Dive Summary:
- Education advocate Michelle Rhee is fighting accusations that she didn't pursue cheating evidence during her three years as the District of Columbia's schools chancellor.
- Rhee says that she "didn't see" an internal memo in which a direct consultant warned that as many as 190 teachers at 70 schools potentially cheated in 2008 by changing students' answers on testing sheets, adding that the testing company doubted the erasure analysis and that later investigations found no widespread cheating.
- Some D.C. schools flagged for possible erasures in the past have seen sharp drops in test scores, and a similar controversy surrounding erasures ended in a grand jury indictment of former Atlanta Supt. Beverly Hall and others, with a firm hired by Rhee to conduct a narrow review in D.C. also cited during Atlanta officials' defense.
From the article:
... In an internal memo, a district consultant warned that about 190 teachers at 70 schools — more than half the system's campuses — may have cheated in 2008 by erasing wrong answers on student testing sheets and filling in correct ones. The four-page document was made public last week in a post by PBS journalist John Merrow, who had received the memo anonymously. ...
