Richmond Schools admit fudging SAT scores…but that’s only the beginning

By Norman Leahy | Monday, June 13th, 2011 | Policy, Virginia

This weekend on The Score radio show, we interviewed former Democratic Party of Virginia chairman Paul Goldman about the brewing controversy over Richmond’s Public School System using the SAT scores from the Maggie Walker Governor’s School to bump-up the district’s average test scores. Paul was aghast that RPS was fudging the numbers from a school over which it has no legal or budgetary authority. He did some digging, made some noise, and got one of his client’s, Democratic Del. Joe Morrissey, to make an issue of it.

After initially denying there was a problem, the Richmond schools have decided to stop the practice:

Richmond public schools have separated the SAT scores of their high schools from those of the regional Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School after criticism from a local state lawmaker and a political consultant.

And when the governor’s school students are removed, the district’s mean combined SAT score drops nearly 200 points.

It was all a misunderstanding, no harm or deceit was intended, so let’s move on.

Except this is hardly the first time the RPS — and other public school systems in the state – have fudged numbers to make themselves look better to parents, lawmakers and the federal government.

Back in 2009, former RPS board member Carol A.O. Wolf noted how the system was characterizing an unusually large number of kids as disabled in order to, she believed, game the state’s Standards of Learning testing regime:

Children deemed in need of “special education” are eligible to take less rigorous versions of the Standards of Learning (SOL) tests. Of particular concern is the way children in grades three through eight are being tested feverishly under alternative assessments for children with disabilities, but hardly at all under the high school versions of the programs.

The incentive to do so is quite clear: if a school system fails to show “adequate yearly progress” toward meeting, or exceeding, state proficiency goals as required by the federal “No Child Left Behind” law, those systems face a number of financial and regulatory penalties – including having under-performing schools shut down and reconstituted as charter schools.

So Richmond’s schools seem to be doing whatever they can to avoid that fate. Fudging the SAT numbers is just another example of this same behavior.
But it’s also a bit more. According to the Cranky Taxpayer website, the Maggie Walker SAT scores were covering a number of sins:

Longwood (University) admission minimum score (reading + math) is 980 for a student with a high school GPA of 2.5 to 2.69 (A=4; we’re talking about a C+ student here); the number is 950 for a GPA of 3 (B student). The Richmond critical reading + math for 2010 (with Maggie Walker excluded: 413 reading + 407 math) of 820 was 160 points below the C+ minimum, 130 points below the C student minimum.

The small percentage of Richmond Public Schools kids taking the SAT produce scores that wouldn’t get them in to a back-up school. The RPS leadership knows this, hence the reason why they quietly, and for years, kept the Maggie Walker Governor’s School SAT numbers in their averages.

Some, like the Richmond Times-Dispatch, have put all this down as a mild flap and “nothing sinister was intended.”

The school system’s behavior — on both the SAT and SOL scores — would seem to point to a very different conclusion.

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