Critics question state finding of cheating at CCSD school

Interim School Board Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky listens during a Clark County School Board meeting at the Clark County School Board headquarters on Thursday, April 11. Skorkowsky was appointed to the top school board job after former superintendent Dwight Jones sudden decision to depart his post last month.

When student test scores skyrocketed in 2011-12, some Kelly Elementary School staff members were called cheaters.

There is “no doubt” that adults altered student answers, asserted State Superintendent of Public Instruction Dale Erquiaga during the April release of his investigation’s findings. But Erquiaga took no questions about the report, which cited little evidence and didn’t identify culprits.

That’s because the state’s 17-month investigation yielded no conclusive evidence of adult cheating or of any cheating at the central Las Vegas school. Transcripts of subpoenaed testimonies obtained by the Review-Journal, an analysis of the state’s findings and interviews with those privy to the investigation reveal a multi-agency probe that critics say ignored evidence to arrive at a conclusion of wrongdoing by school staff.

“It was a predetermined outcome with evidence fabricated to support it,” contends Stephen Augspurger, executive director of the union for Clark County School District administrators. Augspurger sat in on the deputy attorney general’s questioning of high-ranking district administrator Andre Denson, Kelly Principal Patricia Harris and Assistant Principal Steve Niemeier.

The union “won’t support administrators doing the wrong thing, but there’s not one thing in the record to support the state’s conclusion,” Augspurger said last week.

Augspurger requested a meeting with Erquiaga and district Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky, who suspended Denson, Harris and Niemeier after the state released the Kelly report on April 16. Erquiaga’s refusal was delivered through the education department’s attorney.

“If you have proof, bring it forward,” is Augspurger’s challenge to state officials.

Erquiaga was on vacation and unavailable for comment last week, according to department spokeswoman Judy Osgood.

“If he (Erquiaga) thinks his report was correct, why refuse to talk, refuse to meet?” asked Augspurger, who spent the past four months fact-checking the state’s investigation and hired a professional firm to check its test analyses. The union just released its own 18-page report on the Kelly incident and the state’s investigation.

LACK OF EVIDENCE?

Despite the state’s “inconclusive” fingerprint analysis of Kelly’s student answer sheets and lack of witnesses who saw adults change answers, the state concluded that tampering did occur. The state asserted adults cheated based on an erasure analysis and the fact that several individuals had access to answer sheets.

The erasure analysis, which determines how many responses had been changed, was said to show an unusually high number of erasures on the reading and math tests in 2011-12, the year the percentage of proficient Kelly students spiked.

But erasure analysis “does not, under any circumstances, support a definitive assertion that student answers were changed after students returned the test booklets and answer sheets,” said Augspurger’s report, which called the conclusion a “misuse of the erasure analysis data.”

Students simply may have done better, said Andre Denson, who was then an associate superintendent supervising Kelly and the first to investigate after an anonymous letter accused the principal of coaching students.

“They can make that spike,” Denson said of students. “The likelihood is low. But without any proof of cheating, how can you say that didn’t happen?”

The percentage of Kelly students scoring at grade level on state reading tests improved in the years leading up to 2011-12, which school staff explained in their testimony during the state investigation.

The small, struggling school of 300 students — 63 percent of whom are black and 85 percent of whom are poor — was assigned a four-person turnaround team in 2011-12 to better train teachers, plus two more professionals to coach the principal and assistant principal. All kinds of changes were put in place, from assemblies honoring improving students to new instructional programs, said Niemeier, the assistant principal.

But the state didn’t factor that into its report, concluding adult cheating was the only explanation for the dramatic improvement. The state found that school staff “offered no plausible explanation for the situation other than asserting that ‘our students tried hard.’ ”

“The state ignored all the things we did and just said we worked hard. That blew me out of my seat,” Niemeier said Friday, recalling that the deputy attorney general asked if he knew adults had changed students’ answers. “It seemed they already had their minds made up at the beginning.”

WHAT WAS IGNORED

In 2010-11, not even a quarter of Kelly’s fifth-graders read at grade level. However, that number more than tripled, to 77 percent, the following year, according to Kelly’s invalidated results. From 2011 to 2012, the proficiency rate for third-graders in math went from 45 percent to 69 percent. In reading, third-grader proficiency went from 45 percent to 88 percent.

