0 Comments · Wednesday, October 24, 2012
After two years of racking up an
excellent rating on its state report card, Robert A. Taft Information
Technology High School appears headed for a lower grade.
0 Comments · Wednesday, March 14, 2012
If Cincinnati Board of Education members
harbor any doubts about the validity of graduation test scores at Robert
A. Taft Information Technology High School, they’re not sharing them
publicly.
by James McNair
03.02.2012
Posted In:
School Board,
News at 02:44 PM |
Permalink |
Comments (0)
Eileen Cooper-Reed will broach the subject at March 12 school board meeting
Following CityBeat's Feb. 22 cover
story outlining test-score discrepancies at Taft Information
Technology High School, a Cincinnati Public Schools board member
tells CityBeat that she plans to raise those questions as a topic of
discussion at the board’s next meeting.
The article, “Miracle or Mirage? ACT
scores and a mysteriously ended cheating probe raise questions about
Taft High School’s climb to the top,” delved into contrasting
Ohio Graduation Test and ACT test scores at Taft in 2010 and 2011, as
well as a 2006 erasure analysis showing that Taft students entered
correct answers after 88 percent of all erasures on that year’s
OGT. Taft is one of only two excellent-rated high schools in the city
of Cincinnati and a 2010 winner of a National Blue Ribbon award from
the U.S. Department of Education.
The board member, Eileen Cooper-Reed,
doesn’t know what she will ask for or proposed at the board’s
March 12 meeting. “What I do know is that if we have nothing to
hide, then we have nothing to fear,” she says. “Whatever we can
do to make things clear so the community knows what’s going on,
it’s worth doing.”
At a board meeting in November 2006,
Cooper-Reed expressed dismay at having learned about the erasure
analysis from a Columbus Dispatch article that ran four months after
CPS, then under the leadership of superintendent Rosa Blackwell,
refused to investigate the erasures. Cooper-Reed and former board
member Rick Williams said at the meeting that they would send a
letter to the Ohio Department of Education asking it to revisit the
matter. She says now that she has “no idea” if the letter went
out. An ODE spokesman said there is no record of having received the
letter or taking up the request.
“I will bring it up,” Reed says of
the March 12 board meeting. “If someone else doesn’t bring it up,
I certainly will.”