NYT: Huge Charter School, Run by Corbett's Largest Donor, Flagged for Cheating on standardized tests

[JPZenger]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/education/01winerip.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

New article in New York Times about Phila. non-profit that publicly revealed what the PA. State already knew and were keeping secret - that massive cheating was occurring by school officials on standardized tests.

Excerpt:

"Chester Community Charter, one of the state’s biggest schools, with 2,700 students, was among those most often flagged for suspicious erasure results. It also was flagged for questionable test scores: in 2009, 65.4 percent of eighth graders were proficient in math, compared with 22 percent the year before...

Mr. Tomalis, the education secretary, says Gov. Tom Corbett “has been adamant about making sure that we make every effort” to respond “aggressively on these issues.”

The governor will be tested. Chester Community Charter School, which was heavily flagged in the 2009 study for “aberrant” erasures and test scores, is operated by Vahan Gureghian. Mr. Gureghian was the largest individual contributor to the governor’s election campaign last fall, giving more than $300,000.

In April the governor visited Mr. Gureghian’s charter, praising it as a model “that needs to be reported to all the people of Pennsylvania,”

[Divernan]

1. PA GOP Gov. Corbett's officials tell charter schools to investigate themselves.

From the OP link:

"Will Pennsylvania do what it takes to root out cheating? Few school districts have. Most inquiries are led by educators who are not first-rate investigators and have little incentive to make their own districts look bad.

The Pennsylvania investigation is only a few weeks old, far too early to judge. But the first step is not encouraging: State officials have directed school districts and charter schools with suspicious results to investigate themselves.

For places that are serious about exposing cheating, there is a new gold standard: Atlanta. In the bad old days, Atlanta school officials repeatedly investigated themselves and found they had done nothing wrong. Then, last August, the governor decided that, once and for all, he was going to get to the bottom of things, and appointed two former prosecutors to oversee an inquiry.

Sixty of Georgia’s finest criminal investigators spent 10 months on it, and in the end turned up a major cheating scandal involving 178 teachers and principals — 82 of whom confessed — at 44 Atlanta schools, nearly half the district.