An elementary school recently visited by President Clinton, held up
as an example of the success of his administration’s education policies,
is now under fire following allegations by several students that staff
members and tutors helped the students cheat on fourth-grade state
proficiency tests.
In addition, after reporting the student confessions to school
officials, an award-winning teacher who blew the whistle now says her
career may be in jeopardy after she rejected requests by administrators
to recant her story.
Eastgate Elementary School in Columbus, Ohio, the last stop in a
two-day education reform tour conducted by Clinton earlier this month,
garnered national interest in the school’s academic performance. In his
remarks at the May 4 event, Clinton took partial credit for the school’s success, saying his efforts to reduce class size and providing federal money for two additional teachers made a critical difference.
“(Eastgate’s) strategy, which is our strategy in the Clinton-Gore administration, of investing more and demanding more is working,” Clinton said.
At the heart of the Eastgate controversy are school’s most recent test scores on the state’s fourth grade proficiency test. In just one year’s time, the number of Eastgate students passing the reading portion of the test jumped from 9.5 percent to 46.9 percent — a 394 percent increase. Similar gains were seen in the science (262 percent), math (229 percent), and citizenship (96.8 percent) portions of the proficiency test.
In remarks delivered at Clinton’s education reform rally, Eastgate principal Barbara Blake said that “good old-fashioned hard work” and smaller class sizes were responsible for the remarkable test-score gains. But skeptics are raising eyebrows, particularly since state education officials rate single-digit annual improvements as exceptional.
“I’ve never heard of an instance where a school has shown such radical improvement in just a year, so it should have raised some red flags with the school district,” said David DeSchryer, director of research for the
Center for Education Reform. “Even in a school with outstanding programs and new teachers, you’re only going to see incremental gains. To get results like this, they would have had to ship in a whole new student body.”
Christy Maser, a teacher at neighboring Champion Middle School and an official with the Columbus Education Association, told WorldNetDaily that the real test will be in mid-June, when the fourth-grade test scores for the current school year are announced.
“If they have some way let us in on the secret, we would like to know, because we’ve been struggling for quite some time to figure out how to increase test scores even a little bit,” she said.
The allegations of cheating were reported in December by Eastgate fifth-grade teacher Barbara McCarroll, after she discovered that most of her students, who had scored so well on the proficiency tests the previous year, couldn’t add, subtract, multiply or divide. According to a Columbus Public Schools investigation report (a copy of which was obtained by WorldNetDaily), McCarroll had asked students why they were performing so poorly after Blake had reprimanded her for her student’s performance. Several students then admitted that they had cheated on the previous year’s test and showed her how staff members assisted them in providing answers during the exam. McCarroll approached Blake with her concerns later that day.
The investigation report states that one student claimed a school tutor gave him the answers to three math questions by writing the answers out on separate pieces of paper, while other students reported that another school official had pushed their hands over to the correct answer bubbles on a multiple-choice answer sheet. Still another student corroborated the other students’ stories, but denied cheating herself.
Camile Nasbe, the testing director for the Columbus Public Schools who conducted the investigations, also interviewed the fourth-grade teachers who administered the tests, all of who denied helping the students on the exams. Nasbe’s final report, which was submitted to district officials on March 14, concluded that the cheating claims could not be substantiated due to the conflicting stories offered by the students and teachers.
In an interview with the Columbus Dispatch, McCarroll said that the cheating was not unknown to school officials.
“From what I understand, this (cheating) has been going on a long time,” she said. McCarroll also noted that Eastgate teachers and the principal were rewarded with large cash bonuses under a district program as a result of the high scores on the proficiency tests.
In response to the concerns of parents of the children making the claims, the school district yesterday made a formal request to the Ohio Department of Education to conduct its own investigation to help clear up the matter. Department spokesperson Patty Grey told WorldNetDaily that it would take several weeks for the state investigators to complete their interviews with both district and school officials. The findings will then be presented to the State Board of Education, which must approve the investigators’ recommendations.
But the state’s investigation is unlikely to help McCarroll, who says the pressure from Eastgate administrators and teachers to recant her story prompted her to take disability leave in February.
“It got so bad, I started bleeding internally,” she said in a recent interview with the Columbus Dispatch. “I couldn’t sleep; I couldn’t eat. Every day, I went there and people wouldn’t speak with me.” McCarroll, who won the district’s 1995 Good Apple teaching award, now faces the prospect that blowing the whistle on her colleagues might have brought her career to an end.
Despite the controversy, Eastgate’s principal remains defiant, standing firmly behind her school’s test scores. “I think I could withstand any review,” Blake told the Dispatch. “We have nothing to hide.”
Patrick Poole is a regular contributor to WorldNetDaily.