State investigators are having some success finding evidence of TAKS cheating in their first wave of on-site investigations. But it may be another two months before those investigations – of less than 1 percent of schools flagged as suspicious – are completed.

The Texas Education Agency is reacting to findings by Caveon, a Utah test-security firm it hired last year to look for signs of cheating on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

Caveon flagged 699 Texas schools for a variety of reasons, such as unexplained leaps in scores, high numbers of erased answers, or groups of students with identical or nearly identical answer sheets.

This summer, TEA appointed a task force to examine the findings. Agency staffers began on-site investigations at five schools whose scores seemed particularly suspicious. The names of those schools haven’t been made public.

TEA spokeswoman Debbie Graves Ratcliffe said the investigative interviews were helpful in determining which of Caveon’s methods for detecting cheating can be supported through other evidence.

The task force, meeting Thursday in Austin, recommended a few changes to the methods investigators use. That includes interviewing a wider range of staff members on each campus under scrutiny. […]

Read More… from Progress cited in TAKS cheat probe; But initial investigation of five especially suspect schools far from done

On May 12, 2005, Texas education commissioner Shirley Neeley stood in the Wilmer-Hutchins school board chambers and announced the results of her agency’s investigation into cheating on the TAKS test.

“Twenty-two WHISD teachers were found guilty of cheating,” she said. “The investigation found inexcusable, illegal, unprofessional and unacceptable behavior on the part of these 22 individuals.”

Shortly after, the Wilmer-Hutchins schools were all shut down. But the careers of the teachers lived on.

At least 10 of the 22 Wilmer-Hutchins educators are now working in other North Texas public schools, a Dallas Morning News investigation found. None has faced official sanction, more than 2 1/2 years after the cheating took place.

Most were able to find new jobs weeks after Dr. Neeley’s statements.

They were able to do so in part because the body responsible for disciplinary actions against teachers, the State Board for Educator Certification, has been slow to act on the cases. The agency has a notorious backlog and a reputation for letting cases lie dormant, sometimes for more than two years.

In addition, state officials chose not to use their normal method to inform school districts of the findings of their investigation. Several of the school districts that now employ the teachers said they were unaware of the findings until informed by The News.

“I am absolutely dumbfounded,” said Lou Blanchard, director of the Treetops School International, a charter school in Euless. When her school hired a teacher named Betty Houston, Dr. Blanchard had no idea she was one of the teachers state investigators implicated in Wilmer-Hutchins. […]

Read More… from Cheating hasn’t hurt teachers; Exclusive: Accused WHISD educators hired in other schools

If you or your child is applying to a selective college this year, here’s a reading assignment: Pick up a copy of The Price of Admission, a new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden.

It’ll either give you a useful view into how the elite admissions game works or just leave you disgusted about the whole enterprise.

Actually, probably both.

Mr. Golden’s subject is the root unfairness in the way elite colleges choose who wins the coveted spots in their freshman classes.

Some folks complain about admissions policies that favor minority students. But Mr. Golden shows the degree to which the bias actually moves in the opposite direction: toward children of privilege.

We all know wealthy kids have enormous advantages not available to others. Their parents can afford score-boosting SAT prep classes and private school tuition. They can give their children an upbringing that provides endless educational opportunities. Those can all give the rich an edge.

But I’m not talking about those kids – the ones who, even considering their privileges, earn their spots. I’m talking about kids who aren’t remarkably bright but still get into top colleges because of who their daddy is. […]

Read More… from COLUMN: Elite schools make room for mediocre rich kids

It’s the sort of case you might expect Encyclopedia Brown to tackle.

Two kids seem to have cheated on Professor Harpp’s final exam. Can he prove the culprits did it – before it’s too late?

But when McGill University professor David Harpp suspected some of his students were up to no good, he didn’t hire a boy detective for a shiny new quarter. He did the job himself.

He devised a statistical method to determine whether two students were copying test answers from each other. He found that, on a 98-question multiple-choice test, the pair of students had 97 answers exactly the same – including 23 wrong answers.

Confronted with the evidence, the students confessed.

