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Principal and teacher cheating on Regents exams is business as usual in NYC high schools. Everybody knows what is going on.The term of art for changing failing grade to passisg is “scrubbing.” Both the DOE and the UFT wink at test tampering crime wave because each institution benefits.

I blew the whistle on massive Regents grade changing and cover-up at the Cobble Hill School of American Studies. A brave OSI investigator substantiated my allegations in 2005–the AP resigned, the Principal was removed, and the LIS reprimanded. But the DOE suppressed the involvement of the Superintendent and Deputy Chancellor.

Two years later, Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon savaged the OSI report, exonerated the guilty parties, and strongly suggested that I was a false accuser. Yet after citing me over 600 times in 67 pages Condon recommended no penalty!

Owing to my rebuttal of Condon’s corrupt report, he is under investigation himself by an Inspector General of the Department of Investigation. Amazing but true, Condon concluded that the evidence of tampering at Cobble Hill was insufficient even though he neglected to audit the disputed exams!  

Chancellor Klein betrayed OSI and adopted Condon’s flawed report. Klein demoted OSI’s Director, fired her Deputy, and forced the resignation of the honest investigator.

Last summer I sent Klein and his Chief Counsel Michael Best conclusive proof of Regents cheating at the school–my personal, handwritten audit identifying which exams (51in total) were tampered with and how. No surprise–I received no acknowledgement.

For the most part, short answers are either right or wrong; although I have seen some math Regents exams where the question could lead to more than one correct answer; it doesn’t happen often but it happens.

However the free responses are another matter. The SED issues yellow pieces of paper with the interpretations of one set of teachers of the credit values that should be assigned in accordance with the Regents exam rubrics. But sometimes, they are plain wrong. Sometimes there are grey issues. Two completely honest teachers can read the same student response and one can say 2 credits and the other 3 credits. Just because SED re=grades a question they are only making a recommendation of what they think the correct credit value should be. Their judgment may or may not be any better than the Principal, or in the case of what used to be, the Assistant Principal in charge of that subject area. To simply accept the word of SED sometimes can be unfair to students. Last time I checked, most of the people doing the re-evaluation have no more degrees in education than the original graders.

Of course with those who believe strongly that grades on Regents exams are indicative of the performance of a teacher, school, Principal or whatever, the temptation to make an interpretation as favorable to the student is very great, now isn’t it. But that doesn’t necessarily make anybody dishonest.

Jeff S’s point is valid. The rubrics for Regents essays are debatable. But tampering does not usually happen on the initial grading of essays. Even if one or both of the graders are overly generous, they don’t know how the rest of the scoring is going. “Scrubbing” occurs AFTER the final exam scores are determined. The Principal or  AP or teachers go back and change internal scores, e.g. deliberately raising subjective essays ratings one or two points in order to transform failures into passes. Thus tampering is premeditated and not an artifact of subjectivity. The Chicago teachers union did a survey on teacher cheating last summer. When I attempted to ask UFT Michale Mulgrew if he would support a similar survey of his members, he blew me off. When I mentioned my zero tolerance for Regents cheating, a UFT rep said, “You hate children.” So much for UFT ethics. 

Here’s the deal….you have a paper that is 1 or 2 credits below an important cut off for a student (it could be honors or what is need for simply a passing grade)….as a parent you don’t want a student to miss out just because his or her paper was graded by a tougher teacher….you know so many things can be subjective. So you re-read these borderline papers and ask the question, as you should, is there any way to justify giving the student the benefit of the doubt on any question. That is what used to be called scrubbing. Of course the incompetent, unqualified civil rights lawyer masquerading as an educator, heard about it in a newspaper article and decreed he would fire anybody who had the audacity to do whatever possible, within the framework of a very imperfect system, to give a student the benefit of the doubt. When I was an AP, we looked at papers all the time with that in mind. Let’s repeat so everybody can hear…it is not cheating, it is not unethical, it is not done for any reason but to be as fair as possible to the student. I always used a phrase that I learned in baseball, tie goes to the runner. If there is any question and the 1 credit can be the difference between the student achieving something important, of course you ruled in favor of the student. I don’t know why there should be any question about this. And yes, we had cases where we decided the state rubric was just plain wrong, and it was done for professional reasons, and the paper went to Albany and they decreed we had erred (didn’t happen very often but it happens). And then it would be up to the Principal to accept my interpretation or some stranger in Albany. But I would never dream, and I emhasize this, of giving credit to anything if there was no justification.

