Georgia education officials ordered investigations on Thursday at 191 schools across the state where they had found evidence of tampering on answer sheets for the state’s standardized achievement test.
Kathleen B. Mathers's agency conducted the statewide inquiry.
The order came after an inquiry on cheating by the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement raised red flags regarding one in five of Georgia’s 1,857 public elementary and middle schools. A large proportion of the schools were in Atlanta.
The inquiry flagged any school that had an abnormal number of erasures on answer sheets where the answers were changed from wrong to right, suggesting deliberate interference by teachers, principals or other administrators.
Experts said it could become one of the largest cheating scandals in the era of widespread standardized testing.
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found 19 public elementary schools statewide with extraordinary gains or drops in scores between spring last year and this year. A dozen were in Atlanta.
In West Manor and Peyton Forest elementary schools, for instance, students went from among the bottom performers statewide to among the best over the course of one year. The odds of making such a leap were less than 1 in a billion.
This summer, state officials found strong evidence of cheating at four schools statewide in an investigation that followed a December AJC story about improbable gains on state tests.
In the most recent analysis, the AJC again used statistics to look for schools with test score changes far outside the normal range. The newspaper compared students’ scores in one grade versus their scores in the next. Some improved astronomically, but others deteriorated sharply.
“Changes of that magnitude are just extremely suspicious,” said Walt Haney, a testing expert and professor at Boston College.
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