AJC Takes Its ‘Cheating’ Show on the Road, to Mixed Reviews*
*This blog has been updated and corrected to reflect additional
information from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and with
comment from Robert Schaeffer, public education director of Fair
Test.
School districts across the country are on the defensive because
of an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation that has
been raising questions about the validity of ‘suspect’ test
scores at their campuses – news that’s perceived by some
educators as being even more damaging because the source is an
out-of-town newspaper with a limited view of local schools.
The AJC spent seven months examining student test data requested
from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The resulting
stories in the
“Cheating Our Children” series allege that suspicious test
score patterns – which alone are not evidence of cheating – were
found in 196 of the nation’s 3,125 largest school districts.
I had previously written that the paper’s methodology has been
challenged by some educators and researchers. In a written
response to that statement, the AJC told me it developed the
methodology “with the help of four prominent experts in
statistics and testing” and “was also guided by an understanding
of what cheating looks like in test-score data that emerged from
Georgia’s confirmation of widespread cheating in Atlanta
schools.”
The fallout from the series has been significant. The public
schools in Mobile, Ala. — and the local newspaper,
the Press-Register –
have taken particular exception to the AJC’s reporting.
In an interview with the Press-Register, Bert Roughton,
managing editor of the AJC, said the newspaper did not accuse any
school system of cheating.
“Nowhere do we assert this is absolute proof that we have found
cheating. We say that we found something that looks serious,”
Roughton said. “People who say that we have accused them of
cheating aren’t reading what we wrote carefully. The test scores
are suspicious. There’s a high likelihood of human
interference.”
That explanation did not satisfy the Press-Register’s
editorial board,
which wrote that “regardless of managing editor Burt
Roughton’s protestation that ‘nowhere do we assert this is
absolute proof that we have found cheating,’ the insinuation is
unmistakable. Now, despite the adage that it’s impossible to
prove a negative, Mobile County school leaders have no choice but
to try. The honor of their teachers and pupils is at stake.”
The AJC named individual districts in its first batch of stories
in March. This month, the reporting focused on individual schools
which received the prestigious “Blue Ribbon” from the U.S.
Department of Education, an honor that is supposed to recognize
significant and sustained student achievement. (There were just
256 public schools to earn the honor in 2011.) Dozens of Blue
Ribbon schools had “statistically improbable” test score gains
that were unlikely to have occurred without manipulation, the AJC
concluded.
The AJC’s findings didn’t sit well with the U.S. Department of
Education. With the right leadership and instructional support,
dramatic gains are possible, said department spokesman Daren
Briscoe.
“The implication of the AJC article – that dramatic school
improvement is impossible, or that some students are too
disadvantaged to make significant academic progress in a short
time, is troubling,” Briscoe said in a written response to a
request for comment. “Students in disadvantaged communities don’t
have to cheat in order to compete academically with their more
privileged peers.”
But one observer — Jay Mathews, a longtime education journalist
and author of the Washington Post’s “Class Struggles”
column— said he was disappointed by what he perceived as an
implicit part of Briscoe’s defense.
“They’ve decided to take the political route and tarnish
anyone who raises the possibility of cheating as saying that
disadvantaged kids just can’t do it,” Mathews told me.
Mathews also took issue with the AJC’s investigation for
singling out Highland Elementary in Silver Spring, Md., for
no reason other than its student achievement scores fit the
paper’s profile for “suspicious” gains.
Montgomery County Schools Superintendent Joshua Starr released a
statement calling the AJC report irresponsible journalism, and
also said that the improved test scores were the result of hard
work, leadership and a motivated staff, according to the Maryland
Gazette.
The lack of complaints about cheating at Highland Elementary
“does not prove the absence of improper activities. nor do the
score changes prove that there was cheating,” said Robert
Schaeffer, public education director for Fair Test.
“I have no idea what really took place,” said Schaeffer, whose
organization advocates for appropriate use of standardized
testing. “But the zig-zag
pattern of test scores should be more than sufficient to
justify an in-depth, independent review using an array of
forensic tools.”
The statements by Starr and the Education Department “dismissing
the AJC’s story by attacking the messenger should be dismissed as
self-serving and irrelevant,” Schaeffer said. “The data require
more facts, not more rhetoric.”
Last spring, in the wake of USA Today’s
extensive investigation examining the validity of the
District of Columbia Public Schools’ unusually large gains in
student test scores, Mathews wrote a column urging U.S. Secretary
of Education Arne Duncan to
“take back the Blue Ribbon” if it turned out cheating could
be proved.
In our conversation, Mathews said he couldn’t fairly criticize
federal education officials without pointing to what he saw as
related oversights by his own employer. Each year, the
Post chooses the recipients of its Distinguished
Educational Leadership Award, and relies on local school district
officials to make the nominations. One of the nominees was
principal of a school that had been singled out in the USA
Today report for suspect student achievement, and the
Post should have done its own due diligence before handing
out the award, Mathews said.
“We trusted the district to come up with that name, and we should
have been more careful,” Mathews said. “I’m going to be critical
of Arne Duncan but I’m also going to be critical of the
Washington Post.”
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