough.

There have already been two limited investigations, and both were as ineffective at getting to the truth as Michelle Rhee claims most teachers are at teaching kids.

City Council hearings themselves may bring attention to the contradictions in Rhee's and Henderson's stories, they may bring a little more heat onto the principals involved, but they certainly won't move the story forward any.

But a criminal investigation will.

As Valerie Strauss wrote at The Answer Sheet:

The memo does not offer conclusive evidence that cheating occurred, but it literally begs for a thorough probe to be conducted — this time by investigators with subpoena powers.

The indictment of former Atlanta superintendent Beverly Hall and 34 other educators on test cheating charges — under a law used against mobsters — shows that the only way to get to the truth about these suspicions is by approaching it as a criminal case and sending in investigators who can subpoena witnesses. You don’t investigate criminal activity by going in and asking, “Did you cheat? Are you sure you didn’t cheat?” Everyone should have to testify under oath, including Rhee, who appears to have done her best to keep a lid on the allegations.

Unless Rhee and Henderson are interrogated under oath on what they knew about the cheating allegations, when they knew that information, and what they did about it, they are going to continue to evade and stonewall.

We have the blueprint for how to get to the bottom of a cheating scandal - do what they did in Atlanta and have an investigation that is run just the way Governor Sonny Perdue ran his in Atlanta, with special prosecutors and subpoena powers and a substantial budget that allows for a real investigation.

Anything other than that, and we know that the people in power in Washington D.C. municipal government, Congress and the Obama administration aren't interested in getting to the bottom of this.

How Much Longer?

Here is a devastating 7:42 video for Michelle Rhee personally and for her "legacy" as both an education reformer and DCPS chancellor - John Merrow's appearance on MSNBC with Chris Hayes last night.

She of course wouldn't go on the program to respond to Merrow's report of the cheating memo.

How much longer can she get away with ignoring the allegations?

How much longer can she get away with stonewalling a full investigation of the charges of cheating in DCPS schools and her handling of those charges?

Can she continue to release "state education reform report cards" and the like through her PAC, Students First, and not have to respond to these charges?

I'm going to repeat what Jersey Jazzman first wrote when the Merrow report of the memo came out Thursday night:

We are at a crisis point. Either we are going to step up and demand the truth about Michelle Rhee and the Washington, D.C. cheating scandal, or we're going to sweep this entire thing under the rug and pretend that Rhee's vision of the world is valid: that our nation's massive inequity can be laid at the feet of a few "bad" teachers.

It is time - once and for all - to have an honest conversation about the legacy of Michelle Rhee.

How much longer will the media continue to let her run with her Students First jive like nothing happened?

How much longer can Rhee float above it all?

Fordham Institute's Flypaper Makes Excuses For Rhee

You knew they would, right?

Michelle Rhee probably blew it on cheating—but got much else right

Michelle Gininger / April 12, 2013

  John Merrow’s expose on cheating in Washington, D.C., doesn’t look good for former D.C. chancellor Michelle Rhee and current chancellor Kaya Henderson. Indeed, it’s hard to dismiss “two highly placed and reputable sources,” not to mention the missing memo. *

Let’s be clear, however: This is hardly evidence of Atlanta-style wrongdoing. We have no reason to believe that Rhee (or Henderson) encouraged cheating or covered up illegal behavior. It’s more likely that they simply exercised poor judgment in not treating the evidence of cheating more seriously.

Critics are bound to say that all reforms that Rhee stands for—teacher evaluations, tenure reform, and school choice—should be dismissed. But let’s not abandon education reform and accountability at the expense of our students, which getting rid of testing surely would.

Instead, to borrow from Michael Petrilli on the Atlanta cheating scandal, let’s “mend it, not end it.”

Did Michelle Rhee know about the cheating? The evidence is strong.

Should we investigate the D.C. cheating in 2008–10? Maybe.

And should we look at improve standardized testing to curb cheating and to improve student learning? Absolutely.

Oh, so much to hammer away at here.

Let's start at the top.

