From Donna Garner:

QUOTE FROM THE ARTICLE:

"The Key Middle School teacher told union representatives last year that a school administrator gave her and her colleagues advance copies of the 2004 test for their students to use as practice exams, said Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers. The teachers had believed the materials, which they found in their mailboxes, were copies of the prior year's exam, which Texas teachers routinely use to prepare their students for the TAKS, Fallon said."

Teacher tried to report test cheating, union says
HISD allegedly wouldn't grant her immunity; now an office on oversight is being created
By JASON SPENCER, Houston Chronicle, January 8, 2005

A Key Middle School teacher tried to report cheating on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test last spring but gave up when the Houston school district's top lawyer refused to grant her immunity from punishment, the teachers' union president said Friday.

Key is one of 25 Houston Independent School District campuses under investigation because of uncharacteristically high scores on the TAKS.

HISD Superintendent Abe Saavedra announced Thursday that he would create an Office of Inspector General to scrutinize those scores to determine whether they resulted from legitimate academic improvement or cheating. The move was prompted by newspaper reports highlighting suspicious test performance at nearly 400 schools statewide.

The Key Middle School teacher told union representatives last year that a school administrator gave her and her colleagues advance copies of the 2004 test for their students to use as practice exams, said Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers. The teachers had believed the materials, which they found in their mailboxes, were copies of the prior year's exam, which Texas teachers routinely use to prepare their students for the TAKS, Fallon said.

"The teachers were given the test and didn't realize what they'd been given," she said. They didn't realize what had happened until test day, Fallon said.

But when a union representative approached chief HISD attorney Elneita Hutchins-Taylor and offered to have the teacher give a statement in return for immunity, Hutchins-Taylor declined, Fallon said.

"They wouldn't give us a guarantee for the whistleblower," she said. "As far as I know, nothing was done."

Hutchins-Taylor did not return a phone call seeking comment Friday. HISD spokesman Terry Abbott said district officials would not discuss the ongoing investigation.

Key, in northeast Houston, recently received an "acceptable" state rating on the strength of last year's passing rates on the test. The school, where 97 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, was one of 21 HISD campuses tagged as "low-performing" the last time the state rated schools in 2002.

Allegations elsewhere

HISD administrators have been accused in another case of not taking teachers' allegations of cheating seriously. Former Wesley Elementary teacher Donna Garner voiced concerns about cheating at her school during a school board meeting in 2003. District officials initiated an investigation at the time but failed to follow through until November, when Hutchins-Taylor suggested hiring an outside law firm to investigate.

On Thursday, Saavedra acknowledged the district dropped the ball on the Wesley investigation but stopped short of blaming his predecessor, recently retired Superintendent Kaye Stripling.

"It's unacceptable that we have not had quick responses," Saavedra said. "This thing should have been investigated a long time ago."

Saavedra has vowed to root out potential cheating on standardized tests, in part by protecting teachers who come forward with information.

One proposal is to set up a special cheating hotline to operate during testing. Reports from that hotline would go directly to the inspector general.

Fallon has endorsed Saavedra's plan for addressing the allegations and said she believes it will encourage more teachers to report wrongdoing.

Obligation to speak up

Even without the promise of protection, the Key teacher still had a duty to report her suspicions, said Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency. The teacher could have notified the TEA directly but still would have been required to give her name, Rat-cliffe said.

"Any person who fails to report such a violation may be penalized," Ratcliffe said. Those penalties could include the suspension or revocation of the teacher's certification, she said.

Texas Commissioner of Education Shirley Neeley has scheduled a Monday press conference to discuss the cheating allegations and possible improvements for the state's test security system.

KHOU-Channel 11 contributed information for the origination of this report.

jason.spencer@chron.com

Houston school chief to probe cheating reports
CNN.com, January 7, 2005

HOUSTON, Texas (AP) -- The Houston school district's new superintendent wants to create an inspector general office to investigate reports of rampant cheating on the state's standardized achievement test.

