D.C. Public Schools fired a teacher for a “confirmed testing impropriety” during this spring’s round of standardized testing, Chancellor Kaya Henderson told The Washington Examiner.
Henderson declined to name the teacher or the school, and said she could not elaborate on the nature of the “impropriety.”
D.C. school officials investigated 14 security breaches on the 2011 DC Comprehensive Assessment System, or DC CAS, after throwing out 2010 scores from three classrooms with “evidence or a strong suspicion of a test security violation.”
The scores from the fired teacher’s classroom were not included in Friday’s release of the 2011 scores, Henderson said.
The Office of the State Superintendent for Education investigated 18 classrooms with a suspicious number of incorrect answers erased and corrected during the 2010 testing.
The results of three classrooms were thrown out. “Two classrooms had possible testing irregularities and one classroom had a confirmed case of testing impropriety,” a spokeswoman for Henderson said.
The D.C. inspector general is investigating similar patterns on the 2009 exams, which drew public outcry after USA Today wrote an article comparing the odds of changing so many incorrect answers to the correct ones with winning the lottery.
Teachers and parents said the gains made under former Chancellor Michelle Rhee weren’t necessarily real, but perhaps a result of teachers feeling pressure to increase their students’ scores under Impact, the new teacher evaluation tool that links half of a teacher’s permance to student testing gains.
The Washington Post reported that the U.S. Department of Education has become active in the cheating probe.
A widespread cheating scandal in Atlanta Public Schools rocked the nation earlier this week.
Fired up, Henderson told reporters on Friday that the difference between Atlanta and her school system was “confirmed cases of cheating” – Atlanta had them, and D.C. Public Schools was full of cases of “conjecture.”
“I can’t fire people or yank licenses on conjecture,” Henderson said. “I won’t do that to my teachers.”