It is not as if just because Albany says one thing that they are always right.

To Bloomfield and Fiorillo:

When the Principal of Cobble Hill High School conspired with the Region 8 LIS to cover up my tampering allegations through a phony and illicit in-house investigation, I went over their heads to SED. In turn, SED ordered the Superintendent to have the city, via OSI, conduct a true investigation.

SED audits randomly. The DOE investigates specifically. 

The only recommendation for meaningful corrective action on the part of NYSED the Comptroller made which NYSED rejected was reported as follows in Ms. Walz’ piece: “The one area that state officials contested was the recommendation that the department require schools with known scoring irregularities to report changes made to exam scores that the reviewers found to have errors. Huxley argued that because students have already graduated by the time scores are reviewed, it’s not possible to go back and revise the scores.”

We can argue ’till the cows come in re whether individual students’ Regents scores should be corrected when school grading improprieties are identified. Essentially, this would be penalizing kids for the misconduct of adults. The real remedy for scoring inflation should be to require that scores reported for implicated schools and districts should be corrected and the corrected scores used when NYSED calculates all NCLB-related indices – AYP, etc. This way, the adults who cheated are denied the benefit of their bad conduct, as would be those who are, or were, responsible for allowing it to happen. Who knows how many schools and districts which “made” AYP should have flunked it? I’m betting it’s a lot.

When NYSED rejects correcting reported scores, it’s really protecting schools and districts from being held accountable for their misconduct. Since there are no downside risks or penalties for inflating scores, schools and districts will keep on doing it. Why shouldn’t they?

In fact, if pushed, NYSED will say that reporting (and, hypothetically, correcting reports) is a district responsibility, not its responsibility. Since districts benefit from inflated scoring and do not suffer any penalties when caught doing so, there is absolutely no reason why they should stop.

What this audit report will do, ultimately, is spread the word to superintendents, principals and others who supervise test grading that it’s really okay to inflate scores – in case they hadn’t already heard. Unless some serious, verifiable, transparent system of auditing, monitoring and supervising test grading at the state level is put into place – and fully implemented – by NYSED, we should expect that test grade inflation will get even worse over the next few years. We should also assume that while reports of better exam scores and more students graduating multiply, NAEP and SAT scores will – as they have in the past – remain essentially flat. That’s because schools and districts don’t grade NAEP or SAT tests.

The only way that NYSED itself will be held accountable for intentionally allowing this widespread and pervasive fraud to continue is if the US DOE puts its foot down: starts rejecting all NYSED’s reports which contain or are based on such scores and then refuses to give NYSED federal funds for programs which require such reporting. The fish rots from the head. That’s NYSED and … its test scoring system is quite, quite rotten.

Many years ago, then-NYS Comptroller Ned Regan, did an audit of how the objective sections of RCT and Regents exams were graded. Regan identified numerous cases in which answers had obviously been changed after the test answer sheets had been turned in. In several cases, his staff identified the adults who, during grading, had simply changed answers from wrong to right. (Different pencil/inks used, etc.) The report noted that most such changes had been done to transform marginally failing scores into marginally passing ones.

Regan recommended, amongst other things, that State Ed. and the Regents further investigate and, where appropriate, discipline the adults who were found to have changed kids’ answers. State Ed. and the Regents flat out refused, saying that doing so was a district responsibility and not their job! This had nothing to do with essay answers – it was simply an audit of scoring on multiple choice sections of these exams.

