06:44 AM CST on Sunday, March 20, 2005

Associated Press

HOUSTON -- Nearly all of the Houston elementary schools being investigated for possible cheating on the state's standardized achievement test produced sharply weaker exam results this year.

KHOU-TV

Passing rates at all but one of the 18 schools under scrutiny dropped at a greater rate than the overall Houston Independent School District passing rate on the third-grade Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS, reading exam.

Overall, the passing rate for the 14,751 HISD students who took the reading test that's used to determine whether they move on to the fourth grade fell 5 percentage points to 82 percent.

Passing rates at the 18 schools in question fell an average of 19 percentage points.

In addition, average scale scores, which measure the number of correctly answered questions, increased 10 points for HISD's English-speaking students but fell an average of nearly 70 points at the 18 schools under suspect.

Last year, 13 of the schools suspected of cheating had average scale scores that ranked in the top half of all HISD schools on the English exam. This year, that fell to four.

Houston school district spokesman Terry Abbott cautioned against reading too much into the poorer results by the 18 schools.

In an e-mail, Abbott pointed out that some of the 170 elementary schools that have not been suspected of cheating also posted scores substantially lower than last year's.

Also, the cheating investigations at most of the schools are focusing on score anomalies at other grade levels and subjects, he said.

The sharp decline in scores is not direct proof of cheating or wrongdoing, but adds to suspicions, said Thomas Haladyna, an Arizona State University professor specializing in standardized test research.

"You wonder about the validity of scores when they jump around like that," he said.

Factors such as teacher turnover rates and changing student populations could cause major score changes, but that doesn't explain why virtually every suspected school regressed more than the typical campus, Haladyna said.

The questions of cheating arose after an investigation by The Dallas Morning News last year found strong evidence that educators were helping students cheat at nearly 400 schools statewide, including Houston.

Last month, two Houston fifth-grade math teachers were fired and the school principal was demoted after determining the teachers gave answers to students and the principal should have known about the cheating. The teachers have denied any wrongdoing.