New York State education officials announced Monday that they had begun to review the way they detect and prevent cheating on standardized tests, taking a step to avoid the cheating scandals that have engulfed school systems in other states.
New York does not conduct statistical analyses of its high-stakes third- through eighth-grade tests to scour for suspicious results that could signal cheating, like unusual spikes in a school’s scores or predictable erasures on multiple-choice questions, officials said.
Analyses in Atlanta and Philadelphia, among other cities, have produced evidence of tampering on a scale that calls into question those cities’ educational achievements.
The State Education Department released a brief statement on Monday saying that the education commissioner, John B. King Jr., had convened a ?high-level working group in mid-July to begin an immediate review of “all aspects of the state’s testing system.” Officials said details would be available soon.
The group, headed by Valerie Grey, the executive deputy commissioner, will make recommendations to districts that will ensure “the integrity of our testing system before our students return to school in September,” though it may continue making recommendations after the school year starts. Schools are due to get the results of the 2011 third- through eighth-grade tests this week.
“We are in a period now where I believe the results of state testing systems around the country are coming under scrutiny,” Merryl H. Tisch, the commissioner of the State Board of Regents, said in an interview, adding that the state was acting to shore up public trust in its tests.
One hurdle, she said, was technological: the state’s testing systems are not designed to send computerized versions of results for easy comparison. But the state has hired a new testing company, Pearson, to develop its middle and elementary school tests beginning next year, and “the next iteration of test production will add technology to the system to make these types of studies much easier,” she said.
While New York City conducts investigations when questions about results are raised at a particular school, the city’s Education Department does not look systemwide for suspicious patterns on the tests. Those tests are the primary way the city judges the performance of elementary and middle schools on its annual school report cards. Before Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg won control of the schools, the city did conduct erasure analyses, but they were stopped by the Board of Education because of concerns about cost and effectiveness, city officials said.
On the state tests for high school students known as Regents exams, an analysis by The New York Times found a suspicious spike in the number of students who scored just over the passing bar, a statistically improbable result. The city has begun to audit those exams, and the state has changed a policy that had required teachers to re-grade Regents tests of students who came close to passing.
On the elementary and middle school tests, however, the main concern of policy makers has been score inflation, not cheating.? Acknowledging that the tests had become too easy to pass, the state adjusted scoring last year, causing hundreds of thousands of additional children to fall below proficiency.