Abe Saavedra, who was named to the top post last month, also said Thursday that hundreds of monitors will be sent to schools for the February and April cycles of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

The moves come after an investigation by The Dallas Morning News found strong evidence that educators were helping students cheat at dozens of Houston schools and nearly 400 schools statewide.

The newspaper investigation said teachers and administrators were giving students answers or altering test documents to improve student scores.

Saavedra said the Houston district is investigating irregularities at more than a dozen schools where students had shown "growth so excessive that it's hard to explain."

Many of the schools are among the state's most lauded, including Wesley Elementary, which had been held up by President Bush and many conservative education activists as a model for urban schools nationwide.

Saavedra said he will ask the school board next week to approve creation of the inspector general office, which would be led by Robert Moore, district assistant superintendent for internal audit.

Houston Federation of Teachers President Gayle Fallon said she's seen Saavedra's plan and is encouraged that he will make it easier for teachers to report administrators who encourage cheating.

"Most teachers, if left alone, are not going to cheat," she said.

DISD probing TAKS scores
FW also joins Houston in investigating schools that might have cheated
By JOSHUA BENTON, The Dallas Morning News, January 7, 2005

The Dallas and Fort Worth school districts are investigating dozens of their schools for possible cheating on the TAKS test.

The schools were identified by a Dallas Morning News investigation that found suspect scores at nearly 400 schools statewide – schools where test scores swung unexpectedly from poor to stellar.

"Cheating will not be tolerated," Dallas interim Superintendent Larry Groppel said in a statement. "We will thoroughly examine the scope of potential past improprieties."

Dallas is examining scores at 35 schools across the district. The district requested access to The News' findings Friday, more than three weeks after the newspaper first reported that dozens of Dallas schools were suspect.

Fort Worth is looking into scores at eight of its schools identified by The News.

"This is serious business," interim Superintendent Joe Ross said. "We've got to look into it, no ifs, ands or buts."

The districts' moves came a day after the Houston school district announced a series of changes to prevent teachers from cheating on the TAKS, also prompted by the News investigation. Houston's changes include sending monitors to classrooms on test day – a move Dallas says it will match – and creating an investigative department.

Dallas officials began investigating one school, Harrell Budd Elementary in east Oak Cliff, last month after The News found it had one of the most suspicious scoring patterns in the state.

Last year, Budd's third-graders finished in the bottom 4 percent of the state in reading, but its fourth-graders had the second-highest scores of more than 3,000 Texas schools. The only school to top it was a Houston magnet school for gifted children. That's despite the fact that 40 percent of Budd's student body has trouble speaking English.

But the district did not look into the other schools until after Houston ISD announced it was examining scores at all the district's schools and investigating more than 20 schools.

One of the mechanisms that Dallas officials will use in their investigations is comparing TAKS scores with performance on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, another test that Dallas students take.

Donald Claxton, DISD spokesman, said the district has established that the high-scoring students at Harrell Budd didn't fare nearly as well on the lower-stakes Iowa Test. He said the Budd investigation should be concluded by the end of January.

Looking forward, Dallas officials said they would place monitors into many of the district's schools on TAKS testing days this spring. Mr. Claxton said the number of monitors was secret – "We want to keep the element of surprise" – but that it would probably be between 100 and 200.

Houston officials have said they will use between 300 and 600 monitors in their district, which is about 30 percent larger than Dallas.

In addition, Mr. Claxton said the district will provide additional training for teachers.

Mr. Ross, the Fort Worth superintendent, said he had examined The News' findings and said a district inquiry was necessary.

Fort Worth's most unusual scores were at A.M. Pate Elementary, where last spring's fifth-grade scores spiked unexpectedly from the year before. In 2004, those students finished in the top 5 percent of Texas. The year before, when those same students were fourth-graders, they finished in the bottom 3 percent of the state.

"I don't want to say anything to cast doubts on anyone at this point in time," Mr. Ross said of the schools under scrutiny, "because there may be a logical reason for the scores. But statistically it looks odd."

