PACT Scam Rocks Education Establishment

It was supposed to be one of the State Department of Education’s greatest success stories – an innovative principal taking on one of South Carolina’s most impoverished, under-performing schools and turning it into a model for the status quo’s definition of “reform.”

And for a long time that’s exactly what Sanders-Clyde Elementary school in Charleston, S.C. was – until one industrious reporter started asking questions, anyway.

After posting dramatic gains on the Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test (PACT) over the past few years, the school’s principal, MiShawna Moore, quickly became a local hero.

She was praised as a “miracle worker” by the Charleston Post and Courier, showered with praise by state and federal officials and was actually given charge of another school to “turn around” by former district Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson.

Not surprisingly, that school also posted dramatic gains on the PACT last year.

Well … like a particularly explosive episode of “Mythbusters,” the truth behind this public school “miracle” completely blew up in the faces of district officials yesterday – prompting a SLED investigation into fraudulent academic reporting and raising grave concerns over the sanctity of our state’s testing methods.

After receiving reports that “something fishy” was going on in MiShawna Moore’s schools, Charleston Post and Courier education reporter Diette Courrégé started doing some digging.

Specifically, Courrégé began looking into reports that “proficient” students who transferred from Sanders-Clyde elementary were performing far at far lower levels that their test scores would indicate.

In fact, some students who had been rated proficient in reading showed up at other schools unable to read. In many other cases, kids who scored advanced (which is higher than proficient)Â in English and math were struggling not to fail those same subjects at different schools.

Shortly after Courrégé began her investigation this spring, principal MiShawna Moore abruptly resigned from her Charleston positions and took a job with a North Carolina school district.

Community leaders and local parents were shocked and confused by her sudden departure, but had no reason to suspect anything at the time.

In the meantime, however, Courrégé continued uncovering additional evidence as to discrepancies between the test scores Moore’s students had posted and their performance in the classroom.

The potential publicity from her investigation prompted Charleston school district officials to start monitoring the administration of the PACT at Moore’s schools, and this week the “myth of the miracle worker” was officially exploded.

At Sanders-Clyde, after three years of steady and at times astronomical “progress,” students’ test scores this year plummeted by an average of 31 percentage points – or three times the typical year-to-year fluctuation.

Courrégé tells of the damning specifics in this story which appeared in Wednesday’s Post and Courier:

Last year, in most subjects, 80 to 90-plus percent of its students were at least minimally prepared for the next grade, according to PACT results. This year, about half of students were unprepared for the next grade in most subjects.

Last year, 96 percent of its third-grade students scored at or above their grade level in math. This year, 47 percent scored at or above their grade level.

Her story also shows that State Department of Education officials were alerted to the potential of “fudged numbers” at the school three years ago, but failed to take action.

The state has records of the number of answer switches, gauged by eraser marks, made by students. The state average is less than one eraser mark per student. A red flag is raised when students have more than four eraser marks per test.

The state did an unannounced visit to Sanders-Clyde in the spring of 2006 after officials saw a high number of eraser marks from 2005, the same year the school’s test scores shot up, said schools Superintendent Nancy McGinley. The state monitor stayed for one day during testing and concluded there was no cause for alarm, she said.

When test results came out in 2007, Rose discovered that an unusually large number of Sanders-Clyde students jumped two performance levels in one year, McGinley said. The district consulted with the state and found the school had a high number of eraser marks, she said.

District officials agreed to monitor the school during testing in the spring. Eraser marks for the school’s 2008 results have returned to the statewide average.

Frankly, if this isn’t evidence of outright education fraud, we don’t know what is.

We wrote yesterday about South Carolina’s test administrators “fudging numbers” with respect to counting students as “proficient” who only scored “basic” on statewide assessments, but we had no idea things were this bad.

Or this corrupt.

Worse still, it appears that the State Department was willing to turn a blind eye to the “number-fudging” until Courrégé became aware of the situation, at least.

Look, people. South Carolina’s SAT scores for public schools are falling, our graduation rate is the nation’s worst and yet according to S.C. Superintendent of Education Jim Rex, our students are riding a “wave of progress” based on the results of these state-administered exams.

We’re just guessing, but it’s probably easy to ride a “wave of progress” when teachers are giving kids the answers (or worse still, fixing their mistakes before the tests are submitted for grading).

Perhaps saddest of all, however, is the fact that none of what you’re reading now would have ever seen the light of day were it not for one reporter doing her job.

Kudos to Diette Courrégé for some of the most impressive investigative reporting we’ve seen in this state in quite some time. Seriously, she’s got our journalist of the year award locked up, and hopefully she’ll follow up by letting us know how common this sort of fraud might be in other school districts.

Courrégé is one of the few education reporters in this state actually doing her job, people, and her work obviously stands in stark contrast to the feel-good public education apologists reporting up here in Columbia.