In case you’re wondering what the impact has been of my recent cheating stories, here’s my story from today’s front page:

HOUSTON – Houston school officials will unleash an army of test monitors to make sure their teachers and principals aren’t helping students cheat on the TAKS test, the district’s superintendent said Thursday.

The move is a response to a Dallas Morning News investigation that found strong evidence that educators in Houston and elsewhere were giving students answers or altering test documents to improve student scores.

“The most important thing we have as a school system is our integrity,” Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra said.

The district will also create a department, the Office of the Inspector General, to do a better job detecting and pursuing educators who cheat.

Meanwhile, the Dallas Independent School District is considering creating its own team of monitors who would watch for TAKS cheating by test administrators.

At the risk of being self-congratulatory, I’ll highlight two quotes from the story (hey, that rhymes!):

The first is from Saavedra, who called Thursday’s press conference “one of the most important press conferences our district will ever have”: “It is not acceptable to our board or to me or to anyone here that HISD should have to rely on the media to point out anomalies in test scores. That’s our job.”

The second is from the school board member in whose district many of the suspected cheaters reside: “As awkward as this sounds, I want to thank the Morning News for bringing this to our attention. It’s unfortunate that our district officials weren’t able to find these anomalies on their own.”

Finally, major congrats to the Houston Chronicle, who’ve hit upon a nice way to make it seem like they broke this story. They’ve stopped noting in their followups that the Dallas Morning News had anything to do with the exposure of the cheating. They twist and turn every which way to avoid mentioning why, exactly, these reforms are being put into place. You don’t hear anything about the cause until the 24th paragraph, where we hear: “Questions first were raised about the validity of spectacular TAKS gains at four HISD elementary schools: Sanderson, Wesley, Osborne and Highland Heights.”

“Questions first were raised”? Note to media consumers: When you see awkward passive voice like that, it’s sometimes because the writer doesn’t want to say who did the acting upon the subject of the passivity. As in, “The Dallas Morning News first raised questions about…” Very cagey, Chron!

06 January 2005

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