HISD is addressing the TAKS cheating scandal:
Saavedra said he will ask the Houston Independent School District’s school board at its meeting next week to approve the creation of the new Office of Inspector General and give it broad investigative powers to root out any test cheating, unprofessional conduct, or other irregularities.
The office is to be led by Robert Moore, currently HISD’s assistant superintendent for internal auditing and a certified fraud examiner with extensive experience leading investigations. Moore will report directly to the superintendent.
Saavedra’s plan also calls for hundreds of monitors to oversee TAKS testing when it is conducted in February and April. On test days, about half the new monitors would go to targeted classrooms, and half would go to randomly selected classrooms. Schools would get no warnings where monitors might show up.
Saavedra said the district will also tighten testing procedures and operate a hotline during testing cycles. Reports from the hotline will go straight to the Inspector General.
[snip]
Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, said she has seen Saavedra’s plan and is encouraged that he will make it easier for teachers to report administrators who encourage cheating.
“Most teachers, if left alone, are not going to cheat,” Fallon said. “The single most important thing we can do, along with analyzing test scores, is give teachers a safe way to report when they have a boss influencing them to cheat. … He agreed those are practices that need to be stopped immediately.”
Saavedra appears to be getting in front of this aggressively, now that the problems have been uncovered, which is to his credit. Also, the hotline to report problems is a great idea. Gayle Fallon is right — most teachers are honest and need to have a mechanism to safely report any pressure to cheat or other concerns.
