Fairly or not, spikes in test scores haunt some schools

Superintendent Kevin J. McHugh suspects that the Pennsbury School District may be a victim of its own success.

In 2009, the Bucks County district began requiring high school students to demonstrate proficiency in math and reading before they could graduate.

Translation: Get a proficient score or better on the 11th-grade PSSA exams, or face remedial instruction and a senior-year retest. Failing that, no diploma.

Immediately, McHugh said, "we saw a spike in our 11th-grade scores, because the tests actually meant something to our kids that year, and they took it a little bit more seriously."

Reading scores went up 8 percent in 2009, math scores 6 percent. And they have continued to rise, McHugh said.

But instead of receiving laurels from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, Pennsbury High School finds itself under at least a temporary cloud of suspicion.

The school was among seven in the Philadelphia suburbs to be flagged for statistical anomalies in a forensic audit of the 2009 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) test results.

The report found at least three points of concern in 89 schools statewide, more than a third of them in Philadelphia.

Letters and documents specifying the nature of the flags began to arrive Friday in the offices of superintendents and charter schools.

That the schools are just now learning of those findings has appalled education officials in the Corbett administration. Their predecessors under Gov. Ed Rendell, they say, paid a vendor $170,000 to assemble the forensic report and then did nothing with it.

The report came to light only after it was obtained recently by the Philadelphia Public School Notebook, a nonprofit organization that reports on the Philadelphia School District.

"It was basically put on the shelf and ignored," said Timothy Eller, spokesman for Secretary of Education Ronald Tomalis. "There is an internal investigation taking place to find out where it fell through the cracks."

A three-year contract to produce additional forensic reports on the PSSA results was canceled after the first year for budgetary reasons, Eller said. Tomalis has ordered the analyses to be reinstated, has asked the multiple-flagged schools to investigate their irregularities, and has ordered reviews of all PSSA exams since 2009, with an emphasis on Philadelphia.

Twenty-seven Philadelphia School District schools and eight charter schools in the city have at least three flags in the 2009 report.

Irregularities can include sudden year-to-year spikes in test scores, unexpected shifts in the numbers of certain groups - such as special-education students - taking the tests, and suspiciously high numbers of erasures resulting in correct test answers.

State officials stress that a flag does not mean a school cheated.

The state has given superintendents and charter-school officials 30 days to investigate irregularities at multi-flagged schools and report back.

Richard B. Noonan, superintendent of Delaware County's Wallingford-Swarthmore School District, said it would not take him that long.

Like Pennsbury, Wallingford-Swarthmore made PSSA proficiency a must for graduation in 2009. And scores at the district's Strath Haven High School soared, resulting in four flags.

Noonan said the district had also spent two years developing a support program to strengthen the scores of lower-achieving students.

Noonan said he received data on Friday confirming that the flags were solely the result of elevated 2009 scores, not excessive erasures or other forms of suspected cheating.

The results "are deserving of praise and recognition" from the state, Noonan said. He issued an open invitation for Tomalis and his staff to visit Strath Haven "if they want to see a successful, vibrant, and proud school in action."

Eller said that legitimately elevated test scores "absolutely" could result in a school being flagged in a forensic analysis.

"Does it mean the [increase] was unfairly gained? No," Eller said. "It just says that it jumped more than what is typical, so take a look into this and see if it is correct."

Other suburban schools with multiple flags in the report are Snyder-Girotti Elementary School in Bristol Borough, Chester Community Charter School, Penn Wood Senior High School in Delaware County, Cheltenham High School, and Spring-Ford Senior High School in Montgomery County.

Administrators in charge of those schools did not return calls seeking comment on Friday.