Both Dallas and Fort Worth officials said they plan to start performing the sort of statistical analysis The News did each year so officials can detect suspect schools without help from the media. So did an official in the Austin school district, where seven schools had statistically unusual swings in test scores.

"We definitely want to go ahead and start doing something like this on our own," said Holly Williams, director of the district's department of program evaluation. "We wish we had thought of it."

The Texas Education Agency has the ability to perform a similar analysis on all Texas schools, including those in smaller districts that may not have the technical capacity to do it on their own.

But officials choose not to, saying that unexplainable swings in scores are only circumstantial evidence and that the agency does not have the staff to duplicate The News' work. State Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley and other state officials are holding a news conference Monday to address the Texas Education Agency's reaction to the newspaper's findings.

E-mail jbenton@dallasnews.com

Exclusive: Poor schools' TAKS surges raise cheating questions
By JOSHUA BENTON and HOLLY K. HACKER, The Dallas Morning News, December 18, 2004

A Dallas Morning News data analysis has uncovered strong evidence of organized, educator-led cheating on the TAKS test in dozens of Texas schools – and suspicious scores in hundreds more.

The analysis found a poor urban school where third- and fifth-graders are among the state's weakest readers – but the fourth-graders beat out the state's most elite schools. That's despite the fact that many of its students have trouble speaking English.

About this series

For this story, The Dallas Morning News analyzed school test scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Now in its second year, the exam is required for public-school students in grades three through 11.

The state focuses on school passing rates on the TAKS – that is, the percentage of students who met state standards. The News analysis used average scale scores, a more specific measure based on the number of questions answered correctly. Those scores reveal which schools are squeaking by on the test and which ones are acing it.

Reading and math scores in grades three through 11 were examined at every school in the state that tested at least 30 students – more than 7,700 campuses.

The scores were analyzed in three main ways:

• By comparing 2004 reading and math scores within a single grade – for instance, fourth-grade reading vs. fourth-grade math.

• By comparing 2004 scores in a single subject from one grade to the next – for example, fourth-grade math vs. fifth-grade math, or ninth-grade reading vs. 10th-grade reading.

• By tracking scores for a group of students from one year to the next – for example, third-grade reading in 2003 vs. fourth-grade reading in 2004.

Much of the analysis used a statistical tool called regression. It studies the relationship between two or more variables, such as fifth-grade math scores and fifth-grade reading scores.

In each case, a strong relationship between the sets of scores emerged. For instance, schools that did well on the fifth-grade reading test tended to excel in fifth-grade math. Schools with low scores in 10th-grade math typically had disappointing scores in ninth- and 11th-grade math.

Regression also can be used to make predictions based on these relationships. An educated guess about eighth-grade reading can be made if a school's average score in seventh-grade reading is known.

In some cases, however, there were aberrations.

Case in point: Sanderson Elementary School in Houston scored 2068 in fourth-grade math, in the bottom 2 percent of the state. Given that number, Sanderson would be expected to score 2086 in fifth-grade math. Instead, it scored 2696, 610 points higher than expected and the highest score in the state. By comparison, 70 percent of schools scored within 64 points of their predicted score, and 96 percent scored within 128 points.

Sanderson's top score is also surprising given its economic makeup: Thirty-seven out of the 38 kids who took the fifth-grade math test are poor. Education researchers have long found a relationship between test scores and poverty: the higher the poverty rate, the lower the test score, due to the many challenges that poor families face.

While Sanderson Elementary is an extreme case, it's not the only school to score much higher than the statistical model predicted. Statewide, more than 200 schools have scores that are highly abnormal.

The News also identified schools with suspicious scores by ranking them from best to worst in the state, and comparing their standing across years, subjects or grades.

Wilmer Elementary School in Dallas County, for instance, ranked first in the state in third-grade reading but in the bottom 20 percent of schools in fourth-grade reading. Testing experts say such wide swings are suspicious and warrant a closer look. Wilmer Elementary is under state investigation, following an earlier News story and analysis.

