Cheating Scandal
Within a year of Rhee's 2007 DCPS takeover, test scores started climbing, dramatically at some schools.
While the Post was busy touting the results, out-of-town news organizations questioned them. A 2011 USA Today investigation found a higher than average wrong-to-right erasure rate the prior three years at "more than half of D.C. schools."
Erasure rate refers to the number of changed answers on a test and can be used to identify possible cheating.
"A high erasure rate alone is not evidence of impropriety," Henderson said in response.
But some of the erasure rates were very, very high. At Noyes Education Campus, for example, USA Today found,
The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance.
After USA Today's expose', scores at Noyes dropped, according to data posted at Guy Brandenburg's education blog.
"Real students may be fidgety and jumpy, but their scores on yearly high-stakes tests" do NOT jump around like this," wrote Brandenburg, a retired DCPS teacher.
"Look at those scores," wrote historian and education scholar Diane Ravitch, who served as assistant secretary of education under George H. W. Bush. "First the soar up, then they plummet down. Nothing suspicious there, right?"
Not for D.C. Inspector General Charles Willoughby, who found no evidence of widespread cheating, despite only investigating one school, Noyes. The U.S. Education Department Inspector General, in a "tandem" investigation, came to a similar conclusion.
Meanwhile, DCPS failed to conduct its own investigation, even after an internal memo called for one, as PBS's John Merrow reported at his blog.
"There have been no meaningful investigations of the evidence of widespread cheating," civil rights attorney and D.C. budget expert Mary Levy wrote in response to the inspectors general's findings.
"Among the top 10 DCPS erasure schools" scores plummeted at all but one by 2010," noted Levy. "The bottom dropped out by chance at all those schools?"
Atlanta
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