Project Baltimore obtained the internal investigation reports through a public records request, and among the most stunning findings were two teachers accused of helping students cheat on mandatory district tests.
“That's not right,” said Patrice Bell, who taught in Baltimore City Schools for 32 years. She retired in October 2022. When Project Baltimore shared with her the findings from the internal investigations, she was not surprised...
In early July 2023, we reported that government records showed that Superintendent McKnight was still claiming her Prince George's County home as her principal residence even though she was contractually required to relocate to Montgomery County by June 30, 2023.
On August 15, 2023, the Maryland State Department of Assessments and Taxation (SDAT) changed the status of McKnight's PG County home to "Principal Residence: No" after our story was shared with SDAT officials.
SDAT officials have now revealed that McKnight contacted them on August 30, 2023, claiming that her PG County home was still her principal residence. At her request, SDAT changed the principal residence status back to "YES."
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In early July 2023, McKnight's PG County home appeared in the Realtor MLS as "for rent". A few days later, the status changed to "Rented".
As of today, October 17, 2023, the "rented" status has been removed from the MLS.
State officials also confirmed that McKnight is using her PG County address on her driver's license. It's not clear whether she had ever changed her address on her driver's license to her Montgomery County address (if, indeed, she really ever had a Montgomery County address) as required by state law.
“The cheating is out of control.”Math teacher Lois Cohen said this when describing the academic dishonesty that has spread throughout the halls and classrooms of CHS.Cheating is prevalent at CHS, with as many as three separate instances of cheating occurring in the span of one month this year. One aspect of cheating that makes it difficult to combat is that definitions of cheating vary.According to Spanish teacher Stacey Steele-Yue, the definition of cheating ranges from the simple level of glancing at someone else’s answers to full-blown copying someone else’s work.What about discussing the level of difficulty of a test with a student who hasn’t taken it yet? Is that cheating?...
...Academic dishonesty stems from a profound lack of respect in our school community, as well as a sense of combative division between students and the faculty and administration. We are a school that puts far more emphasis on the quantitative value of numbers and statistics than on the importance of learning and knowledge. The work assigned in many classes reflects this approach to education. Busywork assignments asking students to perform onerous tasks, such as copying down physics problems verbatim from a Regents review book, send a clear message that deep, conceptual understanding of material is worthless when compared to high scores on a standardized test. This type of assignment completely disrespects the material being taught, and ultimately insults students’ academic skills...
...The cheating involved several state exams and was uncovered after a cellphone was confiscated from a 16-year-old junior during a citywide language exam on June 18, according to a city Department of Educationinvestigation.The New York Times: At Top School, Cheating Voids 70 Pupils’ Tests
Cellphones are not permitted in city schools, and when officials looked into the student’s phone, they found a trail of text messages, including photos of test pages, that suggested pupils had been sharing information about state Regents exams while they were taking them.
Sixty-nine students had received the messages and responded to them, the department said...
According to documents obtained by The Baltimore Sun this week, independent hearing officers — attorneys hired by the system to render facts and findings in personnel hearings — found the school system's investigation, triggered by plunging student test scores, to be fundamentally flawed.
"While there is a healthy dose of speculation, suggestion and suspicion that cheating occurred in 2009, there is a lack of credible evidence that cheating actually occurred," one hearing officer wrote. "Not one witness was able to testify with certainty that they knew what happened in Abbottston. To the contrary, witness after witness stated that they did not know what happened at Abbottston."
The hearing officers also said city schools CEO Andrés Alonso knew there were problems with a state analysis of eraser markings in test books but moved ahead anyway to dismiss the principals last year.
The findings also raise questions about how the system determines whether a school cheated and who is responsible...
...The most troubling aspect of the school system investigation, according to the hearing officers, was that the system built its case on a faulty erasure analysis. In his announcement that Abbottston had cheated last year, Alonso said the analysis showed patterns of erasures from wrong to right answers "beyond the realm of probability."
In their findings, the hearing officers called the erasure analysis "incompetent" and "crude," and outside experts have called it an embarrassment to the scientific profession. The erasure analysis, conducted by a longtime state Education Department official, was done manually in a living room. Any documentation that could have authenticated it was destroyed....
...Robert Wilson, the lead investigator of a cheating scandal in Atlanta, considered the largest in the history of U.S. public education, said the Abbottston scores should never have been invalidated based on the analysis because it was so flawed. He reviewed hearing documents in the Baltimore case.
Wilson led the 2011 investigation that uncovered rampant cheating in Atlanta public schools — where his team issued a 171-page report identifying 150 educators, 82 of whom confessed to cheating.
Atlanta's erasure analysis consisted of reviewing more than 100,000 test booklets to establish a benchmark, electronically scanning the test booklets and a manual analysis to verify the results.
"If you showed me 167 booklets, and I did exactly what she did, I might be able to say, 'This is a hell of a lot of erasures,' but I'd have to have a lot more than that," Wilson said.
"I am surprised that someone who claims to a psychometrician would have been willing to draw conclusions from such unreliable work," he added. "That the Baltimore City Public Schools would have relied upon it is even more surprising."...
...Beverly Hall, who was Atlanta superintendent during the years the alleged cheating occurred, has retired. She has repeatedly denied any direct knowledge of wrongdoing.
