First of all, is it a scandal or isn't it?
The AJC calls it a "crisis in confidence, character and conscience for APS."
(See more here)
Bev Hall quoted as saying she is not convinced scores were falsified (what else is she going to say?) and is quoted by AJC thusly:
“I’m concerned with the number of schools and convinced we should do a detailed analysis to get to the bottom of this." See full article here.
Individual school results here.
How did they decide who was cheating?
Here is an excerpt from the AJC article:
Responding to earlier evidence of cheating, including an analysis by the AJC, the state had every 2009 answer sheet reviewed to measure how often kids changed wrong answers to right by virtue of erasures on the sheets. Because every test sheet was checked, the state was able to develop a reliable index of how often test answers were changed from wrong to right and flag schools that had inordinate occurrences of answer changes, right down to the classroom level.
It then flagged schools that had higher-than-average numbers of wrong -to-right answers, and found troubling patterns, most of which occurred in Atlanta schools and in Dougherty County schools. To understand, look at third grade math scores. Reviewing the answer sheets of 125,000 third graders, the state found that the average student changed 1.87 answers from wrong to right.
If there was a third-grade classroom in which the students on average changed 4.8 answers from wrong to right, a flag went up, said Kathleen Mathers, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement. “That change was so much bigger than what we saw in classrooms across the state.”
Then, the state examined how each individual class performed on the test and how many answers went from incorrect to correct. They compared each classroom to the state average. To be flagged, the changes from wrong to right answers had to be well above state average, so much so that it could not be a matter of chance. Then, the state looked at the schools as a whole and found widespread instances of improbable answer changes.
So now what is the appropriate response by us, the parents? Leave your comments below.