The post runs with the frame "Sure it looks like Rhee knew about cheating, but so what?  We like her on so many other issues - school privatization, tenure, evaluations based upon test scores - that we simply cannot dismiss her as an education reform 'warrior woman' no matter what she did or didn't do around the cheating!"

Which is to say, they don't really care whether she's a crook or not, they don't really care whether she refuses to be held accountable for her tenure as DCPS chancellor - all they care about is the education reform/privatization policies she promotes and the utility she has to the movement.

In other words, the ends justify the means.

Next, the writer says this "missing memo" is hardly evidence of "Atlanta-style wrongdoing."

Ah, but the USA Today story that originally broke the cheating allegations back in 2011, reported the following:

A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.'s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes' classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.

Noyes is one of 103 public schools here that have had erasure rates that surpassed D.C. averages at least once since 2008. That's more than half of D.C. schools.

Erasures are detected by the same electronic scanners that CTB/McGraw-Hill, D.C.'s testing company, uses to score the tests. When test-takers change answers, they erase penciled-in bubble marks that leave behind a smudge; the machines tally the erasures as well as the new answers for each student.

In 2007-08, six classrooms out of the eight taking tests at Noyes were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of high wrong-to-right erasure rates. The pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, when 80% of Noyes classrooms were flagged by McGraw-Hill.

On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.

"This is an abnormal pattern," says Thomas Haladyna, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University who has studied testing for 20 years.

A trio of academicians consulted by USA TODAY — Haladyna, George Shambaugh of Georgetown University and Gary Miron of Western Michigan University — say the erasure rates found at Noyes and at other D.C. public schools are so statistically rare, and yet showed up in so many classrooms, that they should be examined thoroughly.

Let's repeat that last part:

The erasures at Noyes and other schools were so statistically rare, and yet showed up in so many classrooms, that they should be examined thoroughly.

Were they examined thoroughly?

Rhee indicates in her official statement to the "missing memo" that these allegations were indeed investigated and she and DCPS were exonerated:

In a statement, Rhee said she didn't recall getting Sanford's memo: "As chancellor I received countless reports, memoranda and presentations. I don't recall receiving a report by Sandy Sanford regarding erasure data from the (DC Comprehensive Assessment System), but I'm pleased, as has been previously reported, that both inspectors general (DOE and DCPS) reviewed the memo and confirmed my belief that there was no widespread cheating."

But as Jay Matthews at the Washington Post points out here, both the USDOE and the DCPS investigation were flawed, limited in scope and very little investigating was actually done:

In the 42 years I have worked for this newspaper, I have adopted many of this town’s mental habits. One is a deep respect for inspectors general, those stewards of truth whose work we often herald in The Post. That is why I am disappointed by the failure of not one, but two, inspectors general to expose test tampering in the D.C. schools.

From 2008 through 2010, according to testing company CTB/McGraw Hill, some D.C. schools had 70 percent or more of their classrooms flagged for wrong-to-right erasure rates far beyond the mean erasure rates for all D.C. students. When officials at those schools were denied after-hours access to the answer sheets because of tighter security, their test scores plummeted.

University of North Carolina professor Gregory Cizek investigated similar erasures in Atlanta. He found they were the results of cheating. Many culprits confessed and lost their jobs. Cizek and other psychometricians say there is no reasonable explanation for statistically improbable wrong-to-right erasures other than adults changing the wrong answers to right.

Such expertise apparently didn’t interest D.C. Inspector General Charles J. Willoughby and U.S. Department of Education Inspector General Kathleen S. Tighe. Their investigators found insufficient proof of massive cheating on the district’s standardized tests. It is easy to tell why, now that Tighe’s office has released a report on its findings and Willoughby has been forced by D.C. Council member Kenyan McDuffie to defend his work: Neither IG took the erasure data seriously.

They never studied the answer sheets. When test scores plummeted at Noyes Education Campus and other high-flying D.C. schools, it never occurred to the IGs to ask whether erasures also declined. Noyes educators blamed the declining scores on an influx of new students from low-performing schools. A computer check of enrollment rolls would have told the IGs whether that was true.