Holly K. Hacker

It found a desperately impoverished school where the fourth-graders have trouble adding and subtracting – but nearly all the fifth-graders got perfect scores on the math portion of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

And it found schools where in one year's time – if the scores are to be believed – children devolved from top students to barely being able to read.

The News' findings have led to cheating inquiries in three Texas school districts, including the state's two largest, Dallas and Houston. One of the schools under investigation is a National Blue Ribbon School that a year ago was touted by federal officials as an example of top academic achievement.

"It's very disturbing that this is happening," Dallas schools spokesman Donald Claxton said of data showing unusual swings in test scores at Harrell Budd Elementary. "There will be a broad-scoped, complete investigation. If there's cheating going on, we want to stop it."

The investigation raises serious questions about the ability of the state's accountability system to reliably measure how schools are performing. The Texas system provided the model for No Child Left Behind, the federal law that measures the quality of all U.S. public schools and punishes those that don't meet standards.

"My sense is that we're seeing a change in culture," said Jim Impara, a former state assessment director in Florida and Oregon. "When you have a system where test scores have real impact on teachers' lives, you're more likely to see teachers willing to cheat."

Houston example

The News' analysis is based on examining scale scores – the little-known numbers behind the passing rates that typically get public attention. The investigation searched for schools with unusual gaps in performance between grades or subjects. Research has shown that schools that are weak in one subject or one grade are typically weak in others.

Take Sanderson Elementary, a school in a poor Houston area.

In 2003, after years of mediocre performance, it reached what has traditionally been the pinnacle for American schools: The U.S. Department of Education named Sanderson a Blue Ribbon School because of rapid improvement in its test scores.

But the News' analysis raises questions about the validity of Sanderson's TAKS performance, particularly in fifth-grade math.

Sanderson's fourth-graders scored extremely poorly on the math TAKS test. Their average scale score was so low that it ranked Sanderson in the bottom 2 percent of the state: No. 3,173 out of 3,227 schools.

That's roughly what might be expected from a school where 98 percent of the student body is poor enough to qualify for free or reduced lunches. Hundreds of research studies have found that student poverty is the single most important factor in student academic achievement.

But Sanderson's fifth-graders had astonishing success on the math test. They had the highest scale scores of any school in Texas, beating every magnet school, every wealthy suburban school and every high-performing school in the state.

Sanderson didn't just finish No. 1. No other school in the state was even close. In scale-score points, the distance between Sanderson and the No. 2 school was as large as the gap between No. 2 and No. 116. More than 90 percent of Sanderson's fifth-graders got perfect or near-perfect scores.

'Educational steroids'

Tom Haladyna, a professor at Arizona State University who studies cheating, said that level of improvement between grades is extremely unusual. He compared it to a weekend duffer beating Tiger Woods by 10 strokes, or a scrub softball player hitting 80 home runs in the major leagues: theoretically conceivable but realistically impossible.

"They're using educational steroids," he said.

Those "steroids" were apparently used only on the TAKS test. Just eight weeks before Sanderson fifth-graders took the TAKS, they took a different standardized test, the Stanford Achievement Test. They didn't fare well, finishing below the national average.

Sanderson's principal, James Metoyer, directed all questions about scores to district officials. Houston Superintendent Abe Saavedra issued a written statement to The News.

"At HISD, our credibility and integrity must remain absolutely beyond question," Dr. Saavedra wrote last week. "For that reason, I have asked for a full and thorough investigation of the circumstances surrounding the math scores of this one group of fifth graders."

Dr. Saavedra said the district had reassigned two Sanderson teachers to "other duties" while the district and the state investigate the school's test scores. He also said Mr. Metoyer, the principal, had asked to be reassigned "in order to protect the credibility and the integrity of this investigation."

Dallas school officials reacted similarly when The News informed them last week of problems with the test scores at Harrell Budd Elementary in southern Dallas.

At Budd, the questions involve the fourth grade, where results in both reading and math were questionable. In the third grade, Budd's students finished in the bottom 4 percent of the state in reading. Not unusual, considering nearly 95 percent of its students are poor and more than 40 percent have limited English skills.

