D.C. classrooms flagged for possible cheating on last year’s standardized tests will be under “intensive monitoring” as the 2012 D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System exams kick off Tuesday. Officials from the Office of the State Superintendent for Education, which oversees testing and regulates DC Public Schools and charter schools, will be at schools throughout the city. But the schools referred for further investigation last year will have multiple monitors, and the 71 specific classrooms under investigation will receive special attention from the extra sets of eyes, OSSE spokesman Marc Caposino said.
DC Public Schools also has assigned at least one full-time testing observer to each school, and required schools’ test coordinators and principals to submit detailed test plans.
“Only the most secure system will exonerate our students, teachers, administrators and our school system,” Chancellor Kaya Henderson wrote in an email to school staff.
The District has declined to identify the 71 classrooms spread across 30 DCPS schools and an unknown number of charter schools, maintaining that the teachers are innocent until proven guilty.
Indeed, the school system widened the scope of its oversight for the 2011 tests, recommending more classrooms for investigation than in the past for a broader variety of reasons: some had an unusual number of incorrect answers erased and changed to the right ones, while other classrooms simply made dramatic gains from one year to the next.
The decision followed increased public scrutiny after a USA Today investigation cast doubt on improvements seen at some of the District’s struggling schools. At Noyes Education Campus, the odds of changing so many wrong answers to the right ones was compared to winning a Powerball lottery; the implication was that teachers were doctoring the tests to improve their students’ scores.
Of 18 classrooms investigated last year, three had their scores thrown out for suspected or confirmed cheating. But when suspicions didn’t die down, Henderson called on the federal government to develop national standards to investigate cheating.
DCPS is considering putting less weight on student test scores for teacher evaluations, but staff says that decision is not related to the cheating investigations, The Washington Examiner reported Monday.
About 43 percent of DCPS students currently demonstrate proficiency on the reading and math standardized tests. In a memo to principals, Henderson said her goal is that 75 percent will be proficient by 2017, with double the number of students scoring at the “advanced” level on the exams.
