Jay Mathews wrote a great column on the failure of two inspector generals to probe the DC cheating scandal.

Michelle Rhee is traversing the nation, selling her big “success” story in DC, but the cheating scandal continues to fester. The testing company reported a remarkable number of wrong-to-right erasures in a large number of schools. As Mathews reports, neither IG took the erasure evidence seriously.

As Mathews points out, the only genuine hero in the DC mess was Adell Cothorne, the new principal at Noyes who reported the cheating and got frozen out by top administrators for her integrity.

The failure to get to the bottom of the testing scandal is itself a scandal. Someday, hopefully, a serious investigation will not only inquire into why the scores went up so fast and why they plummeted, but why two slipshod investigations swept the evidence under the rug. Who decided to deep-six the cheating? Why?

Meanwhile, if Rhee comes to town to tout the DC schools as a model, don’t forget to raise two issues:

1) the DC schools have one of the lowest graduation rates in the nation;
2) the achievement gaps between blacks and whites and between whites and Asians in the DC schools are double the gaps of other cities tested by NAEP.

Apparently, Rhee got textbooks delivered to the schools on time. Let’s give her credit for that.