School Principal Says Probe Shows No Cheating

The principal of a nationally acclaimed charter school under investigation for cheating on a standardized test sought Thursday to refute the allegations, saying her own internal inquiry concluded that no teacher had changed answers to boost results.

But Principal Yvonne Chan of the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center said she has reprimanded a third-grade teacher for over-explaining sample questions on last spring’s Spanish-language Aprenda test, a violation of standard testing practices.

Los Angeles Unified School District officials initiated a review in late August after receiving an anonymous tip about irregularities on the Aprenda test. The district inquiry found that of 186 answers changed by the class of third graders, 136 went from wrong to right.

Why those changes and an unusually high number of changes in another class were made remains the subject of an investigation by district officials, who said they expect to conclude their inquiry next week.

Chan, meanwhile, has been able to conduct her own review because of the independent nature of charter schools, which operate outside many regulations that govern traditional campuses. For example, such schools set their own curriculum and budgets.

Chan said the veteran teacher in the third-grade class erred by repeating sample questions--in one case three times--rather than giving the instructions once. The teacher also was wrong to offer his students encouragement during the test, Chan said, telling them such things as “think,” “use your brain” and “do you remember the formula?”

Chan said a teaching assistant present during the test did not see the teacher change any answers, adding that the tests were locked in the school library before and after they were administered.

“There was no evidence that he engaged in erasure” of answers, Chan said of the teacher, whom she declined to identify and said is on vacation. “This teacher never pointed out the answers and never verbally gave kids hints other than [being] too enthusiastic in giving encouragement.”

Of the teacher’s coaching during the exam, Chan said: “He was very apologetic. He said he did it out of his heart. It kills him that these kids did not understand” the questions.

Chan said her investigation also has focused on a first-grade class in which the Aprenda test also showed a high percentage of altered answers. Students interviewed in the probe said they changed answers for no other reason than the test was difficult, Chan said.

Still, at Chan’s suggestion, school district officials are reviewing test results from the first-grade class and a fourth-grade class that took the Stanford Nine, the English equivalent of the Aprenda test.

The officials have so far found no discrepancies with the fourth-grade class, said the district’s coordinator of school reform, Joe Rao.

Chan has offered to retest her students next month using the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, the standardized exam that was used by the school district for more than a decade until it began administering the Stanford Nine and Aprenda tests last year.

District officials said they have no problem with Chan giving another test but that it would not be used in place of the tests given last spring.