HAZLETON - An investigation into anomalies in state test results at five Hazleton Area School District schools suggests that a reporting error could be to blame, a district administrator said.
A recent state Department of Education study revealed that some scores earned on Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests in the 2008-09 school year were "statistically atypical," and also questioned whether they were earned fairly.
"We found what we expected - a glitch in data sent to the state," Francis X. Antonelli, Hazleton Area deputy superintendent, told WBRE-TV on Friday. "And we found explanation for the erasure marks they say were 'irregular.' The erasure marks were well within the state mean and there were only 33 questionable marks out of 6,000 student tests."
The report looked at "aberrant" behavior, or testing irregularities, that may have been carried out by students or educators, according to the report prepared by Data Recognition Corp. in Minnesota.
Most of the three dozen Pennsylvania districts flagged in the report had one or two irregularities. Hazleton Area had multiple incidents covering five schools - Freeland, Heights-Terrace, Hazleton, Valley and West Hazleton elementary/middle schools, as well as Hazleton Area High School.
Before the district began probing the irregularities July 18, Antonelli suggested they may have resulted from a problem with reporting the scores to the education department.
In 2009, Antonelli had said, the district electronically submitted a package of student demographic data to the state Department of Education. The department later discovered it did not have the information, so the district re-submitted the missing data, he said at the time. It's possible the audit was conducted before the missing data was re-submitted to the department, Antonelli suggested earlier this month.
Patricia Cannon, president of the Hazleton Area Education Association, told WBRE that the results of the district's internal investigation should clear its teachers of wrongdoing.
Pennsylvania's report, which was conducted under Gov. Ed Rendell's administration but released only this month, came to light just days after administrators and teachers in Atlanta schools were found to have changed students' answers on tests to improve scores and meet federal education standards.