Educator: Teachers told kids to cheat

A former elementary school math coach says she lost her job after she reported nine Sunnyside district teachers directing first- and second-graders to cheat on tests.

Jean Olson, an educator with more than three decades of experience and a stack of superior evaluations, filed a complaint under a state whistle-blower law against Sunnyside Unified School District and is asking for her job back. An administrative hearing officer will issue a recommendation soon, and Sunnyside's Governing Board will make a final decision.

In her role as a teacher coach at Los Niños Elementary School, 5445 S. Alvernon Way, Olson said that late last year and early this year she saw test papers and heard student comments that indicated teachers were telling students to change wrong answers on tests. She also noticed suspiciously high levels of improvement in some classes from one nine-week period to the next.

A week after she reported her concerns to Los Niños Principal Herbert Springs, she said, he told her that her contract would not be renewed for this school year. That prompted her whistle-blower complaint.

During an administrative hearing last month, Sunnyside officials said Olson's job was one of several at Los Niños sacrificed to budget cuts, and the decision not to renew her contract had nothing to do with her complaint. District officials say they offered Olson a teaching job, but she turned it down.

Officials would not comment on the cheating allegations because the issue is still pending - and they say the real issue Olson's complaint raises is not cheating, but whether she was retaliated against for complaining. However, during the hearing Springs said he investigated the matter by asking the teachers if they allowed or encouraged students to cheat. They said they didn't.

The cheating Olson alleges - much of which was confirmed by another teacher coach at Los Niños - happened on "benchmark" tests, which schools use to measure how students are progressing and whether teachers need to adjust their lesson plans in preparation for the AIMS test, which starts in third grade. The state-mandated AIMS test, formally known as Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards, measures a child's knowledge in reading, math and writing. It's called a "high-stakes test" because consistently low scores can lead to a school being labeled as "failing," which can mean a state takeover and possible replacement of the principal and staff.

Observers say current and future measures tying student performance to educators' evaluations creates a temptation to allow cheating. One law, already in effect, bases 20 percent of a superintendent's pay and benefits on student academic gain and other factors. Another law, to take effect starting with the 2012-13 school year, bases 33 percent to 50 percent of teacher and principal evaluation scores on student performance and test scores.

"The more the state puts pressure on the outcomes of assessments, the more likely that we will tend to see more of these kinds of behaviors," said David Garcia, professor of education policy in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. "Anytime you put stakes on something, you run the risk that it will become corrupted."

Already, there have been resignations over test tampering in Houston, and investigations of teachers altering standardized test scores in Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nevada and Virginia. In Atlanta, state and federal authorities are conducting criminal investigations into fraud over boosting standardized test scores.

It's a disturbing pattern, said Robert Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest, a nonprofit group based in Boston that monitors standardized testing: Administrators pressure teachers to boost scores, teachers respond by "engaging in activities to make scores look better than they are" and administrators look the other way.

"Teachers hear from their principals, who hear from their assistant superintendents, superintendents, school board that 'You have to get the scores up.' "

Testing irregularities

Olson, 59, became a Sunnyside teacher in 1978 and retired in 2003. She then was hired as a contract employee and taught at Los Niños before becoming a math coach and overseeing testing there. She also served as the principal designee at the school when Springs was not there.

As a coach, one of Olson's duties was to observe testing during benchmark exams to make sure rules were followed. She did walk-throughs at other times to observe teachers and offer ideas for improvement - another duty of an educational coach.

In the fall of 2009, Olson said, she noticed some things during benchmark testing that made her uncomfortable. She saw more irregularities in the spring of 2010 and brought her concerns to principal Springs. Another Los Niños educational coach, Brenda Quihuis-Ortega, testified during Olson's eventual whistle-blowing hearing to what she heard and observed.

Among the observations Olson and Quihuis-Ortega detailed during the hearing or presented in exhibits:

• Test papers seemed to have an unusually high number of erasures of wrong answers and then the right answer circled.

Olson checked them and found 182 out of 400 tests were altered.

• Two children said they had heard the story they were being tested on - a story written for the test - prior to taking the test.

• When Quihuis-Ortega noticed a student had stopped working and told him to continue, he said he had to wait until he was told whether the answer was right or wrong.

• When Olson asked students why they were working on a portion of the test they had already completed, one said she had to go back and fix the wrong answers.

• Seven classes - including the one that previously had the lowest scores for its grade level - saw combined scores climb by more than 100 points from one nine-week period to the next, an exhibit presented at Olson's whistle-blowing hearing showed. Olson said increases that large are suspect - especially considering that one of the classes consisted of English-language learners, whose scores are typically low.

• One teacher had three students receive scores exceeding grade level in the benchmark exam in the first nine weeks, and 12 in the second quarter. Olson testified that such dramatic jumps in a nine-week period would be an aberration.

Both Olson's and Quihuis-Ortega's duties were curtailed after they reported irregularities to Springs, who took over testing for the remainder of the last school year. The women testified that at Springs' direction their work with teachers was limited and they no longer did walk-throughs during testing.

