The deafening silence on test cheating
Nobody was particularly surprised when the D.C. Inspector General’s Office, after a 17-month investigation into allegations of widespread cheating on standardized tests in D.C. public schools, issued a new report which concluded that the suspicions were unfounded.
The probe was launched in 2011 in large response to a USA Today
Kaya Henderson and Michelle Rhee (Ricky Carioti/WASHINGTON POST) investigation that focused on Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus, finding through documents and data an unusually high number of erasures where wrong answers had been erased and right answers then marked in. But the newspaper also noted that erasures on tests were flagged as outside the norm at 103 schools at least once since 2008.
Thus it isn’t exactly clear how Inspector General Charles J. Willoughby came to that conclusion.
Investigators only delved into cheating suspicions at Noyes, where big gains on scores were reported during the time that Michelle Rhee was schools chancellor and linked student test scores to the evaluations of some teachers. Willoughby’s team found that at least one teacher had cheated, and decided that because they found so little fire amid the smoke, there was no reason to look at any other schools, the report said.
Yes, that’s what they found after 17 months of work.
more . . . http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-deafening-silence-on-test-cheating/2012/08/11/d4d565e2-e2fb-11e1-a25e-15067bb31849_blog.html