But Budd's fourth-graders were worldbeaters. In reading, they had the second-highest scores in the state, beating schools in Highland Park, Plano and every other high-wealth district. The only school to finish ahead of them was a Houston magnet school for gifted children. Budd's fourth-graders fared almost as well in math, ranking in the top 2 percent of Texas.

After The News reported its findings to district officials, the district launched a cheating investigation at Budd. "We'll find out how extensive the problems are," said Mr. Claxton, the district spokesman. "We're trying to get to the bottom of it."

More than 200 schools

The score swings at Sanderson and Budd were the two most extreme of any of the 7,700 Texas schools whose scores The News analyzed. But they weren't the only ones.

More than 200 schools had large, unexplained score gaps between grades or between tests. In statisticians' lingo, these schools had at least one average scale score that was more than three standard deviations away from what would be predicted based on their scores in other grades or on other tests.

In some cases, there may be legitimate explanations for such gaps. School attendance boundaries could have changed dramatically. Or a new public housing development might have radically changed the composition of a school's student body.

But researchers said that large differences between tests are generally signs of something amiss.

"If you see big swings in those numbers, I think we should raise our eyebrows and say this is very, very unusual," Dr. Haladyna said.

The schools most likely to make the list are high-poverty, urban schools, which often feel the strongest pressure to raise scores.

Houston had the most schools with large gaps: 25 out of the district's 307 schools. Dallas had 21, out of 219 total. Fort Worth had six schools on the list, and no other Texas district had more than three.

Using a stricter standard – four standard deviations from predictions – 41 schools have suspect scores.

The most common pattern involved the third-grade reading TAKS test. Students generally must pass the test to be promoted to fourth grade. That puts more pressure on teachers.

Some examples:

• Houston's Gallegos Elementary. In 2003, Gallegos' third-graders finished in the bottom 8 percent of the state. In 2004, third-graders zoomed up to the top 2 percent. But the school's reading scores in other grades remained weak.

• Dallas' Margaret Henderson Elementary, one of Texas' worst schools. It was one of only two North Texas schools to earn the state's "low performing" label from 2001 to 2003. But in 2004, Henderson's third-graders leapt to the state's 73rd percentile in reading. Fourth- and fifth-graders remained in the bottom 5 percent of the state.

Wilmer school

The News began its data analysis in October, when questions were raised about the validity of test scores in the troubled Wilmer-Hutchins school district.

The analysis found strong evidence of cheating at Wilmer Elementary, a long-underachieving school that rocketed to the best third-grade reading scores in the state. Since the analysis was published, several teachers and students have supported the allegations of TAKS cheating, and the Texas Education Agency has launched an investigation.

In Brownsville, Garza Elementary has scoring patterns similar to Wilmer's. Its fourth- and fifth-graders did poorly on the state's English-language reading test in 2004. Fourth-graders finished in the bottom 11 percent of the state. Fifth-graders were worse: in the bottom 4 percent, 3,336th out of 3,453 schools statewide.

Like Wilmer, Garza teaches the very poor; only three of its 810 students did not qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches. More than three-quarters of its students are considered "limited English proficient" under state definitions.

And, like Wilmer, Garza's students finished in the state's top 2 percent on the third-grade reading test. Almost two-thirds of its students got perfect or near-perfect scores.

Even Brownsville's superintendent thought Garza's third-grade scores were unusual. "I thought, 'That's too good,' " Michael Zolkowski said.

TEA officials are investigating. But district officials have said the inquiry is limited to questions about one or two students' answer sheets, which would not explain the massive score swing.

Researchers differ on how common it is for teachers to cheat. But most agree it is more common than officials like to acknowledge.

John Fremer, who led the team that developed the new version of the SAT, estimates that between 1 and 2 percent of teachers cheat on their students' behalf on standardized tests. Because those classrooms are spread out among schools, he estimates cheating skews the scores of 3 to 5 percent of schools.

A recent Harvard study of testing in Chicago schools found organized, educator-led cheating in about 4 percent of classrooms, 6 percent when schools with low scores faced consequences.

