Two South Bay schools face penalties for alleged cheating by teachers on standardized tests
After conducting self-implicating investigations, two schools in the South Bay are facing state penalties for alleged cheating by teachers on standardized tests.
At Adams Middle School in Redondo Beach, a math teacher allegedly dropped frequent hints and even gave outright answers to the class while administering the test. At ICEF Inglewood Elementary – a charter school – a teacher is accused of creating a study guide using actual questions from a standardized test, which schools typically receive a couple of weeks in advance of the exam date. Both were fired or encouraged to resign.
The improprieties came to light last week, with the state’s annual release of the Academic Performance Index – California’s most closely watched batch of test scores. For those two schools, there were blanks where a three-digit number should have been.
As a consequence to the so-called testing irregularities, the schools – both of them relatively strong performers – will not receive an API score for two years. They are also ineligible to receive statewide recognitions, such as the highly prized distinguished school award.
On the one hand, the events leading to the disqualifications underscore the high-stakes nature of California’s testing culture, which impels a small fraction of teachers to take shortcuts.
But they also reflect the state’s quirky method of uncovering suspect or negligent practices: In California, schools and local school districts are basically expected to police themselves. This means the ones who act diligently, wind up getting punished by the state (and, yes, the press) for their honesty.
“There’s an incentive to say nothing,” said Parker Hudnut, CEO of ICEF Public Schools, a nonprofit network of 14 charter schools in the South Los Angeles area. “But we wanted to do what was right, not what was convenient.”
Of the state’s roughly 10,000 public schools, 118 – including Adams and ICEF – were dinged for testing irregularities. All of the cases were self-reported. Last year witnessed 123 cases.
Administrators with the California Department of Education stress that many of the irregularities are the product not of cheating, but of honest mistakes, such as forgetting to remove a chart of multiplication tables from a bulletin board during the test.
But if the behavior or oversight creates the possibility of an unfair advantage for at least 5 percent of a school’s students, the state determines that an “adult regularity” has occurred.
“In most instances … it isn’t intentional or malicious,” said John Boivin, administrator for the state’s Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program. “The only time we use the word `cheating’ is for student cheating.”
In both South Bay incidents, however, it’s safe to say the teachers are accused of cheating.
At Adams Middle School, the case began with a tip from a parent who made an anonymous phone call to the school district.
The parent reported that the teacher, while administering a standardized math exam, gave the entire class of 35 eighth-graders the answer to a question, according to a state “irregularity report form” obtained by the Daily Breeze.
This triggered an investigation by district headquarters at Redondo Unified. Administrators went to the school and interviewed the teacher and some students. The officials concluded that the teacher was coaching students in the following ways:
Discussing the questions with individual students.
Reading the question aloud to the class and telling them to read the fine print.
Returning answer documents to students and encouraging them to check their answers.
At ICEF Inglewood, the investigation began with the discovery of a suspicious-looking sheet of paper accidentally left on a copy machine, Hudnut said. The document was taken to the office of the new principal, Shuron Owens-Lincoln, who suddenly faced a stark choice: conduct an investigation and risk schoolwide penalties during her first year on the job, or look the other way.
Ten students were interviewed in the ensuing investigation. The conclusion: The teacher created a study guide using specific test questions on the state’s fifth-grade standardized science test.
Hudnut, who spoke on behalf of the school, said he is proud of the leadership the new principal showed.
“It would have been far easier for her to sweep it under the rug,” he said. “It can be embarrassing, but we need to own it and we need to move on. … The bitter irony is, when you exclude the class, the (school’s) API went up significantly.”
For parents at Adams Middle School, the incident is old news, as the school district sent them a letter in July. The letter stated that although the school would lose its overall API score for two years, the students will still receive individual results.
It also stated that the irregularity increases the likelihood that Adams will become a Program Improvement school under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. This essentially means parents would receive letters informing them of their right to send their children to another school.
“We are sure you share our disappointment,” said the letter.
Deepening the wound for some is the fact that the teacher was popular.
“I liked her,” said a parent who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I can’t say anything bad about her. … She was very well-organized.”
He added, “A lot of students complained that she is pretty strict. But these days, kids don’t want to learn like they did in my day.”
Redondo Beach Superintendent Steven Keller tried to put the matter into perspective.
“This is an isolated incident, and does not represent the thousands of hardworking and dedicated South Bay teachers working for the betterment of our youth,” he said.
Last year, Animo Leadership charter high school in Inglewood was similarly penalized after students told administrators that some of the answers on their test booklets had been changed. An investigation discovered an unusually high number of erasure marks on the test in question, indicating that the teacher had made changes to boost the class’s performance.
Statewide, although all of this year’s cases were self-reported, a small number of districts – about 130 – were audited at random by the California Department of Education, officials there said. The audits turned up no instances of irregularities. But this year’s effort marked a return to conducting state audits, which ended for three years starting in 2009 due to budget cuts.