To the untrained observer, it may seem strange that cheating can be reliably detected with statistics, formulas and math, as Texas officials have hired an outside firm to do. But decades of research around the world have produced methods that prove quite effective at smoking out cheaters in ways even the best proctors often can’t. […]

Read More… from Cheating: It’s in the numbers; Formulas can provide powerful evidence of misconduct on exams

Caveon, as a for-profit company, has declined to reveal how, exactly, it does its work.

“Companies don’t publish much about their methods, because then everyone could do it,” said Chris McManus, a professor of psychology and medical education at University College London who has researched cheating.

But Caveon’s report to state officials offers clues to how the company crunches its numbers.

It appears that, like many other cheating researchers, Caveon focuses on wrong answers, not correct ones. If two brilliant students both got perfect scores on the TAKS, Caveon wouldn’t consider that suspicious – even though, by definition, all their answers would be exactly the same.

An appendix to Caveon’s report says that the company calculates the probability that pairs of students would have the same answers if they had acted independently. That’s similar to a portion of the method used at Canada’s McGill University. But it’s unclear how similar two students’ answer sheets must be to trigger Caveon’s suspicion. […]

Read More… from SIDEBAR: Crunching numbers to find Texas cheats; Firm focuses on schools with high number of suspicious results

By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 9A McGill University professor David Harpp has come up with one of the more straightforward statistical methods for teasing out cheaters. Here’s how he might catch two students, Jack and Jill, who are copying answers off each other on a 100-question multiple-choice exam. Let’s say both got C’s on […]

Read More… from SIDEBAR: How wrong answers point to wrongdoing

By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 1A The Texas Education Agency is leaning toward severing ties with the company it hired to look for cheating on the TAKS test, in part because the results have generated negative publicity for the state. The agency also has some concerns about some methods used by the company, Caveon, […]

Read More… from TEA may ax test analyzer; Agency doubts level of TAKS cheating; evaluator defends data

By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 1A All 699 schools suspected of cheating on the TAKS test will face a state investigation, the Texas Education Agency announced Monday. Sort of. The word “investigation” can have many meanings. For some schools, investigations could consist of little more than an exchange of letters. It remains to be […]

Read More… from Entire TAKS list faces inquiry; TEA: All 699 schools suspected of fraud to see some level of scrutiny

Of all the layers of silliness in the No Child Left Behind law, it’s hard to come up with any more poorly thought out than the “persistently dangerous schools” clause.

That’s the part of the law that is supposed to identify which schools are too scary and unsafe for kids to attend. If your school makes the list, it has to give you the chance to transfer to a safer school.

This year, five Texas schools were labeled persistently dangerous. Four are in the Valley, and I’ll admit I don’t know much about them. But the fifth one is a shocker: Cypress Ridge High School in Houston.

Cypress Ridge isn’t some gritty urban school with gangbangers roaming the halls. It’s a middle-class school in the suburbs.

It’s in Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, the biggest suburban district in the state. The area has a lot of new growth; Cypress Ridge was built only four years ago and already has 3,500 students. Its test scores are usually better than the state average. If you want to imagine a Dallas-area high school for context, Cypress Ridge’s demographics are comparable to Newman Smith High in Carrollton.

So how did Cypress Ridge get labeled “persistently dangerous”? Was there a serial killer on the loose in AP Chemistry?

Nope. Just a few kids snagging pills from Dad’s medicine cabinet. […]

Read More… from Column: ‘Dangerous’ not always unsafe

Texas officials have released the names of 241 more schools with suspicious patterns in their test scores. But none are likely to be targeted in the upcoming round of state investigations into possible cheating.

The new list, released Friday, brings the total number of schools with suspicious scores to 699. That’s almost one-tenth of all the Texas schools that administered the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in 2005.

Earlier, the Texas Education Agency had released the names of only 442 schools that had at least one classroom with suspicious scores.

But Caveon – the test-security company the TEA hired to look for cheaters – also looked for schools that had suspicious score patterns schoolwide. Because of differences in the ways Caveon analyzed the scores, some schools were flagged as suspicious schoolwide without raising red flags in any specific classroom.

The TEA had not asked Caveon for the schoolwide list until The Dallas Morning News revealed its existence three weeks ago.

“We wanted to be able to look at all the schools as we think about how to move forward,” spokeswoman Debbie Graves Ratcliffe said. […]

Read More… from TEA adds 241 schools with suspect scores; Campuses not likely to be part of inquiry into possible TAKS cheating