When Michelle Rhee resigned as chancellor of D.C. Public Schools last fall, she left behind a legacy of school closings, teacher accountability, and rising test scores. But those apparently weren’t the only marks left during Rhee’s tenure.
According to a report from USA Today last week, classrooms in 96 schools were flagged for an inordinate number of erasures on correct answers on the 2008 D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System. Over the past three years, dozens of D.C. schools have seen a statistically abnormal amount of corrections on standardized tests, implying that teachers possibly cheated to significantly improve test scores.
Among the flagged schools were some of the District’s top performers, including a number singled out by Rhee for awards and financial bonuses. Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus, a National Blue Ribbon School, saw some of the largest erasures, with students correcting answers more than 12 times more frequently than their peers on one 2009 test.
While an elevated number of corrections alone does not prove wrongdoing, their pervasive and recurring nature makes their appearance by chance unlikely. Rhee’s aggressive approach to reform, which tied teachers’ and administrators’ fates to their students’ performance, incentivized fraudulently boosting test scores. Teachers whose students consistently posted low scores faced termination, and administrators were on an even shorter leash. Principals, some of whom worked with one-year contracts, were sometimes expected to increase scores by 10 percentile points per year.
In 2009, Caveon Test Security was hired by the city to investigate the erasures. Caveon found no evidence of cheating, but the firm did not perform independent analysis of test results and only interviewed teachers in the presence of DCPS officials.
In the wake of USA Today’s revelations, DCPS acting chancellor Kaya Henderson asked the D.C. inspector general to conduct a more rigorous investigation into the test corrections. She should be applauded for taking this step, but as Henderson begins to lead the post-Rhee public school system, she needs to correct the mistakes of her predecessor. While performance-based evaluation is important, Rhee’s high-stakes testing went too far. Because pressure on school employees was so high, that focus on outcomes dealt a blow to actual learning. Henderson should begin by expanding the evaluation period for teachers and administrators and setting more realistic goals for school improvement. She should also reduce the importance of test scores in teacher assessments in favor of more emphasis on in-class evaluations, which are more likely to accurately capture a teacher’s ability.
This week, thousands of students are taking the 2011 version of the DC CAS. Henderson and DCPS face a number of questions, chief among them the relevance and reliability of standardized testing. Like their students, they better check their answers carefully.
