NYT: Pa. Joins States Facing a School Cheating Scandal

...Mr. Herold’s first day was July 6. On July 8 about 9:30 a.m., Ms. Mezzacappa suggested he look at the enormous state file, and by 11:30 that night The Notebook had posted its biggest scoop. A total of 89 schools — 28 in Philadelphia — had been flagged by the state for, among other things, an improbably high number of erasures, as well as questionable gains on reading and math tests.
Mr. Socolar, a data fanatic, calculated that at some of these schools, the odds that the erasures had happened randomly were one in 100 trillion, and Ms. Mezzacappa verified those numbers with Andrew Porter, the dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.
And that is how Pennsylvania became the latest in a growing list of states facing a cheating scandal.
Never before have so many had so much reason to cheat. Students’ scores are now used to determine whether teachers and principals are good or bad, whether teachers should get a bonus or be fired, whether a school is a success or failure.
Will Pennsylvania do what it takes to root out cheating? Few school districts have. Most inquiries are led by educators who are not first-rate investigators and have little incentive to make their own districts look bad...

...Newspaper investigations can point the way, but that won’t nail the cheaters. Reporters at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote many articles about suspected cheating, starting in 2001. And for that they were criticized by city leaders for damaging Atlanta’s image.
If a cheating investigation is to succeed, there must be a top state official with the political will to make it happen, no matter where the investigation leads. In Atlanta that was Sonny Perdue, then the governor, who told investigators there would be no interference and agreed not to read the report until it was finished...

Read entire New York Times article here.