Follow-up to last week's cheating hullabaloo in Texas:
The state education agency is launching an effort to catch cheating on standardized tests, officials announced Monday. Officials will hire an outside expert to review security measures and build a tracking system to monitor test scoring irregularities that could signal cheating...
The changes are in response to a Dallas Morning News investigation that found strong evidence that educators at nearly 400 schools statewide helped students cheat on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. The newspaper study identified schools whose test scores swung wildly from poor to stellar.
TEA's announcement breaks with a previous policy of trusting districts to police themselves. TEA officials had said they investigated cheating allegations only when a district requested it or when they received credible eyewitness evidence of cheating.
The Dallas Morning News, not surprisingly, has more:
Dr. Neeley said the agency had not yet decided how exactly it would analyze test scores to search for cheaters. The News methodology examined the average scale scores of students in each grade at every school. TEA officials have access to more detailed data on individual students, which could allow for more precise detecting of unusual gains.
Search the DMN site for a wealth of related articles, including more detailed coverage of suspicious scores at "the most celebrated elementary school in Texas:"
...a Dallas Morning News investigation has found strong evidence that at least some of the success at Wesley and two affiliated schools come from cheating.
"You're expected to cheat there," said Donna Garner, a former teacher at Wesley who said her fellow teachers instructed her on how to give students answers while administering tests. "There's no way those scores are real."
The News ' analysis found troubling gaps in test scores at Wesley, Highland Heights, and Osborne elementaries, which are all in the Acres Homes neighborhood in Houston. Scores swung wildly from year to year. Schools made jarring test-score leaps from mediocre to stellar in a year's time...
In 2003, fifth-graders in the three elementaries fared extremely well on the reading Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Collectively, they ranked in the top 10 percent of all Texas schools – outscoring high-performing suburban schools in places such as Grapevine, Lewisville and Allen. The fifth-graders' math scores were less spectacular but still slightly above the state average.
But a year later, the scores of those same students came crashing down. When they were sixth-graders at M.C. Williams Middle School, they finished in the bottom 10 percent of the state in both reading and math.
Emphasis mine. Sheesh. It's hard to understand why it took the district this long to consider a tracking system and external review.
Posted by kswygert at January 10, 2005 05:46 PM