Students disappeared at test time
Texas Insider Report: EL PASO Texas He essentially treated these students as
pawns in a scheme to make it look as though he was achieving the thresholds he needed
to meet for his bonuses said Robert Pitman U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas whose office prosecuted former El Paso ISD Superintendent Lorenzo Garcia who in a
dramatic moment at the federal courthouse earlier this month was sentenced to prison for his role in orchestrating the one of the largest testing scandals ever seen in Texas. But
for many students & parents the case did not end there.
Mr. Garcias program led to an inquiry involving three federal entities:
- The F.B.I.
- Mr. Pitmans U.S. Attorney Office and
- The Education Departments Inspector General.
As the federal investigation continues with the likelihood of more arrests of administrators who helped Mr. Garcia the cheating scandal has shaken the 64000-student school district in this border city.
And investigators have found administrators and supervisors manipulated more than just the 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.
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 which allowed him to collect annual bonuses for meeting district goals. Garcia was the first superintendent in the country to be charged with manipulating data used to assess compliance with No Child Left Behind for financial gain the authorities said.
- In June Mr. Garcia pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit mail fraud.
- One charge was connected to the scandal and the other involved his efforts to secure a $450000 no-bid contract for a consulting firm run by his former mistress.
- He was sentenced to 3 years and 6 months in Federal Prison and was ordered to pay $180000 in restitution to the El Paso School District.
The scheme elements of which were carried out for most of Mr. Garcias nearly 6-year tenure centered on the state-mandated
Texas Assessment of Knowledge & Skills or the
TAKS Test as it is known in Texas education cirlces.
Taken by Texas sophomores it is designed and intended to measure a students performance and progress in reading mathematics and other subjects.
The schemes objective was to keep low-performing students out of the classroom so they would not take the test and drag an individual schools as well as the Districts test scores
down according to prosecutors former principals and school advocates.
Students identified as low-performing were transferred to charter schools discouraged from even 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 semesters 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.
Another former principal Lionel Rubio said he knew of six students who had been pushed out of high school and had not pursued an education since.
In 2008 Linda Hernandez-Romeros daughter repeated her freshman year at Bowie High School after administrators told her she was not allowed to return as a sophomore. Ms. Hernandez-Romero said administrators told her that her daughter was not doing well academically and was not likely to perform well on the test.
Ms. Hernandez-Romero protested the decision but she said her daughter never followed through with her education never received a diploma or a G.E.D. and now at age 21 has three children is jobless and survives on welfare.
Her decisions have been very negative after this her mother said. She always tells me: Mom I got kicked out of school because I wasnt smart. I guess Im not Mom look at me. Theres not a way of expressing how bad it feels because its so bad. Seeing one of your children fail and knowing that it was not all her doing is worse.
The program was known as the Bowie model and Mr. Garcia had boasted of his success in raising test scores particularly in 2008 when all of the districts eligible campuses earned
a rating of academically acceptable or better from the state.
But parents and students had another name for what was happening: los desaparecidos or the disappeared.
State education data showed that 381 students were enrolled as freshmen at Bowie in the fall of 2007. The following fall the sophomore class was 170 students. Dozens of the missing students had disappeared through Mr. Garcias program said Eliot Shapleigh a lawyer and former Texas State Senator who began his own investigation into testing misconduct and was credited with bringing the case to light.
Shapleigh said he believed that 100s of students were affected and that district leaders had failed to do enough to locate and help them.
Desaparecidos is by far the worst education scandal in the country Mr. Shapleigh said. In Atlanta the students were helped on tests by teachers. The next day the students were in class. Here the students were disappeared right out of the classroom.
Court documents list six unindicted co-conspirators who assisted Mr. Garcia but they have not been publicly identified. Parents and educators believe that several of those involved in the scandal continue to work in the system or have taken jobs at nearby districts.
The El Paso District meanwhile has had trouble maintaining its leadership with the Board of Trustees appointing three interim superintendents since Mr. Garcias arrest last year.
The states education agency penalized the district in August by lowering its accreditation status assigning a monitor and requiring it to hire outside companies to oversee testing
and identify the structural defects that allowed the scheme to go unchecked.
On Wednesday the newly appointed
Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency Michael L. Williams came to El Paso to speak with parents and administrators telling them he had the power to take other steps including installing a new board of trustees.
Im outraged by what happened Mr. Williams said after the meeting.
Were going to give the district an opportunity to right the ship. And if that doesnt happen then obviously there are several options available to the commissioner of education and Ill look very very carefully at those options.
Former El Paso educators have criticized state officials and the local board as failing to hold Mr. Garcia accountable. In 2010 the Texas Education Agency issued letters clearing Mr. Garcia of wrongdoing finding insufficient evidence on accusations of disappeared students and testing misconduct.
Before he was hired in 2006 Mr. Garcia was a deputy superintendent in Dallas and received a doctorate from the University of Houston. His annual salary was $280314 when he resigned last November three months after his arrest.
It sounded at first like a familiar story: School Administrators seeking to meet either State and-or Federal Standards fraudulently raised students test scores on crucial exams.
Garcia was also fined $56500 the amount of testing-related bonuses he had received.
