Schools+say+No+evidence+of+cheating+on+Pennsylvania+standardized+tests

= Reviews analyzed data from 2009 = = = =By Jonathan D. Silver= =//Published by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette//= =//8/13/11//= = = = = = = = = =Several southwestern Pennsylvania school districts flagged for irregularities in a recently discovered analysis of 2009 standardized test data said Friday they have uncovered no evidence of cheating.= =Monday is the deadline for those schools and dozens of others in Pennsylvania whose problematic results could indicate cheating to submit their findings to the state Department of Education.= =As of late Thursday, about half of the schools had responded. No district had reported cheating, according to department spokesman Tim Eller.= ="Further and more intense review will be conducted in [the education department] once all the reports are received," Mr. Eller said Friday.= =Local districts offered a variety of explanations for the flags raised by a forensic data analysis of the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment exams conducted in 2009 for grades three through eight and 11.= ="The flags were unfounded, really," said Deborah Rittenhouse, curriculum coordinator for the Uniontown Area School District.= =Third-graders at the district's Ben Franklin School were flagged for having borderline high erasure marks on their tests and an unusually high jump in performance.= =Ms. Rittenhouse attributed the better performance among third-graders in the 2008-09 school year to aggressive efforts on the part of the district.= =She said the erasure marks resulted from nervous third-graders, new to taking the PSSA, wanting to make sure all their answers were correct.= ="It can be overwhelming, very scary. And they are just so careful, and they just recheck and they erase," Ms. Rittenhouse said.= =The analysis by Minnesota-based Data Recognition Corp. triggered concerns that students had behaved improperly or that teachers, proctors or administrators were massaging test results.= =Although the report was completed within a few months of the 2009 exams, it sat in limbo at the state Education Department for roughly two years until it was discovered by Philadelphia Public School Notebook, an online publication, which broke the story last month.= =Unusual increases or decreases in performance by a grade from one year to the next, large changes in the population of certain groups of students or above-normal erasure marks changing wrong answers to correct ones led to individual grades being flagged in 79 brick-and-mortar schools in 39 districts, and in 10 charter schools.= = = =The report did not conclude that cheating occurred, but such irregular results could possibly indicate cheating.= =In response to the report, education Secretary Ron Tomalis ordered the schools to conduct internal investigations of their results and report back to state officials.= =The education department said it has built-in safeguards to ensure that it would be able to detect any monkey business if schools investigating themselves tried to cover up cheating.= =Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School in Midland said it has analyzed the data and plans to file its response by Monday.= ="I can also say that the flags occurred because of a few statistical anomalies, in part related to PA Cyber's rapid growth, just as we initially stated. We found no evidence of cheating," school spokesman Fred Miller said.= =Ambridge Area School District attributed its flagged results to major improvements following an effort to rectify the poor showing during the 2008 PSSAs among 11th-graders.= ="If you get nothing else from this, we were not flagged for erasures," said Joseph Pasquerilla, assistant to the superintendent.= =Pittsburgh Public Schools stood by its preliminary report that an unusual result at Sterrett Classical Academy stemmed from a large change in the number of economically disadvantaged students.= =Also finding no hint of cheating were the Belle Vernon Area and the Connellsville Area school districts, which had four schools flagged.= ="After my review of the [raw data], I concluded that the report did not show that there were any erasures by students or staff members, or allegations of cheating," Connellsville interim superintendent Tammy R. Stern said.= =Ms. Stern blamed the unusual results that were picked up by the report on coding errors of students' demographic information. Any big changes in, say, the number of students in an ethnic group could draw attention.= =In this case, Ms. Stern said, coding errors resulted in one school having 42 white third-graders one year and four the next, and no American Indian/American Native fifth-graders in 2008 but 34 a year later.= =The other school districts in the region that were flagged but could not be reached Friday for comment are: New Kensington-Arnold Area, Gateway and Big Beaver Falls Area.= = = = Read more: [] = = = = = = = =News= =home=