Here is a switch: Parents at a charter high school in New Orleans suspected massive cheating and hired a law firm to conduct an investigation. They were right. There was massive cheating.
Landry-Walker High School’s 2013-14 test results were so amazing that some New Orleans education insiders doubted they were valid. More students at Landry-Walker than at Lusher Charter, a selective-admissions school, aced geometry. In biology, the school was fourth-best in the city.
Skeptical of the numbers, the school’s parent organization, the Algiers Charter School Association, launched a 16-month investigation — without telling Landry-Walker’s principal — into what some feared could be widespread, teacher-enabled cheating. The association undertook a detailed analysis of student performance, hired outside lawyers and, for the spring 2015 round of testing, placed independent monitors in every single examination room at its flagship school, according to internal documents.
When the 2014-15 test results came back, Landry-Walker’s scores fell off a cliff. The percentage of students getting top marks in geometry fell by 51 points.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Child abuse and cheating all in one day. Just the tip of the charter iceberg. No wonder they refuse to export their “secrets” to so-called success. And topple it will.
The same analysis should be performed on every school. It can be done since the scores are at the individual student level. It’s pretty easy to set up algorithms that detect these things. Betting houses do it all the time just look at the recent tennis match fixing scandals. And schools are much less sophisticated than organized gambling.
If you find bad apples, toss them out: public school or charter.
As part of the testing contract the testing companies should be running their own analysis of the test answers as they are “grading” them.
Yes, Virginia, we should immediately set up elaborate security measures to go along with the elaborate testing measures.
You can’t monitor people every moment of every day. There’s something terribly wrong with the way of thinking in these schools if we have to do that.
Maybe the testing freaks should re-examine just what kind of environment they have created in public schools and why this keeps happening.
A crack down on students and teachers is treating the symptom. What’s the disease?
” placed independent monitors in every single examination room at its flagship school,”
This strikes me as feat but also another reason to be concerned sbout the testing protocols in this school, and perhaps others.
Can”t discern if these were human monitors or, something like video cams. The article implies the independent monitors were there without telling Landry-Walker’s principal.
I guess that access to the “internal documents” would claify this matter.
That must have been a great place to go to school, huh? They had monitors watching the monitors.
Does anyone think it might be time to look at whether they have gone completely off the deep end with this obsession with test scores?
The principal was not aware that this group spent 16 months accessing student test records and putting monitors in every classroom? If not, true principal may have a strong case that he or she wasn’t aware of the cheating, either, or much of anything else that happened in the school.
Which, frankly, isn’t much of a defense for that principal.
FLERP!: good catch, although I must add that (as Dienne points out below) that speaks volumes about the principal’s lack of experience and competence.
It also says something very powerful about the atmosphere at the school. There evidently wasn’t even one person—and let’s face it, it’s hard to keep a secret when many people are involved and something plays out over 16 months—that had enough confidence in him to either let the cat out of the bag or ask him to get involved to clear things up.
I do not think this will end well.
😎
Sorry, to be clear, I was trying to make Dienne’s point, albeit in roundabout and jokey form.
“I know nothing!”
I wonder if anyone will go to jail for racketeering. I doubt it!
Yet the charter beat goes on!
From the article: “…the association fired its chief executive, Adrian Morgan, eight months after the plummeting scores came back… He took a lawyer to a Jan. 22 charter board meeting and appeared to be negotiating a severance package.”
Severance package? How about a bus ticket out of town?
I skimmed the article looking for the total cost of the investigation, and didn’t see it, but did see that the lawyers working for the parents were charging over $200 per hour, and that their report ran to 700 pages.
The idea that charter schools are so unregulated that parents see merit in spending many thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of dollars to investigate what is going on in their children’s school is shocking.
Another recent exposure about cheating in New Orleans’ Recovery School District: “Fraud in testing, special education found at ReNEW charter school”
http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2016/01/renew_charter_fraud_report.html#incart_river_index
More from New Orleans: “Carver High broke special-education law by suspending student for nearly 5 weeks”
http://thelensnola.org/2016/02/04/carver-high-broke-special-education-law-by-suspending-student-for-nearly-5-weeks/
What are the odds there will be no investigation and no one from that Charter school will end up in prison like those public school teachers and administrators in that other test cheating scandal?
Why isn’t Michelle Rhee in prison for the cheating that took place in Washington DC’s schools when she was in charge and bragged about all the gains on the tests that had been scammed?
Why isn’t Eva Moskowitz under investigation from child abuse and crimes against humanity?
Why isn’t Arne Duncan under investigation for giving away public money to fund private schools?
I’m sure this list could go on for pages.
Googling around, I gather the ASCA is not “the parents” but the charter school operator, comprised of CEO, principals & teachers, board of trustees. & partners including many local businesses. Seems unique as charter school operators go.
Wait, so did private funds pay for the investigation, or was it taxpayer money?
I am glad they got caught!
Do you think there are any cases where non-charter public schools have been caught cheating?
jdhollowell, yes, public schools have administrators and teachers who get caught cheating. They are supervised. It is easier for charters to cheat because they are unsupervised. The only way their cheating is found out is by whistleblowers speaking up.