In an anonymous survey of Arizona teachers by Dr. Haladyna, 11 percent said they improperly helped students on 1991 state tests.

Dr. Impara said that when he started in the testing business in the 1960s, cheating on standardized tests was barely a concern.

"There were almost no stakes attached," said Dr. Impara, who with Dr. Fremer has formed a private test-security company. "The test was intended to provide information on student performance."

Changes in Texas

That started to change in Texas in the early 1990s, with the birth of the state's accountability system. School passing rates were made public and broadcast widely. Schools earned ratings based on their passing rates. The idea: shaming low-performing schools publicly would encourage them to get their ratings up.

Now, in many districts, scores are the key factor in evaluating the performance of superintendents, principals and teachers.

Dr. Haladyna said schools should be able to explain wide gaps in scores if they are not cheating.

"Every time you see one of these schools," he said, "you have the right to ask the question, 'How did you do it?' There has to be a program, a method that's producing these results. 'We just tried harder' is not an acceptable answer."

"We just worked real hard" was the explanation given by Geraldine Hobson, principal of Wilmer Elementary, when she was asked last month about Wilmer's astounding third-grade scores. She resigned less than two weeks later.

The News' method of looking for unusual test scores does not catch all cheaters. It does not, for instance, detect schools that cheat consistently across multiple grades and multiple subjects.

It also doesn't catch more subtle cheaters. A teacher who gives students a few correct answers on test day could raise her students' scores enough for them to pass, but not enough for a huge score increase that might draw attention.

"You're catching the dumb cheaters," Dr. Haladyna said of the analysis. "The smart cheaters you're not going to be able to detect."

Tomorrow: How TEA policies let teachers get away with cheating.

E-mail jbenton@dallasnews.com and hhacker@dallasnews.com

HISD plan: Fight fraud on the cheap
Rick Casey, Houston Chronicle, January 8, 2004

How seriously should we take the Houston Independent School District's pledge to do a better job of policing cheating on the all-important TAKS test?

Consider:

• Schools Superintendent Abe Saavedra is promised a $60,000 performance bonus. One of the key measures is the district's performance on that test.
• District administrators can earn $20,000 in performance bonuses.
• School principals can get bonuses up to $5,000.
• Classroom teachers can earn $800.
In total, the district shells out about $7 million in bonuses based in good part on TAKS performance.

In addition, the district pays $150,000 annually to PR man Terry Abbott, whose four-member staff's sole purpose is to maximize good publicity for the district and prevent or minimize bad publicity.

These are some of the resources devoted to pumping up test scores and good news.

So how much funding is the district committing to Saavedra's bold new effort to root out academic fraud?

Zilch. Zero. Nada.

A scary title
In the wake of a statewide analysis by the Dallas Morning News that found powerful evidence of TAKS cheating in HISD and several other school districts, Saavedra announced that his staff found 23 HISD schools with suspect scores.

He's appointed veteran staff auditor Robert Moore to lead the effort.

Has he given Moore extra staff? No.

Has he given Moore extra money? No.

Has he promised him a performance bonus for any cheating he finds? No.

Saavedra has, however, armed Moore with a powerful title. Instead of assistant superintendent for internal audit, he is now inspector general!

That should strike fear into any would-be cheaters.

The problem here is not Saavedra and Moore. The problem is the culture of school boards in general and the HISD board in particular.

Myth versus money
Americans have long accepted the myth that schools are somehow different than other governmental endeavors. They should be lightly governed by polite trustees who understand that staff and teachers are dedicated, virtuous people untainted by the faults that abide in the rest of humanity.

The reality is that the Houston Independent School District is, by far, the largest employer in Harris County.

With a budget of $1.3 billion, it employs 31,500 people.

According to the Houston Business Journal 2005 Book of Lists, the second-largest employer is the city of Houston, with 10,000 fewer employees.

Third is Shell Oil, with 18,000 Harris County employees.

You don't have to be Solomon to figure out that if you have 31,000 employees and let them know their futures depend on getting children to pencil in the right dots, some of them will do whatever it takes to get their children to pencil in the right dots.

