Almost five months to the day it started, an oft-delayed investigation of Atlanta Public Schools ends Monday with the release of a report expected to detail testing violations by as many as 100 educators.
With the report, an independent panel formed to investigate irregularities on state standardized tests at city schools has promised to draw a clear picture of what happened and how, from the inadvertent breaking of test security rules to the changing of students' scores. According to discussions and interviews over the past several months, they will:
- Name schools, including where scores may have been falsified.
- Make recommendations to halt problems and move forward.
- Identify individuals -- although, for legal reasons, not likely make them public -- who violated policy or ethics.
Testing violations may result in state sanctions ranging from a reprimand to a loss of teaching license.
"There is no doubt this has been a difficult assignment for everybody," said Gary Price, the panel's chairman and a partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers. The panel met this week for the 11th -- and last -- time before the report's release. It spent nearly three hours behind closed doors to talk about personnel issues related to the probe. "We have [educators'] careers on the line."
The Atlanta panel is set to meet at 2 p.m. Monday to finalize the report. The city school board will then meet at 2:30 p.m. to accept the report and turn it over to the state for review.
In some ways, it culminates more than a year of hints that something in APS was wrong.
In December 2008, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an analysis that showed improbable gains at schools -- including some in Atlanta -- on state tests taken first in the spring and then in the summer by students struggling to master core skills such as reading and math.
A subsequent state investigation named four schools statewide that turned in questionable results for tests taken in summer 2008, including Atlanta's Deerwood Academy.
The state eventually threw out those scores, which were from fifth-grade math retests on the Georgia Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests. The audit found evidence of an abnormal number of erasures at those schools on those retests in which the wrong answer often was replaced by the right one. In some cases, educators involved in the probe denied wrongdoing. Others confessed to erasing students' answers to increase scores.
In October, the AJC published a second investigation that showed 19 schools statewide reporting extraordinary gains or drops in state test scores between 2008 and 2009.
A dozen of those schools were in Atlanta, including schools where students went from among the bottom performers statewide to among the best in the course of one year. According to the AJC analysis, the odds of making such a leap were less than 1 in 1 billion.
The state launched a comprehensive audit. According to its report, released in February, 191 Georgia public schools required investigation because they showed unusual patterns of erasures on the CRCT. The tests, of students in first through eighth grade, help determine whether schools meet federal benchmarks related to the No Child Left Behind Act.
Atlanta had the most schools flagged in any system -- 58 -- more than two-thirds of its public elementary and middle schools. It is the last of the 34 systems to complete its investigation, which is being overseen by a 15-member panel of city business and community leaders.
The panel hired investigators from Caveon Test Security and the auditing company KPMG. Over the past five months, KPMG lead investigator Charles Riepenhoff said, investigators have conducted more than 300 interviews with city school employees, parents and students. They have poured over thousands of testing documents, policies and procedures, and reviewed more than 50,000 e-mails. Price tallied their work time at approximately 3,000 hours.
Atlanta's report was originally due in late May. The panel moved its release date to mid-June, but then again delayed it, citing a need for more time. Earlier this month, the state Board of Education issued an irrevocable Aug. 2 deadline for the panel to deliver its findings or face sanctions directed at the school system.
Price told the AJC in June as many as 100 employees at 12 schools may be reported for possible violations of test security procedures. Investigators prioritized work at those 12 schools due to multiple red flags, including the number of erasures, inconsistent scoring or unusual grade increases. They said they had moderate to minimal concerns about the other 46 city schools; the report may make recommendations involving some of them, but there is no indication employees at those remaining schools will be implicated.
State officials have said an additional 80 educators statewide could also face disciplinary action in connection with their overall probe.
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