Dec 20, 2012 3 min read

PHILADELPHIA – A school cheating investigation that has led to educator suspensions, stricter testing protocols and more than 140 professional misconduct complaints is winding down, state education officials say.

The Philadelphia district and two city charter schools are the only remaining subjects of the 17-month probe into suspicious math and reading scores on standardized tests known as the PSSAs, or Pennsylvania System of School Assessment.

Officials have been looking into the 2009-11 test results at 48 districts and charters based on statistical anomalies and high percentages of wrong-to-right erasure marks. Thirty were cleared, but evidence of tampering was found in 15 others.

“What we were seeing was not student work,” said Carolyn Dumaresq, the state’s deputy secretary for elementary and secondary education.

She stressed that in most cases, the misconduct was isolated to a single building or grade level within a district.

“There are a lot of professionals out there who were administering the test appropriately,” she said.

But dozens were not. The Education Department has filed more than 140 professional misconduct complaints against individuals in the investigated districts, said agency spokesman Tim Eller. If sustained, the educators could lose their teaching certificates.

Determining who was responsible for the cheating has been a tricky matter, especially in buildings where many educators had access to test booklets and/or student answer sheets, Dumaresq said.

Districts were ordered to do internal investigations, take appropriate personnel action and submit plans for improving test security. Six of the 15 districts’ plans were accepted, but the state will monitor the other nine, Dumaresq said.

Among the districts with acceptable plans, local officials meted out discipline: A principal in Berwick and a teacher in Big Beaver Falls were each given 10-day unpaid suspensions, and several reprimands and warnings were issued in Bethlehem and Scranton. Also in Scranton, a teacher was suspended without pay with intent to dismiss. School board vice president Nathan Barrett, who would not elaborate on details of the case, said at a recent board meeting that he supports the recommendation to fire the employee.

The two other districts with approved test security plans are Pittsburgh and New Kensington-Arnold.

The nine districts or schools that face continued monitoring are Reading, Delaware Valley, Harrisburg, Lancaster, Hazleton, Derry, Monessen and two charter schools.

For teachers to lose their certificates, the teacher-misconduct complaints would first have to be upgraded to charges by the Professional Standards and Practices Commission, the state agency that oversees educator discipline. The commission would then conduct a hearing on the allegations. Only the final decisions are made public. The process could take years.

The cheating investigation began after a long-buried state forensic report on 2009 PSSA results was unearthed in 2011 by The Notebook, an independent news organization covering the Philadelphia school district. The probe later expanded to include scores from 2010 and 2011.

PSSA scores are used to measure a federal benchmark called AYP, or “adequate yearly progress.” Schools that fail to make AYP receive additional oversight and, eventually, could end up with new staff or be shut down.

Education Secretary Ronald Tomalis this fall attributed a statewide drop in 2012 PSSA scores to enhanced anti-cheating measures. But Marianne Perie, chairwoman of the state Technical Advisory Committee that reviewed the scores, said Tomalis was speculating. She told The Morning Call of Allentown that the committee did not examine the effect of budget cuts, among other possible factors, on test results.