Chancellor Carmen Fariña appointed a permanent task force geared at preventing and addressing cases of academic misconduct on Tuesday, following the removal of John Dewey High School's principal over grade inflation and another investigation that found in elementary school principal forged student answers on a state test.
“Schools violating our academic policies are not giving students the education they deserve, and I have zero tolerance for schools flaunting our policies" she said in a statement to reporters.
The Regulatory Task Force will include five Department of Education officials as well as an external auditor, without any ties to the agency. Any evidence of inappropriate conduct will be brought to the Special Commissioner of Investigation. The accounting firm Ernst and Young will also perform its own tests of academic data.
Phil Weinberg, deputy chancellor for teaching and learning and head of the new task force, said members would review whether schools are complying with the rules around credit recovery, attendance and graduation requirements, and produce biannual reports on how well guidelines are being followed. Schools would also get training and resources.
"What’s behind this is our desire to be proactive about any kind of misunderstanding around policies," he said, "any kind of poorly designed or poorly thought out decisions that are made at schools and to make sure that we educate our school system to follow our very, very, very, very stringent guidelines around academic policy."
But Weinberg said there's no indication that cheating and other cases of misconduct are on the rise, despite the recent headlines.
One expert who's studied school data agreed. Aaron Pallas, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, has probed increases and decreases in test scores at the city's elementary and middle schools.
"I’ve not seen anything that suggests that there’s been a rise in cheating," he said.
Pallas suggested the task force is an attempt by Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration to show it's taking the situation seriously. De Blasio won only a temporary renewal in Albany this year of his control over the city school system and the issue will surface again next spring.
"It’s a response to the political pressure that the administration is feeling regarding the renewal of mayoral control and the fear that anything that makes the administration look inept or corrupt jeopardizes the extension of mayoral control," said Pallas.
Many critics of high-stakes tests also believe educators have been under intense pressure in the past decade to show good test scores and graduation rates. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration closed schools that weren't performing well. Teachers know their own evaluations depend in part on a growth in student test scores. While the de Blasio administration stopped grading schools with an A-F letter system the state legislature approved a new teacher evaluation system that relies more on test scores than the previous version.
Meanwhile, the Special Commissioner of Investigation is looking into another allegation of grade inflation by a student who recently graduated from William Cullen Bryant High School in Queens. The accusation was reported by the New York Post.
