District Administration - November/December 2011 - (Page 53)

school administrators. “You have to take a real, serious and sober look at the leadership in your system,” he says. “The things that happened in Atlanta were not simply teachers acting off the cuff. There was real pressure from leadership.” Meanwhile, Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Andrés Alonso has laid down the law, and won praise for his response to the cheating there. Besides implementing many of the same changes that Atlanta has embraced, the district spent nearly $400,000 this past spring to place outside monitors at all 157 schools in classrooms where the Maryland School Assessment is being administered. “We are doing everything within our power to make it impossible to cheat, and we will find and punish those who do,” Alonso says. “The protocols we have in place go beyond what we know most urban districts to be doing in the realm of test security.” Alonso has also made a personal appeal to the educators in his district, recording an eight-minute video in which he emphasizes personal integrity in the testing process. “If there is anybody who is thinking about any kind of irregularities,” he says in his presentation, “I need you to understand that your entire professional livelihood is on the line. We are not talking about termination. We are not talking about being transferred. We are talking about losing your professional license.” That recording has received a larger audience, including Kris Ellington, the deputy commissioner for accountability, research and measurement at the Florida Department of Education. “It was very clear, compelling and professional,” says Ellington, who has spent much of the year dealing with irregularities in the results of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test in 14 districts around the state. Gaining a Technological Edge Those irregularities surfaced in 2010 after Florida hired a test-security company that uses detection technology to spot erasures, unlikely gains in year-to-year test scores, and extensive similarities in student answer sheets. “Tools for doing that have become a lot more sophisticated,” Ellington says. “There was statistical evidence on the erasures on the answer documents.” The districts involved conducted investi- “The things that happened in Atlanta were not simply teachers acting off the cuff. There was real pressure from leadership.” —John Barge, state superintendent of schools, Georgia gations but found no cheating. That was not the case this summer in Philadelphia, where detection technology revealed patterns of cheating at 13 schools. “This is the first year where we’ve had real evidence of schools manipulating the tests,” says Daniel Piotrowski, the www.DistrictAdministration.com November/December 2011 53 http://www.sallyridescience.com http://www.sallyridescience.com http://www.DistrictAdministration.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - November/December 2011

District Administration - November/December 2011
Contents
From the Editor
News Update
Inside the Law
Administrator Profile
District Profile
CIO news
How to Update Your Network on a Budget
The Importance of IT Team Unity
Creating an Anti-Bullying Program With the Resources You Have
The Ultimate Empowerment Program for Parents
Taking the Helm in Cheating Scandals
Readers’ Choice: Top 100 Products
New Directions
Professional Opinion
Problem/Solution
Going Mobile

District Administration - November/December 2011