Dive Brief:
- After an investigation into testing impropriety this spring at Teachers College Community School, a Harlem elementary school, city education officials have invalidated the scores of 47 third-graders.
- Jeanene Worrell-Breeden, the school’s former principal, reportedly admitted that she filled out answers when students failed to complete the exams. She died in April, eight days after she jumped in front of a New York subway car. Whether she knew about the investigation has not been determined.
- The test scores would have been the first official evaluation for the school, which opened in 2011 and enrolled 218 students last year.
Dive Insight:
The case of Worrell-Breeden is a particularly tragic case of administrator-facilitated cheating, due to the high-stakes testing environment. In New York, the state’s Regent exams have historically been the gatekeepers for moving students from one grade to the next and for graduating from high school.
No students at Teachers College Community School will have their movement from third to fourth grade impacted by the decision to throw out their test scores. But if they had performed poorly, they could have been held back or targeted for additional supports.
Similar cheating cases have sprung up where high-stakes testing prompted adults to fudge students' scores. The most famous example was the Atlanta cheating scandal that resulted in 11 convictions for teachers and administrators, but schools from Maine to Pennsylvania have also had to grapple with educator-driven cheating.