She had just received the latest crop of scores for the CRCT, a state standardized test. Curiously, Vogell noted, several schools statewide had changed in status between the spring 2008 administration of the test and the summer retest in 2008, going from not meeting Adequate Yearly Progress rates, a calculation set by federal legislation that determines the fates of individual schools, to meeting the measure.
"We saw there were a lot more schools that met AYP than we had expected. It was a larger shift," Vogell told The Huffington Post.
Like any intrepid reporter, she had some questions. "We were poking around. We saw some schools that had very hard to believe gains, just looking with the naked eye," she said.
After performing a statistical analysis with her data guru, she found something curious: a handful of schools had increased their performance so much more than they had been expected to that it raised questions over whether educators had intervened in the testing process. She published her first story in December 2008, highlighting schools where the gains seemed astronomical.
Three years later, the answers to those questions made national news, with Tuesday’s revelation that a state-commissioned investigation found rampant, systemwide cheating in 44 Atlanta public schools, with 178 teachers and principals routinely erasing incorrect answers on standardized tests and replacing them with correct ones. The cheating inflated the scores of thousands of students, giving the false impression of their -- and Atlanta's -- success.
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