Atlanta Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall

I wrote favorably about Atlanta Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall recently (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2010/08/scandal-haunts-atlantas-school-chief.html), which triggered some pushback from friends in Atlanta, saying she's no friend of charters and not really much of a reformer – and then the Atlanta Journal-Constitution dropped this bomb of an article, which raises many troubling questions:

 

Beverly Hall brought impeccable credentials, and a compelling narrative.

 

She arrived in Atlanta as school superintendent in 1999 when, she said, even kindergarten teachers — "some of the most optimistic people in the world" — overwhelmingly told surveyors they didn't expect their students ever to graduate from high school. Early in her tenure, one school, Carver High, graduated just 14 percent of its seniors.

 

"Fast forward to 2009," Hall said. The district's graduation rate stood 30 percentage points higher than it had in 2002. Carver's surge was even more astounding: 80 points.

 

This is Hall's version of what she calls the "remarkable turnaround" of the Atlanta Public Schools under her watch. It has earned her acclaim as a school reformer, praise from federal education officials, and a reputation for guiding one of the greatest improvements of an urban school system in U.S. history.

 

For many Atlanta students, however, the transformation is a mirage.

 

School officials have continually manipulated or misrepresented key statistics, giving false impressions of student achievement and, at the same time, an exaggerated depiction of Hall as savior of a long-troubled system, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.

 

The skewed data call into question the two accomplishments most responsible for Hall's standing as an education megastar: Higher scores on standardized tests and the dramatic increase in the graduation rate.

 

The latter, the AJC found through an analysis of state data and interviews with education experts, likely occurred in large part because of a mass exodus of students from Atlanta high schools during the three school years that ended in 2005. During that time, when most of the graduation rate's growth occurred, the district removed from its rolls one-third of all pupils in grades nine through 12 — almost 18,000 students.

 

District officials marked most of these students as "transfers," rather than as dropouts, allowing officials to disregard them when calculating what Hall has described as the "all-important" graduation rate. The fewer students being counted, the fewer graduates needed to make the rate higher.

 

…Like the graduation rate, Atlanta's scores on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, or CRCT, the state's primary measure of student performance, are in dispute. A number of Atlanta schools posted statistically improbable increases on the 2009 CRCT, and state officials found a high number of erasures on test papers that boosted scores in 58 of the district's schools.

 

But the district may have further manipulated CRCT scores at some schools through questionable student transfers, the AJC found.

 

In the month before schools administer the CRCT each spring, records show, transfers spike at another alternative school, Forrest Hill Academy. Concentrated at Forrest Hill, numerous poor-performing students no longer were liabilities to their home schools. Instead, their CRCT scores counted against Forrest Hill, where failure rates on some sections of the exam have run as high as 97 percent.

 

Even the extent of Atlanta's improvements on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — the NAEP, which describes itself as the gold standard for measuring student achievement — is questionable.

 

Atlanta, Hall has said many times, is the only urban school district that has shown what she calls "significant improvement in all grades and test areas" on the NAEP since 2003.

 

But only fourth- and eighth-graders take the NAEP, and then only a sample of those pupils in certain schools. In Atlanta, scores increased as the makeup of test takers changed. The proportion of white students taking the fourth-grade test more than doubled between 2003 and 2009. On the eighth-grade exam, white students were 40 percent more likely to be tested in 2009 than in 2003. Considering Atlanta's well-established achievement gap between black and white students, these demographic shifts could help explain the higher NAEP scores.

 

Neither the district nor individual schools choose the students who take the test. But NAEP officials rely on the district to compile student rosters.

 

"So, Atlanta Public Schools gives the NAEP folks the list of students from which the NAEP folks sample students," said Ben Scafidi, director of the nonprofit Center for an Educated Georgia in Norcross and a former education adviser to Gov. Sonny Perdue. "So, it is possible to cheat on NAEP by taking students likely to do poorly on the exams off the roster."

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Atlanta Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall: In her own words

http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/atlanta-superintendent-calls-alleged-593824.html