Why you should care about those testing ‘irregularities’ in Chicago schools

When Chicago Public Schools Inspector General Nicholas Schuler began to get numerous complaints of alleged cheating on standardized tests, he did what a good IG should: Investigate.

The public, after all, should be told if widespread cheating on standardized tests is happening in schools. Our city must feel confident that the district’s test score gains are real, the product of improved teaching and learning and not gaming the system.

There’s a lot riding on scores for the NWEA MAP (Measure of Academic Progress), the national test administered twice a year — in the fall and spring — to students in the second through eighth grades.

NWEA scores are a factor in teacher and principal evaluations, admissions to selective high schools, and a school’s overall quality rating.

Few people will say it out loud, but that means there’s an incentive to cheat. Testing scandals have rocked other big-city districts, like Atlanta and Washington D.C., for just these reasons. And there’s no reason to believe Chicago is immune.

As it turns out, the results of Schuler’s investigation are, for the most part, reassuring. The IG’s report found no evidence of widespread cheating that would threaten CPS’ claim to making solid academic progress in recent years.

But there’s ample evidence of problems with testing practices. For that reason, CPS must make good on its pledge to adopt all of the IG’s recommendations, to improve testing security and protect the integrity of its NWEA results. For its part, NWEA “fully supports” that plan, its CEO, Chris Minnich, said in a statement.

Among the problems uncovered by the IG in its analysis of NWEA data from 2017 and 2018 was a “concerning level of unusually long test durations, high pause counts and other irregularities.”

“Tens of thousands of students are taking at least twice the national average duration” to finish the assessment test, the report found. Some children took up to five times as long.

There are no hard-and-fast time restrictions on the NWEA, which is administered via computer. But the report’s findings should worry us, as testing experts told the OIG.

When students take far longer than average to finish a test, there’s a risk their scores will be invalidated because of it. When students take five hours to finish a test that others completed in one hour, it’s only fair to wonder if they got coaching or help during that extra time.

As for repeatedly pausing the computer-based test, the IG found evidence that both students and teachers in a small group of schools knew that doing so would work to their advantage.

“Students in schools with high average pause counts described ways in which proctors paused tests so students could skip hard questions,” according to the report, “or students themselves allowed questions to time out.”

At the Feb. 26 Board of Education meeting, members accused Schuler of being irresponsible by even mentioning the possibility of test cheating in his report. “If you can’t [prove it], don’t make those assertions,” board member Lucino Sotelo said at that meeting.

What nonsense.

“I think it would basically be naive to not mention the possibility of cheating or gaming,” Schuler responded. “I think we’ve been pretty fair that it’s in the mix, we can’t quantify it. ... I think what we reported is very measured.”

A report under wraps

Meanwhile, we’re still trying to figure out why this report, completed back in September, was not released to the public until last Friday.

The usual protocol, in which the IG promptly releases a report after getting feedback from CPS, was not followed this time. Five months is far too long to keep critical research involving public schools under wraps.

CPS says it has already begun to follow through on the IG’s recommendations to hire a testing security expert, improve training on testing policies and conduct school audits to ensure that correct test practices are followed when the assessment is administered. (Schuler has since left the IG’s post, for unrelated reasons.)

And we still have confidence in previous studies, by researchers at Stanford University and University of Chicago, that found CPS’ academic gains are real and substantive.

Schuler’s report, though, is a wake-up call. The district had better protect the integrity of those carefully measured gains.

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com.