El Paso Schools Confront Scandal of Students Who 'Disappeared' at Test Time
BYLINE: By MANNY FERNANDEZ
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; National Desk; Pg. 23
LENGTH: 1267 words
EL PASO -- It sounded at first like a familiar story: school administrators, seeking to meet state and federal standards, fraudulently raised students' scores on crucial exams.
But in the cheating scandal that has shaken the 64,000-student school district in this border city, administrators manipulated more than numbers. They are accused of keeping low-performing students out of classrooms altogether by improperly holding some back, accelerating others and preventing many from showing up for the tests or enrolling in school at all.
It led to a dramatic moment at the federal courthouse this month, when a former schools superintendent, Lorenzo Garcia, was sentenced to prison for his role in orchestrating the testing scandal. But for students and parents, the case did not end there. A federal investigation continues, with the likelihood of more arrests of administrators who helped Mr. Garcia.
Federal prosecutors charged Mr. Garcia, 57, with devising an elaborate program to inflate test scores to improve the performance of struggling schools under the federal No Child Left Behind Act and to allow him to collect annual bonuses for meeting district goals.
The scheme, elements of which were carried out for most of Mr. Garcia's nearly six-year tenure, centered on a state-mandated test taken by sophomores. Known as the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, it measures performance in reading, mathematics and other subjects. The scheme's objective was to keep low-performing students out of the classroom so they would not take the test and drag scores down, according to prosecutors, former principals and school advocates.
Students identified as low-performing were transferred to charter schools, discouraged from enrolling in school or were visited at home by truant officers and told not to go to school on the test day. For some, credits were deleted from transcripts or grades were changed from passing to failing or from failing to passing so they could be reclassified as freshmen or juniors.
Others intentionally held back were allowed to catch up before graduation with ''turbo-mesters,'' in which students earned a semester's worth of credit for a few hours of computer work. A former high school principal said in an interview and in court that one student earned two semester credits in three hours on the last day of school. Still other students who transferred to the district from Mexico were automatically put in the ninth grade, even if they had earned credits for the 10th grade, to keep them from taking the test.
''He essentially treated these students as pawns in a scheme to make it look as though he was achieving the thresholds he needed for his bonuses,'' said Robert Pitman, the United States attorney for the Western District of Texas, whose office prosecuted Mr. Garcia.
FERNANDEZ, By MANNY. "El Paso Schools Confront Scandal of Students Who 'Disappeared' at Test Time." The New York Times. (October 14, 2012 Sunday ): 1267 words. LexisNexis Academic. Web. Date Accessed: 2012/10/23.
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