Acting Chancellor Kaya Henderson declined to discuss the circumstances of the dismissals, citing privacy rules. Improper actions could involve giving students advance looks at test questions, prompting students during tests or tampering with answer sheets after the tests are completed.
D.C. test scores have been closely watched in recent years as school reform efforts have taken root. Rising scores on the city tests and on separate federal tests have been cited as signs of progress.
D.C. State Superintendent of Education Hosanna Mahaley said Wednesday that the troubles identified in 2010 test results were isolated. “Most of our teachers and students are playing by the rules,” she said.
Whether Wednesday’s action will dispel questions about the reliability of the city’s test scores remains unclear. A USA Today investigation published in March found that classrooms in more than 100 D.C. public schools showed higher-than-average rates of erasures from wrong to right answers on the annual tests between 2006 and 2010. They included schools that showed some of the most dramatic growth in scores. Henderson has asked the office of D.C. Inspector General Charles Willoughby to investigate the newspaper’s findings.
Testing experts regard elevated erasure rates as an indicator that students might have been improperly steered toward changing answers or that answer sheets were tampered with after the test was given. Classrooms in some schools, such as Noyes Education Campus, Bowen Elementary and Aiton Elementary, showed extraordinary levels of erasures: from 10 to 12 times the District average.
Mahaley, speaking Wednesday at the weekly news briefing of Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), did not elaborate on what could have gone wrong in the three classrooms. Mahaley’s agency oversees the administration of the test — known as DC-CAS — in all public schools, traditional and charter.
In a letter to Henderson, Mahaley’s office noted that the three classrooms with voided scores were at Noyes, C.W. Harris Elementary and Leckie Elementary schools.
The invalidation of those scores came in response to answer sheet irregularities in classrooms at 18 schools — 10 in the school system and eight public charters — that were flagged after an analysis by CTB/McGraw Hill, the publisher of the test.
Mahaley’s office conveyed those preliminary findings to the D.C. school system, which hired Caveon, a Utah-based test security firm, to review security procedures and interview staff in the classrooms that had been flagged. Safiya Simmons, a spokeswoman for Henderson, said Caveon “concluded that two classrooms had possible testing irregularities and one classroom had a confirmed case of testing impropriety.”
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