Testing: "Gaming the System?" May 12, 2008
Thursday, May 29, 2008

"Gaming the System?"

“Gaming the System?”

by Linda Perlstein
In March, Laurel Rosenhall of the Sacramento Bee visited schools in the advanced stages of “program improvement” to find out how they were trying to claw their way back to NCLB adequacy on state tests. What she saw in classrooms at Will C. Wood Middle School was common: longer language arts blocks, more dedicated reading time, rewards for students who read for fun. What the principal admitted to in an interview was less typical: After the school had missed AYP because of one category—African American students in math—he reclassified the race of a few children and pushed the subgroup below California’s n-size of 100.
 Laurel had learned, from interviews at the district, that some schools originally short of making AYP in 2007 had their status changed after a data correction; she knew that Will C. Wood was one of them. She also knew she had a story on her hands, she said, when a lead teacher at the school told her, “I know to a reporter it may seem like gaming the system, but you have to be really careful about how you report your data or you’ll never get out of program improvement.”
 Back at the newspaper, Laurel, who has covered education at the Bee for nearly six years, finished the school improvement story, which ran in late March. Except for a photo of a pancake breakfast held as a reading reward, Laurel only briefly mentioned Will C. Wood in the story, because of questions raised by the reclassification.
Meanwhile, she requested databases from the California Department of Education showing, at several points in time, which schools had made AYP in 2007. The department was cooperative: Five days later, CDs were ready for her to pick up. There was a huge amount of data: many, many fields across 6,000 Title I schools. Fortunately, Laurel had the help of colleague Phillip Reese, the Bee’s go-to guy for database reporting. Phillip set up queries in Access to identify the 113 schools that had had their AYP status changed after the initial release of test results.
 Laurel chose a few to look at more closely, including Will C. Wood. According to Laurel, when she called the principal, Jim Wong, to say she wanted to follow up on something that had arisen in their interview, he said, “I had a feeling you would come back to that.” Wong didn’t seem thrilled to hear from her; nonetheless, he was forthright. In his mind, because the students he reclassified were biracial and he got permission from their parents to change their identification, what he was doing was above board. And the staff was still very proud of making AYP.
 On April 27, the Bee published “Schools Reclassify Students, Pass Test Under Federal Law.” Depending on your point of view, Wong may not have come out smelling very sweet. Consider this quote: “You get a kid that's half black, half white. What are you going to put him down as? If one kid makes the difference and I can go white, that gets me out of trouble.” But in the end, though Wong wasn’t thrilled with the attention, Laurel said he told her the story was fair and accurate.
 I think that one reason Laurel could write this piece and not wind up with a defensive, bitter source is that she didn’t play “gotcha.” It’s important, when you visit a school for one purpose, that you are very careful about sticking to your proclaimed agenda. If you see or hear something that you think would make a good, different story, come back to it. Re-report. Another key point is that Laurel let the staff of Will C. Wood have their say: Wong got to show everything the school is doing academically to improve test performance, and he was able to explain the pressures educators are under.
 Laurel tried to find out, from Education Trust and the U.S. Department of Education, whether other states allow this kind of demographic reclassification after the fact. Nobody she spoke with knew the answer. Here’s where you come in. This is a story any beat reporter could replicate. From conception to publication, the piece took Laurel only three or four weeks, with only one week working on this exclusively. You may have to resort to a FOIA if your state isn’t as cooperative as California was; you may have to look a little harder to find someone who can help with the databases. But a search for this kind of data manipulation tells readers a lot about the pressures of No Child Left Behind and the ways schools and districts find to give the appearance of improvement.