Only one Gainesville city school is under investigation after a state review of standardized test score data flagged 20 percent of Georgia elementary and middle schools for possible cheating last year.
About 25 percent of Gainesville Exploration Academy classrooms were flagged for having an unusually high number of erasures on last spring’s Criterion-Referenced Competency Test. This places the school in the “severe” category, which includes 73 other Georgia schools with 25 percent or more flagged classrooms.
Fair Street International Baccalaureate World School was flagged as a “moderate” concern with 13.9 percent of its classrooms found to have an unusual number of erasures.
No Hall County schools were ranked as severe concerns.
The report was called for by the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement to track wrong-to-right erasures — meaning incorrect answers were erased and changed to correct answers, which can indicate cheating.
Kathleen Mathers, Office of Student Achievement director, told the state board of education Wednesday she recommends schools in the severe category put in place state school system monitors during testing or rotate teacher monitors. For schools with fewer than 25 percent flag rates, the office is leaving investigations up to district boards of education.
“We are very much turning this back over to the local superintendents, and we are not saying in any way that we think teachers in those buildings changed student answers,” Mathers said. “What we are saying are these schools look unusual compared to other schools across the state.”
Gainesville schools Superintendent Merrianne Dyer said Wednesday she is not concerned by the report’s findings.
“To be honest, I would say that this is the first time they’ve done an erasure analysis,” she said. “Who knows if this is how many times people have been erasing forever. It’s like a baseline, really.”
After speaking with Gainesville and Fair Street elementary schools’ principals, Dyer said they plan to follow the recommendations from the Office of Student Achievement. Most of the flagged classrooms were from the first- and second-grade levels, and they will do more to prepare students at these grade levels for the tests, she added.
“We will remain committed to preparing and implementing test preparation and state-approved administration procedures for our students and teachers.”
Of Hall County’s 29 schools included in the report, three were considered minimal causes for concern, including Chestnut Mountain Elementary, with 6.1 percent of classrooms flagged; Lyman Hall Elementary with 6.3 percent; and White Sulphur Elementary with 6.9 percent.
Hall County schools Superintendent Will Schofield said Wednesday he feels positive about the results.
“It just goes back to the fact that I think we have great people in our school system,” he said. “One of the greatest expectations we have is to help young people develop character. Adults in the building need to model that, and I think our people do that in a wonderful way.”
About 1,800 schools were included in the report, of which 370 showed higher occurrences of wrong-to-right erasures on tests. The report included data from all CRCT tests taken at the first- to eighth-grade levels. Each classroom was evaluated and compared to the state average of erasure marks. If they fell more than three points outside of the state average, the classroom was flagged.
On average, 4 percent of the nearly 153,000 classrooms analyzed were flagged.
Although board members hesitated to point fingers at school leaders, state schools Superintendent Kathy Cox did not downplay the report’s findings.
“Nobody’s getting accused of anything at this point, but the teeth that we have are still there,” Cox said. “If we find that a testing environment was compromised, you as a state board have the ability to make the results of that test null and void for that school.”
The report, which was conducted by the same company that publishes the state CRCT test, is available on the Office of Student Achievement Web site at www.gaosa.org.