But Rogers-Martin knew none of this in 2007. She only saw a growing gap between her students' standardized test scores and those of some of her colleagues -- leading her to doubt her teaching skills.
Eventually, however, she began to suspect that something else was at work. Though she says administrators ignored her suspicions when she raised them, Rogers-Martin eventually got a chance to tell state investigators what she saw. (Rogers-Martin is named as a witness in the governor's report but not implicated in any cheating.)
Teaching second, fourth and fifth grades, she noticed inconsistencies between her students' abilities and their previous year's standardized test scores.
Some children with the highest rating on the previous year's test -- "exceeding expectations" -- arrived in her class completely unprepared for the coursework.
She started asking questions: How is this child "exceeding expectations" on last year's test "when they can't read and they can't count?" she asked her principal.
"Oh, I guess they are just a great guesser," Rogers-Martin says the principal told her...
...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.Read entire New York Times article here.
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...
...For teachers, a culture of fear ensured the deception would continue.“APS is run like the mob,” one teacher told investigators, saying she cheated because she feared retaliation if she didn’t.The voluminous report names 178 educators, including 38 principals, as participants in cheating. More than 80 confessed. The investigators said they confirmed cheating in 44 of 56 schools they examined.The investigators conducted more than 2,100 interviews and examined more than 800,000 documents in what is likely the most wide-ranging investigation into test-cheating in a public school district ever conducted in United States history.The findings fly in the face of years of denials from Atlanta administrators. The investigators re-examined the state’s erasure analysis — which they said proved to be valid and reliable — and sought to lay to rest district leaders’ numerous excuses for the suspicious scores...
...The special investigators’ report describes years of misconduct that took place as far up the chain of command as the superintendent’s office. The report accuses Hall and her aides of repeatedly tampering with or hiding records that cast an unflattering light on the district. In one case, Hall’s chief Human Resources officer Millicent Few “illegally ordered” the destruction of early, damning drafts of an outside lawyer’s investigation of test-tampering at Atlanta’s Deerwood Academy, the report said...
...The district’s priority became maintaining and promoting Hall’s image as a miracle worker...
...Her supporters were so concerned the district’s problems would reflect poorly on the Atlanta “brand,” the report said, that they attacked those who asked questions about the district’s purported success...
...Hall preferred to spend her time networking with philanthropic and business leaders rather than walking the halls of her schools, the investigators found...
“Hall became a subject of adoration and made herself the focus rather than the children,” the investigators wrote. “Her image became more important than reality.”
Are you smarter than a third-grader? Because the online education system used by the Fairfax County public schools apparently is not.
Police believe that a 9-year-old McLean boy hacked into the Blackboard Learning System used by the county school system to change teachers' and staff members' passwords, change or delete course content, and change course enrollment. One of the victims was Fairfax Superintendent Jack D. Dale, according to an affidavit filed by a Fairfax detective in Fairfax Circuit Court this week...
Turns out teachers at a local DC school had been trying for years to turn in one of the leaders of the Churchill High School cheating scandal but the administration at the school kept telling them it wasn't worth the hassle...
"We had been waiting years for him to be caught. Years!" says a teacher at a different school who had taught one of the students at the center of the suburban DC cheating ring. "Every time we went to the administration about another cheating episode, we were told not to pursue it and the cheating was swept under the rug..."
...Benz declined to release disciplinary details because the students are juveniles and instead urged parents to consult the student handbook for disciplinary protocols. But that explanation wasn't enough for the irate parents...
...As parents bickered with Benz for more than an hour about how the eight students connected to the breach are hurting the school's name, Laura Siegel sat quietly, front and center at the meeting. Siegel, the volunteer coordinator for the Churchill Cluster, said if other students knew what the consequences were, they could be deterred from repeating the act.
"Hacking into a big school system deserves expulsion," said Siegel, who has a son in his senior year at the school. "That's pretty serious."
Newsweek - Bitter Lessons: The Kids Were The Heroes In The Scandal At Potomac Elementary. What Happens When Role Models Teach DishonestyThe first hints of something wrong at Potomac Elementary came from the kids. Whispering to one another in the hallways and on the playground, then telling their parents after school, a few fifth graders began describing the peculiar behavior of their principal...
...But on a deeper level, the Potomac scandal is a morality play with a disturbing twist: the heroes were the children who had the courage to question the ethics of the very people who were supposed to be teaching them the values of honesty and integrity...
...The kids were bothered and confused. "Some kids were saying to each other, 'I don't think she's allowed to do that'," one fifth grader told NEWSWEEK. The student, a 10-year-old boy, recounted that he was given extra time on the math test...
...In their public pronouncements, school-district administrators [Blog Note: The MCPS Superintendent was Jerry Weast] seemed more embarrassed by the negative publicity than ashamed of the cheating. The school appeared to approach the incident more as an exercise in damage control than as an opportunity to teach right from wrong...
...They weren't always on top. In 1998 Potomac finished a mere seventh in the county on the MSPAP. In the fall of 1999 Montgomery's new school superintendent, Jerry Weast, prepared a "productivity map" showing how each of the county's schools scored. He told newspaper reporters that the map would help him identify and weed out principals whose schools were performing poorly. Potomac Elementary was rated "less productive" because its scores had leveled off in recent years. A few months later, when the 1999 MSPAP results came out, Potomac had vault-ed to No. 1...