In his response to McDuffie, Willoughby also dismissed evidence from Adell Cothorne, a principal at Noyes Education Campus who reported suspicious behavior at her school. Cothorne said she found three staffers loyal to a former principal holed up in a room, after-hours, with answer sheets and erasers in their hands. She said she believed they were erasing wrong answers and penciling in the right ones on a D.C. preliminary exam.

Cothorne says Willoughby’s people never tried to interview her. Willoughby told McDuffie that Cothorne’s attorney said the principal didn’t want to talk. You decide who is telling the truth. The fact that Willoughby stopped his investigation after looking at just one school, Noyes, suggests little interest on his part in getting at the truth.

I congratulate Tighe’s staff for interviewing Cothorne in July 2011. The principal said they talked to her for several hours. Willoughby knew this but never mentioned it in his original August 2012 report. He said he couldn’t use her account because she had filed a whistleblower’s lawsuit against the District and the complaint had been sealed by the court – which happens in all whistleblower suits.

The Education Department also revealed Feb. 7 that several educators reported other forms and signs of cheating at Noyes and other D.C. schools: tests distributed days in advance to teachers who shared the questions with students; teachers coaching kids during the tests; kids excelling on the tests though they had performed poorly in class.

Yet both IGs apparently reject Cothorne’s assertions, though they don’t explain why. Because the three staffers she fingered denied any wrongdoing? Had they confessed, they almost certainly would have been fired. So why did the IGs believe them instead of her?

Cothorne now finds herself condemned as a liar after Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said she made “fictitious” claims.

Amid apparent lying, cheating and turning of blind eyes, I’d say that if there’s one honorable person in this five-year-long melodrama, it’s Cothorne. She’s the one who didn’t look the other way, instead putting her students’ interests first.

These two flawed, IG-led investigations uncovered nothing because they didn't really want to uncover anything.  

Rhee can try and hang her hat on these two IG-led investigations as proof of exoneration but they actually raise more questions than they resolve and they certainly do not give us definitive proof that "Atlanta-style wrongdoing" didn't take place in DC since only the last investigation in Atlanta - the one pushed by Governor Perdue - actually found the evidence of widespread cheating.  

Remember, the first couple in Atlanta, as ineffectual and limited as the two IG-led investigations done on Rhee, found no evidence of cheating either and exonerated Beverly Hall and her teachers:

In August 2010, after yet another blue-ribbon commission of Atlanta officials found no serious cheating, Mr. Perdue appointed the two special prosecutors and gave them subpoena powers and a budget substantial enough to hire more than 50 state investigators who were overseen by Mr. Hyde.

Mr. Bowers, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Hyde had spent most of their careers putting criminals in prison, and almost as important, they could write. They produced an investigative report with a narrative that read more like a crime thriller than a sleepy legal document and placed Dr. Hall center stage in a drama of mind-boggling dysfunction.

Until we get a full investigation of all those erasures at the 103 DCPS schools USA Today red-flagged, until we get a full investigation of Rhee's and Henderson's official responses to the Sanford memo, we cannot say whether "Atlanta-style wrongdoing" did or did not take place in D.C. because the truth is, we don't know if it did or didn't.

Let's have that investigation, run just the way Governor Sonny Perdue ran the last one in Atlanta, with special prosecutors and subpoena powers and a substantial budget that allows for a real investigation, and then we will know whether Atlanta-style wrongdoing took place or not.

Next, the Flypaper writer says that there is no evidence that Rhee or her deputy chancellor Kaya Henderson encouraged cheating or covered up illegal behavior.

But that's not necessarily so.

John Merrow in his post last night about the cheating memo wrote the following:

Rhee has publicly maintained that, if bureaucratic red tape hadn’t gotten in the way, she would have investigated the erasures. For example, in an interview^[1] conducted for PBS’ “Frontline” before I learned about the confidential memo, Rhee told me, “We kept saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to do this; we just need to have more information.’ And by the time the information was trickling in back and forth, we were about to take the next year’s test. And there was a new superintendent of education that came in at the time. And she said, ‘Okay, well, we’re about to take the next test anyway so let’s just make sure that the proper protocols are in place for next time.’”

