Teachers least likely to erase answers

The newspaper found that teachers typically have access to the finished exams for less time than either the students who take the test or the school administrators who collect and secure the answer sheets. In the only erasure case that has been fully resolved, a principal and an assistant principal at a DeKalb County elementary school confessed that they had changed answer sheets during a weekend erasing session in the principal’s office.

Officials in some school systems offer a benign explanation for a high number of erasures: Students, they say, are told to lightly mark their answers and then go back through the test, erasing the marks and changing answers if necessary.

Teachers, however, say they couldn’t make wholesale erasures on answer sheets, even if they wanted to.

“As far as I’m concerned there is no way a teacher can be erasing students’ answers,” said Patrick Crabtree, head of the Atlanta Association of Educators, who teaches fourth grade at Avondale Elementary in the city system.

“There is no time to sit down in the classroom and look and see what’s going on with those tests. We turn them right back in. We have really no access to it.”

Tim Callahan, spokesman for the 78,000-member Professional Association of Georgia Educators, a teacher group, agreed.

“First of all, teachers don’t have the access or the time you need to do that work,” Callahan said. “Secondly they don’t have the motivation the same way a principal or administrator would. They are looking to move the numbers on a whole school. A teacher would just have one class of answers on their hands.

“If there was indeed some malfeasance going on, it would most likely be an administrator. They have access and motivation.”

Hal Beaver, executive director of the Georgia Association of Elementary School Principals, said principals also have limited access to the testing materials once students finish them. At the end of each testing day, answer sheets and booklets are bundled and stored in a locked room, said Beaver, a retired principal.

“Inappropriate things may have happened in a few instances, but inappropriate things always go on somewhere, even in churches and newspapers,” Beaver said.

“Administrators rarely even see the tests. It would be a rare instance when a principal even looked at it. From my perspective, principals would have very little contact with it.”

Based on interviews with those responsible for test protocols, only two people have access to the exam once it arrives at the school and once the tests are completed: the principal and the testing administrator, who is usually the assistant principal.

How it works

In the weeks leading up to spring break, schools across metro Atlanta will take possession of the 2010 CRCT, which will come shrink-wrapped in boxes, and store it in vaults, locked rooms and buildings with video cameras.

Some will be delivered to the schools. Others will be picked up by principals or testing coordinators, who sign and timestamp the receipt for tens of thousands of testing booklets and answer sheets.

Local school leaders say they use these and other procedures to protect the integrity of the exam, which is taken annually by students in first through eighth grades.

At Gwinnett County’s Chattahoochee Elementary — which is not part of the erasures investigation — Principal Jeff Lee detailed the CRCT protocol for the AJC.

Preparations begin on the first day of school, Lee said.

The school custodian, clerks, teachers and administrators — about 100 in all — go over how to sign out the test booklets and answer documents, when to pick tests up and distribute each section, and even how many times they can read a question to a student without breaching security.

At 8:30 a.m. on test days, teachers begin their march to the locked room, where a table has been set up just outside the door. There they retrieve testing booklets and answer sheets marked with their names. They count them. Then Lee and Assistant Principal Sheldon Jefferson count them again before the teachers return to their rooms to distribute the tests.

Once students complete the tests, teachers collect them and return the documents to the testing coordinator, who stores them under lock and key until the next testing day. The process is repeated until the nine-day testing cycle is over or every child has been tested — whichever comes first.

It is not until a couple of days after all testing is complete that the materials are returned to the district. If the testing is finished on Friday, the materials are not returned until Monday afternoon at the earliest.

When the materials are returned, the bar codes are again checked to make sure they match with what went out.

Teachers implicated

Although teachers say they’ve had no part in the erasures, security breaches of other kinds overwhelmingly point to teachers and often result from a procedural or cheating error, said Gary Walker, director of the Georgia Professional Standards Commission’s ethics division.

“A teacher might read a question more than twice, for instance,” he said.

Teachers also err when they don’t follow instructions properly or coach students during the test.

Last spring, Walker said, a student indicated that his teacher clarified questions and terminology.

“You’re not supposed to do that,” he said.

In one case, a teacher told students to change answers and “sang songs” that implied answers and demonstrated the answer with a clock, Walker said.

“That’s cheating,” he said.

The teacher was suspended 90 days without pay.

Atlanta investigation

In the erasures probe, nearly 69 percent of Atlanta Public Schools’ elementary and middle schools showed unusual patterns of erasures, the most of any district in the state.

Superintendent Beverly Hall told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the district relied on monitors and other testing security measures when students took the exam last spring.

Test monitors at each school peeked into classroom windows. Sometimes they opened the door to look in. Other times they entered the classroom and walked around, Hall said.

“There was process and there was monitoring and there were protocols,” said Hall. “No, that doesn’t mean someone cannot circumvent it. And that’s the question mark that’s out there.”

A blue ribbon panel of community leaders has been named to investigate the city schools.