Bloomberg NYC Dept. of Ed. delayed FOIA request on cheating scandals for 18 months. Nearly 100 NYC educators implicated in cheating probes since 2006 incl. 17 principals, some cases never made public, one school raised 255 scores

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1/29/13, “Ex-NYCiSchool principal in Regents test cheat,” NY Post, Yoav Gonen

“The former principal of the high-performing NYCiSchool improperly allowed one of her teachers to re-grade and raise scores on high school Regents exams, school investigators found.

She was among nearly 100 educators — including 17 principals, 61 teachers, seven assistant principals and nine other staffers — who have been implicated in cheating probes by the city Department of Education since 2006, according to documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act filing.

It took the Department of Education nearly 18 months to comply with The Post’s request for cheating cases confirmed by its internal investigative arm, the Office of Special Investigations —
in violation of the rules governing public access to documents.

 

Among the recent cases, NYCiSchool principal Alisa Berger let teacher Susan Herzog re-grade the June 2010 Living Environment Regents exam by herself

 

after they had already been graded.

 

Herzog said she raised the scores given to students for certain questions after clarifying proper procedures with the State Education Department. Berger told The Post that student scores were both raised and lowered, but that no students’ grade was changed from failing to passing.

“Did I make a procedural mistake? I did. Was it cheating? Absolutely not,” said Berger, who unrelatedly left the downtown school last year.

Among the biggest cases of cheating, teachers at Hillcrest HS in Queens were found to have bumped up the scores of

255 students on the English Regents exams back in 2006.

The case was never made public and

no teachers were punished because the re-scoring practice, known as “scrubbing,” wasn’t technically prohibited.

In another case, Manhattan teacher Iris Ventura helped several classrooms of 8th graders with the state’s high-stakes math exams — at the request of MS 322 principal Erica Zigelman, investigators found.

Despite the DOE’s stated no tolerance policy for cheating,
they were both let off with letters of reprimand.

In 2011, Ventura was caught cheating again — this time telling four 7th graders to check their answers on the state math exams, probers found.

She was again let off with a letter in her file, and has since resigned, according to the DOE.”

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Mayor Bloomberg and school test scores scandals:

March 2011, "The Bloomberg Bubble Bursts," Commentary, Siegel and Stern

"From 2005 to 2009, Bloomberg called press conferences to celebrate the ever-more-spectacular test-score increases. At those events, the union president, Randi Weingarten, stood next to the mayor nodding in approval, even though she would confide to associates that the scores were likely inflated. Bloomberg and Weingarten each had their own reasons to hype the test scores: Bloomberg to boost his national profile and Weingarten to lay down a marker for yet another series of teacher pay increases....

"But nothing illuminates the vacancy of Bloomberg’s mayoralty more than the false narrative that depicted him as America’s “education mayor.”...

Indeed, the purpose of the extra spending could not have been to improve student performance, since he said very plainly that he didn’t believe there was any connection between the two. 

Rather it was to shore up his political prospects and help make his reputation as the nation’s “education mayor.” Instead of insisting on changes in teacher-compensation packages that might have reduced the city’s long-term pension and health-care costs, Bloomberg cashed in his chips in the coin of either direct political support from the United Federation of Teachers or its calculated neutrality....

But soon it became clear that, in this area as in others, it was necessary to pay attention to what this mayor did rather than what he said. Almost immediately, on the issue of classroom instruction, Bloomberg and Klein chose to defer to the progressive old guard within the school system. Lucy Calkins of Columbia Teachers College, one of the country’s leading progressive educators and a fierce opponent of the phonics approach to reading, was given a leading role in designing reading and writing instruction for most schools (to a tune of more than $10 million in consultant contracts).

Bloomberg also began dipping deeper into the city treasury for more and more tax dollars for the schools. From fiscal 2003 to 2011, the education budget grew from $12.7 billion to $23 billion annually—almost a 70 percent increase in inflation-adjusted dollars. Most of the money was paid out in 43 percent across-the-board teacher-salary increases in just the first six years of Bloomberg’s tenure. He also added more than 4,000 teachers to the payroll, reaching 80,000—one teacher for every 13 students in the system. But the mayor who prided himself on his business acumen in managing the city’s workforce obtained almost nothing in return from the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) for this unprecedented bonanza."...




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