Two Carroll County teachers accused of cheating on a standardized test will have their teaching certificates revoked within a few days if they don?t respond to the charges.
“A letter indicating that [Nancy Grasmick], state superintendent [of schools], intended to take action on the revocation of the certificates went out early last week, and they had 10 calendar days to respond,” Bill Reinhard, spokesman for the state Department of Education, said Wednesday in an interview with The Examiner.
If the certificates are revoked, the teachers will have to wait 10 years before they could apply for reconsideration of the revocations, he said.
The teachers recently resigned from the school system.
“I think their certifications should be revoked because of what was done,” said Charles Ecker, Carroll County superintendent of schools, who declined to identify the women.
“Teachers sign a statement that they won?t do these things.”
Ecker asked that the teaching certificates of the fourth-grade teachers at Linton Springs and Mount Airy elementary schools be revoked after the Linton Springs teacher admitted to copying questions from a previous Maryland School Assessment reading test and creating a worksheet that was shared with a Mount Airy teacher.
That teacher also shared the worksheet with other teachers at the school who did not know the questions had been copied from a previous MSA test, said Ecker.
Some teachers at Mount Airy who received copies of the worksheet informed the school principal of the similarities between questions on the worksheet and those on the MSA test taken by students in March.
Reinhard said teachers are prohibited from copying and reproducing “secure” test questions. He said sample test items are available to teachers on the state?s Web site.
When asked if the motive for the teachers? actions might have been related to the pressure to achieve good test results under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, Reinhard said, “It?s never been right to cheat, and it has nothing to do with No Child Left Behind. But it has everything to do with assessing kids properly.”
Ecker said the school system always has met progress goals under the law.