The state concluded those changes were too dramatic. But statistically, it doesn’t take many students to create such leaps when grade levels are about 40 students each, as they are at Kelly.

For example, 85 percent of fourth-graders scored proficient in reading in 2011-12, doubling the passing rate of 42 percent from the previous year. With fourth-grade classes of 43 students in 2010-11 and 34 students in 2011-12, only 11 more students would have to pass the test to account for such a leap.

For that grade to jump from a 51 percent to 74 percent proficiency rate in math, only three more students needed to earn passing scores.

“They (investigators) never asked about that at all,” Niemeier said. “When you talk about every kid having an impact, here it really was every kid.”

“I don’t think the state cared,” said Denson, adding that the district “should have pushed back. I wish the district did more to rally around Kelly. There was no proof of anyone doing anything.”

Superintendent Skorkowsky immediately suspended all of those named — yet not accused of cheating — in the state’s report. Those suspension remain in effect. He declined comment last week because the “state still considers the investigation open” and the district hasn’t filed a response to the state’s report.

Skorkowsky was not named in the state report, which criticized the district’s handling of cheating allegations before the state intervened. Denson was blamed for mishandling the district’s initial investigation and was suspended by Skorkowsky. However, Denson at the time was acting under the direction of Skorkowsky, who was then deputy superintendent and who eventually “took over the investigation,” according to transcripts of Denson’s Jan. 17 testimony.

When Denson told of Skorkowsky’s involvement, Deputy Attorney General Carrie Parker called for a break in the interview. When questioning resumed, she asked about another topic. At the end of the two-hour interview she asked Denson if there were any other questions she should ask. He told her to ask about being relieved of the investigation by Skorkowsky.

Denson assumed state investigators would question other district officials involved with the investigation, such as Skorkowsky and district testing director Leslie Arnold.

“I was just hoping that they’d want to get to the truth,” Denson said.

But state investigators never subpoenaed Skorkowsky or any other district administrator, Augspurger said.

“It is inexplicable, to put it mildly, that Pat Skorkowsky, now superintendent, appears somehow insulated from criticism for his part in the flawed investigation,” he said. “Probing questions should have been asked. But no subpoena was issued. No questions were asked by those conducting the investigation. An opportunity to discover the truth was missed.”

A CALL FOR APOLOGIES

Following concerns of tampering in the 2011-12 school year, district personnel administered the state skills tests in 2012-13. State investigators asserted in their report that “significantly” declining math and reading test scores in 2012-13 provide more evidence of adult cheating. Nevada schools must annually test third- through fifth-graders in math and reading.

The state report didn’t consider the impact of withdrawing Kelly’s extra resources in 2012-13, nor did it address the fact that test scores didn’t plummet. More third- and fifth-graders had passing math scores in 2012-13, when district personnel gave the tests.

Although the percentage of passing reading scores declined in 2012-13 at all three grade levels, passing rates were closer to the spike of 2011-12 than any previous year, with the exception of fourth grade. For example, the rate of fifth-graders reading at grade level in 2012-13 was 72 percent, slightly down from 77 percent in 2011-12 but nowhere near the 24 percent rate in 2010-11, the year before the cheating investigation.

“We poured our hearts into making students succeed,” Niemeier said. “We expect our kids to do great. But when they pull through, we’re skeptical and say our kids can’t do that good.”

Teachers were replaced in 2013-14. The school and community were “devastated, when in fact these kids did it,” Niemeier said.

“Perhaps there was no cheating,” Augspurger said. Maybe there was. “In either case, it remains the responsibility of the district and Nevada Department of Education to discover, not manufacture, evidence that will reveal the truth.”

Without conclusive evidence, such scorn shouldn’t be hurled onto Kelly, said Augspurger. He wants apologies made, Kelly’s 2011-12 test scores validated, letters of admonition sent to Kelly administrators rescinded and action against state staff for delivering the “flawed” report.

Contact Trevon Milliard at tmilliard@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0279. Find him on Twitter: @TrevonMilliard.