Are Virginia's school testing results fraudulent?

[Karmadillo]

http://www.dailyhowler.com/index.shtml

THE STORY-TO-DATE CONTINUES: It seems that Christmas came early for Maury Elementary of Alexandria, Virginia last year. In the spring of 2005, only 5 of Maury’s 19 third-graders passed the state’s “Reading/Language Arts” test, a passing rate of 27 percent. (Statewide, 77 percent of third-graders passed. We’ll call this test “reading” from this point on.) But yes, Virginia—there is a Santa Claus! Thanks to bizarre statistical manipulations, the state ended up reporting that 17 of Maury’s 19 third-graders had passed—and Maury was soon at the top of the Washington Post’s front page, hailed as “a study in pride, progress” (full links below). How did five out of 19 become seventeen? How did an abysmal passing rate become a source of community “pride?” Simple—according to Alexandria testing director Monte Dawson, an undisclosed number of Maury fourth-graders also were given the third-grade test. When 12 fourth-graders passed the third-grade test, they were added to the third-grade total. We know, we know, it sounds impossible—but no, we’re really not making this up. Indeed, Dawson sent us a lengthy excerpt, apparently from a technical manual, which outlined the absurd procedure. What do you do when a school’s passing rate exceeds 100? The excerpt even explained that!

Once again, we’re not making this up. And according to the material Dawson sent, this absurd statistical procedure has been used in Virginia since 2001; presumably, it may have inflated official “passing rates” at many other schools in the state. If this has occurred, then the state has been systematically defrauding its citizens through this public reporting (“accountability!”) system.

Have other schools displayed the pattern observed at Maury last year? Have “passing rates” been inflated statewide by the use of this absurd procedure? For example, have elementary schools in the Norfolk system had their passing rates inflated? As we noted last week, Norfolk won a prestigious national award for urban school systems last year, granted by the Broad Foundation. But did Norfolk win this national prize based on inflated school passing rates? This may be the world’s most obvious question—and it’s a question we simply can’t answer.

The question is obvious, but it can’t be answered—because the state of Virginia has now removed its “school report cards” from public view. (These are the public records posted on-line to inform the public about public schools. The “school report cards” have been unavailable since at least March 3.) Of course, nothing on-line disappears completely; some readers tell us that they have been able to access some of these records through various machinations. Yesterday, for example, a reader sent us material he had accessed in an Excel file. Uh-oh! We don’t have Excel. And the basic question, of course, is this: Why are these records being withheld from normal public inspection?

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