This had, and has, nothing to do with assuring that a student is given all appropriate credit for a “constructed” essay answer. It was just plain, old adult cheating then. What we see in the current DiNapoli audit is that State Ed. and the Regents basically have the same position these days: effectively monitoring and supervising the system for grading mandated tests is not, ultimately, State Ed. and the Regents’ responsibility, and they aren’t going to do it. What we have in NYS is a now widely-discredited system for legitimate test construction; a discredited and non-transparent system for test score point assignments, and a discredited system for test grading. And if history predicts, what we’re going to get is a series of paper pronouncements from State Ed. and the Regents re how they’re going to fix the very broken system, followed by a total failure to implement the fixes. It doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at “bubble in” multiple choice answers or essay responses.

The bottom line really is that the student scores, and thus student graduation numbers, reported by NYS schools, school districts, and by State Ed. itself, should be deemed virtually completely unreliable in terms of usefulness for making any judgments whatsoever about what and how well kids have learned, and even more pointedly, what and how well schools, districts and our state’s public education system have taught. In other words, the data reported is what IT professionals call “GIGO” – Garbage In: Garbage Out. The flat NAEP and SAT scores for NYS and NYCDOE tell it all – no meaningful progress for kids; vast increase in adults’ official excuses. State Ed. and the Regents – and school districts and schools – have nothing to do with constructing or scoring these exams. In areas where State Ed. and/or districts and schools do have some power to influence results – well, that’s what the staggeringly high percentages of NYS and NYC kids who were allowed modifications and/or accommodations on NAEP was about, wasn’t it? These were provided so frequently that serious questions are being raised about the validity of NAEP scores here. If anyone ever audits records documenting the propriety of these mods and accoms being granted, five will get you ten that State Ed. and the NYC DOE announce that they were not ordered to retain documentation, and thus did not do so.

The kids deserve better. They do not need to be awarded paper diplomas which do not reflect what they have learned and/or what they can do. All this gets them is the need for remedial coursework after graduation from high school and flunking entry-level employer aptitude tests.

I worked at a school where the social studies AP would change the essay scores after the teachers graded them. I reported this (along with other scoring improprieties) anonymously to the state before I left the school. I can’t say for sure that they never investigated, but I expected to hear about an investigation from former colleagues and never heard anything. Also, in my conversations with someone in Albany, I was pretty much told that they had no clear policies for penalizing schools that gave scores that were out of line with their standards.

The whole Regents system is set up to be abused, with teachers scoring the Regents exams of students at their own schools, and in small schools, scoring their own students. This is a long-standing practice which is inexcusable in the first place, but especially so when the accountability system will come hard down on any school that has a high failure rate. What is the possible justification for this practice, and why does the State allow it to continue? it makes the results inherently untrustworthy.

This month’s USDOE OIG’s audit of how NYSED handles economic stimulus funds (and underlying “regular” federal grant funds revealed that NYSED does nothing to actually audit, monitor or supervise how districts handle these funds. In fact, it exists just as a conduit for them. The new NYS Comptroller audit documents the same patterns of behavior, albeit in a non-financial area (which does have, however, significant financial implications.)

To be blunt, NYSED is what is called a “captive regulatory agency.” Wikipedia has a nice quote re captive agencies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture.

Economic rationale – The idea of regulatory capture has an obvious economic basis in that vested interests in an industry have the greatest financial stake in regulatory activity and are likely to be less hindered by collective action problems that might riddle those affected by regulation (like dispersed consumers each of whom has little particular incentive to try to influence regulators). As well, we would expect that when regulators form expert bodies to examine policy, this will invariably feature current or former industry members, or at the very least, individuals with contacts in the industry.

Some economists, such as Jon Hansen and his co-authors, argue that the phenomenon extends beyond just political agencies and organizations. Businesses have an incentive to control anything that has power over them, including institutions from the media to academia to popular culture, and thus will try to capture them as well. When this happens, they call this phenomenon “deep capture.”

