Students, Teachers, and Other Faculty Catch a Fraud | Rowsey Blog

Students, Teachers, and Other Faculty Catch a Fraud

June 16, 2008

This story from the dispatch is unbelievable. It details the story of a local principal that has been recommended for a suspension of her license due to testing “irregularities.”

Six teachers, two secretaries and the custodians invoked the spirit of Sherlock
Holmes to solve the case of the tampered tests.

Students’ answers on state exams had changed overnight.

To solve the whodunit, the staff-turned-sleuths collected evidence and conducted an experiment.
It was elementary, they say: The culprit was the principal.

Now the Ohio Department of Education has recommended that Stacey Carna’s license be suspended –
that’s all state law allows, despite the high stakes attached to school testing.

Carna led Ashville Elementary for less than one school year, 2006-07, but the Teays Valley
district paid her to stay home for the most-recent year. She received her $81,585 salary because
she still had a contract.

The facts of the case, according to the sleuthing staff, began with this: Carna didn’t stay
late. Ever.

But then Carna stayed quite late one Monday, the first day of the state achievement tests in May
2007, teachers said.

The second clue: They knew students had picked wrong test answers that suddenly became correct.
And there were eraser marks. Lots of them.

Then Carna spent more late nights in her office, with paper covering the window. Unusual, the
staff thought. The custodian said Carna told him she couldn’t be bothered.

Then came the linchpin of the case: After testing was over on the Wednesday of test week, the
amateur detectives placed the box containing the fifth-grade tests exactly 3 inches from the
storage-room filing cabinets. The fourth-grade tests were 4 inches away, and those for
third-graders 2 inches from the cabinets. The secretaries said they locked the door behind
them.

The next morning, the crates of tests had been pushed flush with the cabinets. The district
suspended Carna, despite her claims of innocence.

“I clearly told (the superintendent) that I did not alter tests in any way, and that I did not
have any firsthand knowledge of any security breech (sic) relating to the altering of student
answers or test access in the storage room,” Carna wrote in a district statement. Further, she had
always had trouble with those secretaries, she wrote.

Carna, 38, of Pickerington, couldn’t be reached for comment. Her attorney, Beverly J. Farlow,
said she had no comment, either.

The superintendent, Jeff Sheets, sent the Ohio Department of Education a letter the week of the
tests, detailing what his investigators had found. Then he questioned whether Carna’s last school,
in Franklin County’s Hamilton district, had come by its test-score gains honestly.

“I questioned whether she had displayed, in our district, characteristics as a leader that would
foster truly raising test scores,” Sheets said.

Carna’s contract had been nonrenewed in Hamilton because the district said she wasn’t performing
to its standards, although Teays Valley liked her because of her previous success in raising test
scores. Hamilton officials did not respond to requests to comment on the case.

Punishments for test cheating peaked in Ohio around 2005, when the number of tests increased.
Carna’s suggested punishment, it turns out, is a bit stronger than most: The most-common discipline
from the state for cheating on standardized exams is a written reprimand.

A
Dispatch analysis found that of the 38 educators disciplined for test cheating
since 1997, eight were from central Ohio. The department says it can’t and won’t go beyond the law,
and wouldn’t say whether it thinks the punishment for cheaters is too weak. After Carna’s case is
presented to a hearing officer next month, the State Board of Education might be asked to vote on
her suspension.

After Carna’s actions were questioned, Ashville’s tests were declared no good, and students had
to take a different version of the tests the next week.

Sheets hopes the department takes punishing test cheaters seriously; it cost his district a
lot.

But the detective work was free.

Posted by Jason Rowsey | Filed Under Politics 

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