Quihuis-Ortega is now a teacher coach at Los Ranchitos Elementary School, also in the Sunnyside district. One of the teachers Olson accused of cheating, whom Springs cleared of wrongdoing, is now in charge of testing at Los Niños. Olson also applied for that job, but district officials said she was not the most qualified candidate.

Benchmark testing

Guidelines for benchmark testing provided by Sunnyside officials are very general and do not address cheating. However, Tucson Unified School District's testing policy prohibits "disclosing test items to students prior to testing, changing a student's answer or coaching a student on an item, or prompting a student to change an answer."

While the TUSD policy covers all forms of testing - benchmark, high-stakes and otherwise - during the hearing for Olson's whistle-blower complaint Sunnyside officials made it clear they don't put much weight on benchmark testing.

Bernie Cohn, who oversees the district's K-8 schools' curriculum, faculty and staff, testified that the district follows "very loose guidelines" in administering the test because it is not considered high-stakes. The district spent more than $150,000 on benchmark tests last school year and has budgeted slightly more than that for this school year.

Cohn testified he has had five cases of what he called "testing irregularities" with benchmark testing, and that each time it happened he talked with the teachers and told them it was not appropriate. He did not consider firing any of the teachers, he said, but if it happened again he would refer the teacher to human resources for discipline. He said he did not know what the punishment would be.

Los Niños Principal Springs testified he would recommend a teacher be fired for cheating on the AIMS test, but not on a benchmark test.

During the hearing, Armand Salese, Olson's attorney, asked Cohn: "If a teacher is cheating on a test - in other words, giving the student the answers to the tests, these benchmark tests - that's dishonest, is it not?"

"I'm not going to answer that as dishonest," Cohn said. "I don't know what the purpose is of giving the answers to it."

"Well, if the teacher, when you caught her, said, 'I want to get higher scores for all my kids in the class so my class looks better,' " Salese said.

"I have had that situation and I would like to share with you why I don't think it's dishonest," Cohn said. "I had a teacher tell me, 'I gave the test the day before … and the reason behind it was I didn't want my kids to look stupid when they took the test' and I explained to the teacher that's not the process for this and you need not to do that and it was never done again. That's how I handled it."

"So you didn't consider that to be dishonest?" Salese asked.

"I felt it was a judgment error," Cohn said.

Sunnyside Superintendent Manuel L. Isquierdo, Governing Board members, administrators and the teachers accused of helping students cheat would not be interviewed for this story. District Attorney John Richardson said he advised them not to comment because no final decision has been reached in Olson's complaint. The district released a one-page statement, which said Olson's allegations "have not been verified and the teachers that were the subject of the accusations have denied cheating." The statement says the district believes it is unfair to reach any conclusions or determinations on the matter "based solely on the testimony and arguments presented" at the hearing.

The effects of cheating

Tests are tests, several educational experts said, and anything that alters their results renders them useless.

"If the district values the use of benchmark tests to measure student progress, then they have to place a value on the test's reliability," said J. Robert Hendricks, associate professor and head of the department of educational policy studies and practice at the University of Arizona College of Education.

Allegations of possible cheating - even on a test used for in-house purposes only - demand a thorough investigation, Hendricks said. That entails a historical analysis of test data to assess whether there have been inconsistencies in scores and conversations with all parties involved - perhaps even with students, he said.

Allowing test results to be manipulated, even if there is no malicious intent, damages children now and into the future, said Garcia, the ASU education policy professor.

"The student is the one who's really hurt," he said, "because the student is not receiving the instruction needed to gain the knowledge to pass the test."

So far, coming forward with her allegations of cheating has done nothing good for Olson.

She became an outcast at her school, she said, and she lost her job.

Tucson attorney Ben Hufford, the assigned hearing officer in Olson's whistle-blower case, will recommend this month whether Olson should get her job back. The final decision is up to Sunnyside's Governing Board.

Whatever happens, Olson said, she doesn't regret speaking up.

"I just want the cheating to stop," she said.

On StarNet: Read the deposition of Sunnyside Unified School District official Bernie Cohn at azstarnet.com/pdf

Los Niños Elementary School AIMS test results

2009-10

% Passing Math % Passing Reading % Passing Writing

3rd grade 69 67 NA

4th grade 55 54 NA

5th grade 50 67 60

2008-09

% Passing Math % Passing Reading % Passing Writing

3rd grade 70 67 77

4th grade 77 68 83

5th grade 69 61 61

2007-08

% Passing Math % Passing Reading % Passing Writing

3rd grade 70 60 77

4th grade 79 71 67

5th grade 67 61 63

2006-07

% Passing Math % Passing Reading % Passing Writing

3rd grade 75 67 84

4th grade 83 58 87

5th grade 57 55 66

2005-06

% Passing Math % Passing Reading % Passing Writing

3rd grade 86 69 69

4th grade 77 74 84

5th grade 75 69 73

Contact reporter Carmen Duarte at 573-4104 or cduarte@azstarnet.com