Not only should no one be shocked, but the board should have set up a system designed to anticipate fraud and deal with it.

Why the board and not the superintendent? Because the only other folks in the school district who don't have a financial interest in TAKS scores - custodians, cafeteria workers and bus drivers - don't have any power.

The citizens of Houston in November voted to give the city controller the authority to conduct independent investigations of city programs. We want somebody other than the mayor and his staff to be able to tell us whether city programs are well run and city money well spent.

Similarly, large corporations have internal auditors who report directly to the directors.

But school trustees, part-time and unpaid, have only one source of in-depth information on the district's operations: the executive whose job, salary and bonus depend on their good impressions.

HISD is far too large and important an endeavor for a governing arrangement designed for small, 19th century communities.

There is, of course, no certainty that school trustees, any more than corporate trustees, would use an independent auditing arm wisely. (We saw how they dealt with the assistant principal who blew the whistle on fraudulent dropout figures.)

And it may be that a change in state law would be required for trustees to set up a well-funded and well-staffed internal auditing arm reporting to them.

But without the information such an office can give trustees, we can only expect that the large school bureaucracies will continue to behave like other unchecked bureaucracies - ignoring or covering up problems when they can, and taking minimum actions to deal with them when they must.

You can write to Rick Casey at P.O. Box 4260, Houston, TX 77210, or e-mail him at rick.casey@chron.com.

Neeley still cheerleader, not sheriff
By RICK CASEY, Houston Chronicle, January 11, 2005

Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley surrounded herself with a posse Monday to announce that the state of Texas is going to get tough with cheaters.

"We have zero tolerance for cheating," she said, flanked by a host of education officials and Superintendent Abe Saavedra of Houston Independent School District and Interim Dallas ISD Superintendent Larry Groppel, both of whom are shocked to learn cheating may be happening in their districts.

It would be easy to have a bit of fun at Neeley's expense. After all, she made the governor look like something of a fool when, in announcing her appointment a year ago, he bragged on the bogus statistics provided him regarding her performance as superintendent at Galena Park.

Though it is a low-income district, the governor said as she stood humbly by, 82 percent of graduates attended college. And she had doubled the number taking the SAT or ACT college-placement exams during her tenure.

SAT scores plummeted
It turned out that nobody really knew how many Galena Park seniors were going to college. The district had surveyed them, and 56 percent said they were going to college. Another 25 percent said they were going to technical or business institutes.

And it turned out the number of students taking the SAT or ACT hadn't doubled. It had gone up 53 percent - not bad, unless you noticed that the number of graduates had increased 62 percent.

Worse, scores on the ACT had dropped 7 percent and on the SAT a depressing 13 percent.

Meanwhile the percentage of Galena Park students passing a state test required of those attending community colleges plummeted from 34 percent to 18 percent.

But Neeley did improve Galena Park's performance in the one test that mattered, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. As the governor noted, she made Galena Park the state's largest "exemplary" school district.

Pressure cooker
She did it by being - her word - a cheerleader.

And by telling principals they would lose their positions if they didn't produce high-enough TAAS scores.

I don't know if any cheating went on in the resulting pressure cooker. I heard from students, parents and teachers, however, that the decreased performance described above was related to the single-minded focus on TAAS success.

At her news conference Monday, Neeley said, "The few who would attempt to cheat on the TAKS (the test that replaced the TAAS) or other state tests shortchange students and undermine the credibility of our state's testing program."

Nicole King, who had graduated magna cum laude from Galena Park with flying TAAS scores, couldn't break a mediocre 850 on the SAT and found herself struggling in college math.

"Since the beginning, all we were trained on was the TAAS test, that's it," she said. "We had hours of classroom time devoted on strategic ways to enhance our test scores. It's ridiculous."

She wasn't shortchanged by cheating on the test.

She was shortchanged by the district's single-minded focus on it.

But Gov. Rick Perry never expressed second thoughts on his appointment.

