Let them eat cupcakes. Plus why Michelle Rhee is lawyering up.

[hay rick]

44. From the Frontline story-

As reported in USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/07/frontline-dc-schools-cheating/1814139/

Washington's Noyes Education Campus was the subject of a 2011 investigative series by USA TODAY, which first reported on unusually high numbers of wrong-to-right pencil erasures on standardized test papers going back to 2008.
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The PBS Frontline documentary "The Education of Michelle Rhee," ... offers the first testimony from Adell Cothorne, who in the 2010-11 school year was principal at Noyes. Cothorne tells the filmmakers that she alerted officials on Nov. 3, 2010, to an afterschool incident in which she stumbled upon three staffers sitting in an office with students' completed practice test booklets and pencils.
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She immediately reported the incident, but was never contacted by administrators. "I kind of trusted that somebody would follow through on it and it didn't really happen that way," Cothorne said.

Cothorne filed a federal complaint against the district in 2011, alleging that cheating essentially defrauded the U.S. government, since Washington receives millions in federal funds annually for education. That triggered an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education, which said on Monday that cheating was limited to just one school, which it didn't specify. The department said it couldn't substantiate any false claims and the U.S. Department of Justice declined to intervene.

When Cothorne saw the staffers with the completed booklets she noticed that "the erasers were down and the pencil points were up."

Michelle Rhee announced her resignation as D.C. Schools Chancellor on October 13, 2010.

More on the "investigation": http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/education/education-of-michelle-rhee/education-department-finds-no-evidence-of-widespread-cheating-on-d-c-exams/

The confidential lawsuit was brought in 2011 by Adell Cothorne, a former principal of the Noyes Education Campus. In her complaint, which was recently unsealed, Cothorne alleges that the district provided results from tampered student exams to the Department of Education while applying for federal grants, including $75 million in Race to the Top funding ultimately rewarded to D.C. in 2010.
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As chancellor from 2007 to 2010, Rhee placed an emphasis on student test scores, tying exam results to the pay and employment status of teachers and principals. The approach produced higher scores, but also became the focus of public controversy in 2011 after a USA Today investigation documented an unusually high number of wrong-to-right pencil erasures on standardized test papers going back to 2008. The testing company, CTB-McGraw/Hill, however, pointed out the erasures to then state superintendent Deborah Gist in 2008.
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The D.C. inspector general’s report (pdf) did not investigate erasures during Rhee’s first year as chancellor, 2007-2008, the year with the highest number of suspicious erasures. Rather, it looked at only one school, even though approximately half of district schools had been flagged for a high rate of erasures.
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In one instance, Cothorne reported walking in on a teacher teaching materials that were going to be on the DC BAS exam while test booklets were in front of the students. In a separate incident, a Noyes teacher allegedly told her, “You know they cheat on their tests,” according to the complaint. When test security was later tightened at Noyes, according to Cothorne, scores fell by 25 percent.