Fourth Norfolk school found to have testing irregularities

NORFOLK

An elementary school whose recent honors include a character education award failed to test 16 students last spring on at least one mandatory exam used by the state to gauge academic performance.

Dreamkeepers Academy is the fourth Norfolk school found to have testing irregularities last year on the Standards of Learning exam or an alternative test.

Each of the 16 students skipped at least one of the four SOL tests covering reading, science, math and history and social sciences.

One former Dreamkeepers teacher said she resigned because the school intentionally exempted underperforming students from taking SOL tests. Another former teacher said that instructors were pressured to maintain high test scores.

"We were asked to cheat and some people were cheating," said Nicole Fagnan, who taught at Dreamkeepers last year. "It made me sick to my stomach to know they were given an award for character."

Dreamkeepers Principal Doreatha White said Tuesday that school administrators never told teachers to pull low-achieving students out of testing.

The testing problems were the result of simple error in collecting answer sheets for some students, and the state did not find the incident to be serious enough to investigate, Norfolk Superintendent Stephen C. Jones said.

School Board Chairman Stephen Tonelson said he'd been unaware that testing irregularities occurred at Dreamkeepers. He said he would ask Jones to provide more information about the incident to the board.

Jones said the division will soon install a special phone line for staff to report concerns about SOL testing "which they may not be comfortable reporting to their schools' test coordinators or building administrators," according to a memo.

That memo, sent to board members Friday, briefly reported the Dreamkeepers incident. "We have clarified procedures at Dreamkeepers to ensure that the incident is not repeated," the memo stated.

Karren Bailey, who heads the department in charge of testing and other research, said the division's own oversight procedure revealed that answer sheets for 16 out of 160 students were missing in grades 3, 4 and 5 on reading, math, science, history and social science.

Answer sheets, which must be filed for students absent during testing, were subsequently gathered from the school even though the students were not tested.

Norfolk's pattern of testing irregularities have Virginia education leaders so concerned that state schools Superintendent Patricia Wright took the unusual step last month of urging city officials to get tutored on how to properly administer accreditation tests, Charles Pyle, spokesman for the state Education department, said.

SOL or Virginia Grade Level Alternative testing problems were also discovered last year at Lafayette-Winona Middle School, Northside Middle and Campostella Elementary School and investigated by the state.

"The department is very concerned about making sure the Board of Education's regulations are followed and that all the procedures for the assessment program are, in fact, followed in every school in every division," Pyle said.

The state uses SOL tests to determine whether a school should be accredited. For divisions, accreditation is the gold standard, and denial is a source of embarrassment.

Pyle said the test sheets Norfolk eventually filed for the non-participating Dreamkeepers students said that some were absent, exempt or that they refused to take the tests.

Fagnan, the teacher who said she resigned over the issue, told The Virginian-Pilot that low-achieving students were intentionally withheld from SOL testing when she taught fifth-grade during the 2008-09 school year. Fagnan said she was so bothered by the practice that she resigned last June and took a job in Florida "due to the moral dilemmas that I had working at the school."

Fagnan said she asked her team leader what would happen with children who were pulled from classes to avoid testing. She was told those kids would "just stay in the gym," she recalled.

"There were certain kids pulled at testing who never took the SOL," she said. "The children pulled during testing were not those with any sort of disability."

White, Dreamkeepers' principal, said students' performance is tested regularly and that those results help pinpoint pupils for extra instruction in small groups.

"It does not happen during the SOL testing window," she said.

Fagnan said "pacing," a test-taking technique frowned on by the state, was a regular practice at Dreamkeepers as well.

In pacing, students typically are told to fill out portions of the test and then stop until instructed to continue to the next section. It is meant to help pupils keep their concentration during a test, but it is against Virginia and Norfolk guidelines.

She said she reported her experiences to Norfolk administrators last spring and to the state last month.

Bailey, the division's testing overseer, said a complaint was received last spring from a teacher who had seen Dreamkeepers pupils in a hall and felt they weren't tested.

Jones said, "I'm assuming the teacher had no idea whether these kids were coming to school late, whether or not they'd been excused to go to the lavatory."

Todd Hageman, an Indiana teacher who taught at Dreamkeepers from 2005 to 2007, said school administrators put immense pressure on teachers to achieve high scores.

"They came down on us hard because we had to maintain the high scores. They came down so hard, many teachers would quit yearly either out of moral and/or stress related reasons," he said.

"They'd ask, 'Which ones do you think are not going to do well?' And they'd be pulled out and put in a smaller room," he said. "As to what happened in those smaller rooms, I don't know, I wasn't there."

Hageman said many of his students had strong potential.

"But you'll see 80, 90, 100 test scores," he said. "There was no way 100 percent of my kids were writing on a fourth- grade level - some couldn't even form paragraphs that would be cohesive. You'd do your best to get them ready, but 100 percent? Come on."

At Lafayette-Winona Middle last year, the state found at least two dozen special education students who weren't tested and assessments with identical answers, including misspellings. The incident involved an alternative Standards of Learning test.

That inquiry was prompted by a teacher's complaint that instructors were pressured to inappropriately direct special education students to an alternative assessment that they were more likely to pass than the SOL exams. The school's principal denied the allegation, and the state did not issue an opinion.

At Campostella Elementary, Norfolk conducted an investigation in the fall after the state found a significant number of tests with erasures on wrong answers for questions that were then marked correctly.

Division leaders said there was no evidence that staff helped the students answer the tests. The problems involved two classrooms of third-graders.

At Northside Middle, state guidelines for testing students with disabilities also were not followed.

Jones said an investigative panel he appointed in December to review testing practices would give its recommendations later this month.

Once recommendations are in place, "there will be consequences, very well spelled out," for violations, Jones said.

Lafayette-Winona staffers and principals in elementary and middle schools have received mandatory Virginia Grade Level Alternative training, he said. Training also took place at Northside Middle and Campostella Elementary.

Formerly known as J.J. Roberts Elementary, the division changed the school's name to Dreamkeepers Academy in 2003 as part of an overhaul to improve instruction and performance.

In 2004, the school failed to achieve a federal performance standard because a handful of fifth-graders were absent on test day. However, the school has been fully accredited by the state for at least three years.

Students - 76 percent of whom are lower-income - get two extra hours of class daily, as well as character and career awareness education. They wear uniforms and, with their families, sign a commitment to meet the school's standards. Admission is open to any Norfolk child. Close to 400 students attend pre-K through fifth grade.

Last month, the school received a Virginia State School of Character award for excellence in character education, a state VIP Competence to Excellence award in 2008 and a 2010 Virginia State School of Change award.

Last year, its students posted high SOL passing scores, including 96 percent for third-grade history and 87 percent in English for grades 3-5.

Steven G. Vegh, (757) 446-2417, steven.vegh@pilotonline.com