All Decatur Schools “Clear” in CRCT Cheating Investigation
Decatur Metro | February 12, 2010I’m sure many of you school-junkies have been closely following Georgia’s ongoing CRCT “cheating scandal”, where many panicked administrators in certain schools systems across the state made many students instantly and suspiciously brilliant with just an eraser and a pencil.
Just this week the AJC released the list of “severe” schools, those where 25% or more of classrooms had a significant number of erasures from wrong to right answers on the CRCT tests. More than half of the schools labeled “severe” were within the Atlanta Public School system. Play them off Keyboard Cat!
Closer to home, according to the AJC’s database, none of the City of Decatur’s schools registered above the “clear” category (“0%-5.4% of classrooms in this school flagged with wrong-to-right changes that fell above the state average”), in the CRCT investigation.
Here’s the percentage of classes flagged by CSD school…
- Clairemont Elementary: 0%
- Oakhurst Elementary: 3.7%
- Winnona Park Elementary: 0%
- Glennwood Academy: 5.3%
- Renfroe Middle School: 4.2%
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Man, I went to the AJC database to see how neighboring schools did. Whew, Eastlake Elementary is in trouble…! 42% of classes have been flagged. That’s not going to be pretty!
This is a good thing. Not that I would expect any less from CSD but it’s always nice to have one’s faith confirmed. While many of us have real concerns about CSD that we need to express as parents and voters, we wouldn’t even bother if we didn’t believe that it was basically sound and could be improved. If one resided in a school district where a third of schools show evidence of administratrs or teachers cheating, one wouldn’t even bother trying to express concerns.
I do wonder about the state’s numbers and methodology. How can Oakhurst have 3.7% of its classes flagged for 2009 if it only has 16 classrooms according to the school website. 1/16 is at least 6.25%. Oakhurst would have to have at least 26 classes to get a percentage of 3.7%. Even if one adds some special and Links classes, 26 classes doesn’t make sense. My guess is that it got the tens digit wrong and used 26 instead of 16. OR do they really mean 3.7% of answers were changed from wrong to right vs 3.7% classrooms were above the state average.
I also wonder about the methodology of setting the state average of wrong-to-right erasures as the threshold to consider a classroom of concern. If one takes an average, one has to expect that some classrooms are above it and some are below it. Isn’t there any better science to this? No research showing what % of students tend to erase answers on standardized criterion-referenced tests? What expected % change from wrong to right, from right to wrong, and from wrong to wrong answers? Without all this info, one can’t be sure that a high rate of wrong-to-right erasures isn’t just the result of students being encouraged in some classrooms to double check their answers and erase if necessary?
Nonetheless, Atlanta schools sure do look suspicious unless they can argue that they indoctrinate their students to double check answers and erase a lot or that they had more erasers available or something like that!
I bet the Decatur kids inadvertently cheated. Probably looked out the classroom window during the test and saw yard signs saying that “War” or “Historic District” is NOT the answer.
Since they knew that neither of those terms could be the answer, the students were statistically more likely to select the correct answer.
ROFL!
ROFL indeed!