The city has dropped key controls for detecting cheating on the state’s high-stakes standardized tests, the Daily News has learned.
In 2002, the then-Board of Education dropped an analysis system to red-flag suspiciously high erasing on tests, officials said.
The city also downgraded the number of random monitors sent to schools on test day to police for cheats, former officials said.
“I was shocked because I felt that we caught people cheating and there may have been people cheating that we didn’t catch,” said Kathleen Cashin, a former regional superintendent in Brooklyn who is now a member of the state Board of Regents, recalling her reaction to the policy change.
Checks on cheating have become a hot-button issue across the country after an analysis of erasures on answer sheets in Atlanta this summer uncovered widespread cheating. More than 150 principals and teachers in that city have been implicated in the scandal.
In Philadelphia and Washington, similar analyses have pointed to possible problems of staff boosting scores improperly.
New York City Education Department officials note erasure and other analyses still get used when there are reports of problems. They also still send monitors to roughly 10% of the schools on a random basis.
City officials also say they have upped security in key areas, including imposing a strict deadline of 3 p.m. on test days for the submission of answer sheets to grading centers.
The lack of checks on cheating comes at a time when the city has raised the stakes on the standardized tests by using them to rate teachers’ performances, to close schools and to hold back kids who underperform.
“If the tradeoff was increasing test security procedures or lowering the stakes, I would tell you to lower the stakes,” said Robert Tobias, former head of testing at the Board of Education, who noted the city’s security for testing was “state of the art” when he left in 2001.
“Try to reduce the incentives to cheat by using the tests the way they were intended to be used – that is as a general measure of pupil performance and school performance.
“If you’re going to continue with a high-stakes environment … you should do everything you possibly can to discourage and detect it.”rmonahan@nydailynews.com