What we have in NYSED is a “deep[ly] capture[d]” regulatory agency which has self-defined its mission as the tender care and feeding of its self-defined clientele, i.e., school districts. It doesn’t matter what area of NYSED functioning you examine. When you get past the intentionally-incomprehensible verbiage it spits out like clockwork, you discover that what it really does is ignore just about everything it is supposed to do – for kids – and either does nothing at all or does whatever it takes to insure that districts keep getting as much money as possible. Laws and regulations notwithstanding, there are no real strings attached to districts’ use of these funds and no real constraints on their behavior at the State level.

In terms of testing, it means that a sham system has been set up to make things as comfortable as possible … for the districts. The result is a testing system – test construction; test administration; test grading – which is a complete sham.

Why is this allowed to go on? Well, who appoints NYSED’s Board of Directors – the Regents? Turns out that Sheldon Silver, in his absolute discretion, makes these decisions in secret, and then almost every spring, like clockwork, new Regents sprout up like mushrooms on rotten logs. Then the Legislature, in its infinite wit and wisdom, votes in a joint session to rubber stamp what Silver has decided. Why is NYSED really answerable to? The Legislature, as a group, and to each and every individual State Assembly Member and Senator. Period. Numerous recent scandals outside NYC have shown that folks from local political organizations in every area of the State – the organizations which get these legislators nominated and elected – have no show sham “jobs” with their local districts and BOCES, despite the fact that they do absolutely no work for the districts as legitimate employees. Protection of these and other similarly-unsavory relationships between local political organizations and local districts is these legislators’ prime objective – not getting money for their districts for legitimate programs and services for kids.

So of course NYSED is going to have a sham system of testing and accountability. It does what it does to get funds for districts who “flunk” accountability and want the money, although nobody has a clue as to what it is really spent on. It does what it does to not have districts which don’t want these funds deemed “in need of improvement.” And it does everything else in between … to keep its real clientele, districts’ administrators and legislators well paid and happy. What happens to kids in these districts? Consider them collateral damage on NYSED’s road to the tender care and feeding of its real clientele.

We need a fundamental reorganization of how public education is handled in New York State, starting right at the top. As a baby step, a truly independent Inspector General’s office should be established with authority and budget to audit and investigate everything NYSED does … and doesn’t do, and which has the willingness and ability to send information it has gathered to the right prosecutors and federal Inspector Generals. I can’t see anything else that will work. In fact, I can’t imagine anything else that will even start to work to clean up NYSED’s functioning.

There is a simple solution to serial criminal Regents tampering (it’s a misdemeanor) that corrodes the NYC school system and makes a mockery of graduation rates–third party grading. 
NYSED could mandate that all state exams be scored by disinterested teachers at a central locations as in some other states, or by import/export of teachers or exams with other schools, or at least by using number codes rather than names on exams graded in the students’ school. Twenty of the 27 Chapter Leaders I surveyed last spring endorsed this antidote to cheating and hoped that the UFT would, too. 
If teachers are to live or die by high stakes tests like Regents, as Education Secretary Duncan insists, let the results be absolutely honest. On November 13, via Jay Matthews of the Washington Post, I asked Duncan about cheating: 

Q. Secretary Duncan, you cooperated with Steven Levitt’s investigation of teacher and principal cheating on high stakes tests when you ran Chicago Public Schools. Levitt’s dismaying findings were reported in “Freakonomics.” As a NYC high school teacher I have blown the whistle on test tampering which is not only rampant in our schools, but also covered up by the DOE and UFT which exploits rising counterfeit scores for their own ends. Since RttT [Race to the Top] rates schools and teachers on test scores, what will you do to stop the fakery which only cheats our students? Blind grading is the answer.
A He said this too is one of the issues that will affect who gets what from the Race To The Top fund. 
Translation: Drop dead.
Which is the same answer we get from Chancellor Klein and President Mulgrew. But maybe not Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch. She seems to be the honest type.       

Many people outside the system are shocked when I tell them that schools grade their own exams.

You think they could make test less tamper proof.