At best, that story is misleading.

...

 Michelle Rhee had to decide whether to investigate aggressively or not. She had publicly promised to make all decisions “in the best interests of children,” and a full-scale investigation would seem to keep that pledge. If cheating were proved, she could fire the offenders and see that students with false scores received the remedial attention they needed. Failing to investigate might be interpreted as a betrayal of children’s interests–if it ever became public knowledge.

For unknown reasons, Rhee decided there would be no full investigation.  And then, every time questions came up around the allegations, Rhee used the two limited IG investigations as proof of full exoneration (when they actually weren't) or refused to answer questions at all (as happened with USA Today.)

Now Rhee is claiming she doesn't remember the memo that shows she was filled in on the potential cheating problem.

Merrow says he has a highly reliable source in DCPS who knows Rhee saw the memo and discussed it at DCPS staff meetings.

While none of this is direct evidence that she or Henderson encouraged cheating, nor is it direct evidence of a cover-up, it certainly leaves a stink around how they handled the allegations and why they decided a full investigation was not warranted. 

In fact, the Flypaper writer herself later writes that "The evidence is strong" that Rhee knew about cheating.

If "The evidence is strong" that Rhee knew about cheating but did nothing about it and now continues to do everything she can to stonewall further investigation of the cheating allegations and her handling of them, it certainly leaves the impression that there was some kind of cover-up.  

Otherwise why not go with the full investigation? 

Otherwise why not talk to USA Today about the allegations?

Otherwise why not go on Chris Hayes' program on MSNBC and respond to John Merrow's report on the cheating memo?

The Flypaper writer then sets up a straw man argument over the potential fall-out of this scandal - critics of Rhee will say the allegations against Rhee are a reason to end all of her reforms.

Then we get a reiteration of Flypaper's Mike Petrilli's "Mend it, Don't End It" meme that he trotted out earlier after the Atlanta indictments.

I don't know what other critics of Rhee are saying, but here is what this critic is saying:

The allegations against Rhee are evidence of why a full investigation of Rhee needs to be done and if her "miracle schools" in DC turn out to be as bogus as the miracles in Atlanta and Texas, then it means we need to reassess what test-based accountability reforms are doing to school systems all across the nation since so many of the "miracles" turn out to be shams.

It is quite clear that there is a lot of fear in the halls of the education reform think tanks and "non-profits" now that the Rhee cheating memo has surfaced just two weeks after the Beverly Hall/Atlanta indictments.

Hall was bad, but the reform movement could survive Hall's fall from grace.  

Rhee, however, is another matter. 

As I wrote back on March 30, 

Hall's fall from education reform grace is happening far from center stage and while it hurts the movement that someone with Hall's education reform credentials has been taken down by evidence of cheating and fraud, it is not fatal to the movement.

If the same were to happen to Michelle Rhee or Joel Klein, the other education reformer and former schools chancellor with the same prominence and notoriety as Rhee, it would be, if not fatal to the movement, a very grave wound from which the movement might not recover.

Rhee, along with Klein, are the very public faces of the education reform movement.

Whatever happens to them, happens to the test-based, teacher accountability/education reform movement as well.

For now, they're circling the wagons around her and making excuses for her and for Kaya Henderson too.

It is amazing how the "No Excuses!" crowd, the "Teacher Accountability" people, are so uninterested in accountability for Michelle Rhee, Kaya Henderson and DCPS and are making excuses for them.

There needs to be a full, Atlanta-style investigation of Michelle Rhee, her tenure at DCPS, what she knew about the cheating allegations and what she did or didn't do in response to them.

And it would be great if the "No Excuses!" crowd, the "Teacher Accountability" people who so love to hold teachers and schools accountable for real and perceived sins of omission and commission, would do the same for their emblem of ed deform, Michelle Rhee.

That's not asking too much, is it?