He wanted her, he said, "to do on the state level what she has done at Galena Park."

Some local school districts have worked on the difficult problem of maintaining a solid, broad education while meeting the demands of high-stakes testing.

But our state leaders insist on pretending there is no problem. How else to explain the fact that Texas Education Agency has three staffers assigned to investigating reports of cheating - one for every million children taking the test?

And Neeley, while trying to sound like a sheriff, couldn't subdue the cheerleader.

First she referred to the "few who would attempt to cheat." How would she know? The TEA has made no effort to determine how widespread cheating is.

Then she concluded by saying, "Don't rush to judgment just because scores on a test increase rapidly. That result is more likely to mean that it is time to celebrate, rather than investigate."

That sounds good, but it's not true.

It won't be time to celebrate, even in the unlikely event we wipe out cheating, until our graduates excel by a broad range of measures, not just the TAAS or TAKS.

Intimidating the cheaters won't make that happen. Only wise leadership from school principals on up to the president.

You can write to Rick Casey at P.O. Box 4260, Houston, TX 77210, or e-mail him at rick.casey@chron.com.

Cheating allegations at Wesley go back to 2003
Teacher had addressed HISD board meeting about problem
By JOSHUA BENTON, The Dallas Morning News, December 30, 2004

The fact there might be cheating at Wesley Elementary is not news to Houston officials.

In June 2003, former Wesley teacher Donna Garner stood before a meeting of the Houston school board and directly accused officials of cheating at Wesley. "I was instructed on how to cheat and that the expectation was that I would cheat," she said, according to a copy of her speech.

District officials pledged an investigation. But it has taken the district a year and a half just to hire an outside law firm to do the investigating. The lengthy delays could make it harder to catch cheaters.

"When a great deal of time has passed between the incident and the investigation, people forget things," said Suzanne Marchman, spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency. "And what happened on test day is not as clear as it was eight months ago or a year ago."

A Houston Independent School District investigator interviewed Ms. Garner in September 2003, according to TEA records. The Houston school board decided an independent panel should investigate the allegations "because of the strong political overtones of such an investigation," according to an HISD summary of the case.

But the district's testing coordinator apparently did not assemble the panel before his retirement in March 2004.

His replacement, David Guetzow, contacted TEA and outlined his plans. He wanted to assemble three to five retired school administrators to objectively see if there is cheating at Wesley, according to TEA records. He asked TEA to help by providing a facilitator familiar with cheating investigations who could assist the independent panel. Mr. Guetzow said the whole process would be completed in two to three weeks.

"(T)he school board prefers to handle this case as objectively and as free of political or racial overtones as possible," Mr. Guetzow wrote. "Of particular concern is the fact that the allegations describe a well organized and regimented cheating environment. If true, this casts suspicions on all schools in the Acres Homes Charter district because [former district head Thaddeus Lott] was credited with maintaining a very disciplined and controlled charter program. It would be difficult to understand how the alleged cheating techniques, if true, could have escaped his knowledge."

TEA agreed to provide the facilitator, and agency officials told HISD to let the agency know when they needed the facilitator to be provided.

TEA is still waiting.

"We have not heard back from HISD since May," Ms. Marchman said.

In an e-mail dated Nov. 8, HISD's general counsel, Elneita Hutchins-Taylor, put some of the blame for the delay on TEA. She wrote: "Part of the process which HISD did begin several months ago, was to contact TEA and request that the agency conduct an investigation. TEA has not formally responded to the district. It appears, however, that TEA does not intend to assist HISD in this matter."

Ms. Marchman said that is false.

"TEA was never asked to conduct an investigation," she said. "I don't think the agency would deny request Houston's request or any other district's request. The agency offers whatever services it can." TEA officials recently assisted Houston when the district investigated fraudulent dropout reporting in Houston high schools.

Terry Abbott, a district spokesperson, said Thursday that the district is aware of the "lack of progress" in the Wesley investigation. Last month, HISD appointed a law firm as independent counsel to investigate. In a statement, Houston Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra promised a "full and thorough investigation."