The big news out of Gotham this week (Times,? Daily News) is the ?sharp rise in accusations of cheating by educators? (NYT), with the assumed follow-up question: Is New York the next Atlanta? ?(Michelle Rhee is off the hook, for the time being.)
If the response to that news by the city's new chancellor, Dennis Walcott, is any indication of the city's attitude about cheating, we should be worried.? As Walcott told Sharon Otterman of the Times,
People are reporting things, that's fine; we want people to report things?. [P]eople could be reporting for real and necessarily real reasons.
Uh? That means, I suppose, that this is not Atlanta; not to worry, Gotham just has a reporting spike.
The ed department's chief academic officer, Shael Polokow-Suransky, tried to explain Walcott's odd comment by telling Otterman that, ?When there is conflict that exists in a school ? sometimes between teachers, sometimes between teachers and administration ? it is not unusual that there are reports and allegations made as a result of that.?
Protesteth too much?? Plenty of personnel ? and personal -- battles are fought by filing pre-emptive (and bogus) charges. God knows, there are enough rules and regulations to give even Attila the Hun some cover while he complains.? But that debate is a distraction: Was there cheating or not?
According to the city's special commissioner of investigation, Richard Condon, whose report is the cause of the current uproar, cheating complaints in NYC have increased from 68 in 2003 to 225 last year.? Quite an increase. But those stunning numbers come on the heels of an August 8 comment by Mayor Michael Bloomberg that "to the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence or even allegations of widespread cheating," (New York Post), which raises the question of whether we've got a cheating scandal on our hands -- or a cover-up of such.
Consider this, from Walcott, in the Times: ?I have not seen one iota of fact about systemwide cheating on the part of New York City. This is not Atlanta at all.?
Are we sure about that? An almost fourfold increase in cheating reports and not "one iota" of evidence that we have a problem?
If nothing else, the city's response to the new cheating allegation inquiries has been bumbling, leaving one to wonder what has happened to the once powerful PR machine at the district's Tweed headquarters.? In fact, Gotham's cheating and testing security problems have been a slow-moving train wreck, which should have alerted the department to trouble brewing.? (See my August 2 post for some history.) One of the more blatant examples of the city's problems was a study conducted for the Wall Street Journal earlier this year which concluded that nearly 5% of the city's high schoolers who passed the state's Regents test last year ?should have failed? ? because of test tampering.
Walcott's problem now is to regain some credibility high ground.
But unlike the state's new Commissioner of Education, John King, who quickly formed a task force, last month, to investigate the cheating and its causes and cures, the City's educators are on the defensive ? and showing it.? Condon's office, which is ostensibly independent of the city education department and handles all matter of possible misconduct, from conflict of interest to sexual misconduct, substantiated 13 of the 62 cheating cases that his office investigated. Emphasis here: that his office investigated. The big question is why, as Otterman reports, ?a vast majority of the 1,252 accusations of test-tampering and grade-changing by educators [Condon] has received have been referred back to the [education] department's in-house investigators? and why ?city officials last week would not provide information about the disposition of those cases.?
These are serious cover-up charges, but Walcott only digs the hole deeper? with his op-ed in today's New York Daily News.? He leads by taking out after ?opponents of student testing? who he says used the Atlanta cheating scandal
as an opportunity to question achievement results here in New York City and the education reform community's push for strong accountability systems. Many of the same voices are seizing on fresh reports of an increase in allegations of cheating as a sign that actual tampering with scores is widespread.
Well, some of us just want to know whether there is cheating; not because we are against testing, but because we are for it: testing can not be a credible measure of success unless it is a credible measuring tool. Cheating seriously weakens that tool. (If you don't believe me, see the new New York ruling about ?the use of test scores to evaluate teachers.) ?And we haven't even touched the troublesome question of ?erasure analysis,? a standard ?testing integrity measurement that was abandoned by New York City either just before or just after ? according to Otterman, this is another matter of dispute ? Bloomberg assumed control of the schools in 2002.? (Oddly, Walcott writes in the Daily News that erasure analysis ?is useful in certain cases where we suspect cheating may have occurred, and we use it for that purpose,? which only confuses the matter since he also says ?it is foolish to think?[such erasure analysis] will eliminate any and all cheating.?)
No, we don't want to debate the ?widespread? nature of this beast until we get the facts. But so far the chancellor sounds more defensive about those facts than forthcoming. ?He spends a great deal of time in his Daily News op-ed discussing ?the precautions we have in New York City public school around grades 3-to-8 testing.?? But he avoids talking about the thirteen cases of cheating that the special investigator found or the 1,252 accusations of test-tampering and grade-changing that his department supposedly investigated. How did that happen with all the ?precautions?? Walcott cites an 18-month audit done by the city's controller in 2009 as proof that ?safeguards have clearly worked,? but that hardly covers the period of Condon's report and Walcott doesn't mention the fact that the audit also concluded that the city's education department had ?engaged in sloppy and unprofessional practices that encourage cheating and data manipulation.? (See my August 2 post cited above).
If transparency is to be a hallmark of the reform movement, Mayor Bloomberg and his new schools chancellor have a lot of catching up to do.? To regain the credibility high ground, first and foremost, they have to get the facts out.? Walcott may have rode into Tweed as an ?education diplomat,? but now he needs to shed ? and shed quickly -- the appeaser mantle and take up the sword of Damocles. Slay the cheater! But, please, don't shoot the messenger.
--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
