During Wednesday's meeting at Carver Elementary School, RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras asked attendees to hold hands and talk about how they would help the school to heal from the SOL cheating fallout. (Photo by Sarah King)
Editor's note: This story was updated on Aug. 7.
Carver Elementary School’s fall from grace was swift, but the inquiry into how and why a cheating ring to boost the school’s Standards of Learning (SOL) test scores flew under the radar for at least three years may raise more questions than the Virginia Department of Education report answered.
On Wednesday, Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras -- flanked by administration officials and School Board members -- held a community forum in the Carver auditorium to address the state investigation’s report released Monday, which concluded that an unknown number of students had been given inappropriate assistance on their SOL examinations.
“The adults who orchestrated this cheating violated a sacred trust,” Kamras told the audience of roughly 50 Carver students, parents, teachers and members of the community and RPS administration.
“Pending [School] Board approval, I can confirm that none of the individuals involved will be employed with RPS this fall,” Kamras began. “Pending state approval, I can confirm none of these individuals will hold a teaching license in the commonwealth.”
The uproar reverberated through the River City within moments of Kamras releasing an emailed statement Monday afternoon sharing the report with the RPS community: Besides the handful of teachers mentioned by name as facilitating the cheating and administering the SOL tests at the request of Carver Principal Kiwana Yates, the VDOE report states that parents were given forms to opt out of testing after the state nullified the first round of SOL testing this spring amid suspicion of irregularities. In addition, "It was reported to RPS staff and VDOE staff by anonymous sources and during student interviews that individuals went to students’ homes to encourage parents to refuse to have their children be retested."
Mariah White, the former unofficial PTA president, says she opted out of the test on behalf of her own children and acknowledges placing two signs in front of the school to alert parents that they could opt out, but she disputes a statement included in the report that "One teacher reported hearing that the PTA president was working in the community to get parents to opt out." That is not true, White says.
On Aug. 6, the Richmond School Board accepted resignations from Yates, along with four teachers and an administrator.
The fallout of the investigation report went further than personnel implications, though. The state revoked Carver’s accreditation -- a status that Yates secured after marked improvement in SOL pass rates after she assumed leadership at the school in 2012.
By 2016, the school -- more than 90 percent of whose students live in the Gilpin Court public housing community — was a textbook success story. Carver was named a National Blue Ribbon school by the U.S. Department of Education and was a recipient of Virginia’s Board of Education Distinguished Achievement Awards.
Students were performing at unprecedented achievement levels compared to just a few years prior. Third graders at the elementary school passed their reading SOL in 2013-2014 at a 76.5 percent rate; by fifth grade, the same cohort of students passed the reading SOL at a full 100 percent.
But then the first, and arguably most pressing, issue to arise out of the report, became apparent. When those same fifth graders left elementary school to attend Albert Hill Middle School in 2016-2017, more than 60 percent of the same students failed their reading SOL.
Transfer students faced similar issues. A third grader at Carver in 2016 scored above 500 points on the reading SOL; the next year, the student scored even higher -- 542 points. But after moving to a different school, the student’s reading SOL score was only 278 points -- more than 100 points below the “pass” benchmark.
That student was not alone, either. Of the 13 students who attended a different school after attending Carver, not a single child passed the reading SOL at their new school, despite each of them recording a passing or pass/advanced score previously.
The Virginia Department of Education assessed the latter metrics, as well as conducting dozens of interviews with students and staff after launching a standard SOL audit turned full-blown investigation.
“Something this significant -- we’re talking about a person’s career, an educator’s career -- you want to be thorough,” Tracy Epp, chief academic officer for RPS, told the crowd in the auditorium of the elementary school Wednesday night.
“There were multiple pieces of information that were pulled together -- it wasn’t just the students coming from here to middle school; it wasn’t just the student quotes in interviews,” Epp told the group after a tense exchange between Kamras and a Carver parent. “It was all the pieces pulled together that showed a very clear pattern and that something was very wrong.”
Epp’s comments followed pointed questions from Precious Elliott, a Gilpin Court resident whose 11-year-old son has autism and was one of 16 students interviewed without prior parental consent during the investigation process.
Several parents spoke in defense of Yates, whom they characterized as a loving member of the community who put her students and their families first -- giving rides to and from school; helping former students apply to college and personally attending to families who needed extra help.
“That’s what makes this so tough,” 2nd District School Board member Scott Barlow said when he addressed the group convened in the auditorium Wednesday. “We all know Dr. Yates loved her kids here. … they made them feel like they were in a safe space; that they were loved. … And I’m sure everyone here has been in a situation where a family member or someone they loved defied their trust, and it’s hard to accept at first. But we grow from these experiences.”
Barlow went on to publicly share for the first time his personal stake in bringing about the initial audit of Carver’s testing procedures.
In the wake of such huge successes at the school after Yates took the helm, he said, he wanted to know how “we take the great things going on at Carver and make sure we do those things at every single one of our schools” in RPS.
“But when I started asking those questions … I wasn’t getting answers,” Barlow said. “I was told, ‘There’s a lot of haters out there; there’s a lot of white people … there’s a lot of people in the counties … who just don’t think our students are capable of this.’ ”
Despite his efforts to raise the issue with prior administrators -- visiting in person, making phone calls and writing emails -- Barlow says his concerns didn’t fall upon receptive ears until he broached the topic with the new administration under Kamras, who assumed the superintendent role in February.
“We know testing anomalies happen,” Barlow said. “Kids get nervous … but if you look at the report, it looks systemic … it looks unfair to our kids.”
The unfairness he alluded to is not new, either. Before 2013, disabled students were similarly defying expectations on the Virginia Grade Level Alternative (VGLA) tests.
When the VGLA was abolished by the state in 2013, disabled students’ scores dropped drastically. But after Yates’ arrival at Carver, the scores steadily started climbing again -- and eventually the third grade pass rate for reading surpassed non-disabled student SOL scores in 2015, and again in 2017 among fourth graders taking the reading SOL.
Carver isn’t the only school exhibiting discrepancies in scores, according to state data.
Fourth graders taking the reading SOL at Fairfield Court Elementary -- another school where the majority of students live in a public housing community -- saw just as sharp an increase in pass rates, with fewer than 40 percent of fourth graders (both disabled and non-disabled) passing the reading SOL in 2013. By 2015, non-disabled fourth graders at Fairfield Court had hit a remarkable nearly 90-percent pass rate on the reading SOL, and disabled students scored even higher than their non-disabled peers at the same school, surpassing the Virginia state average pass rate for non-disabled students taking the same test.
Fairfield Court Elementary fifth graders’ reading scores were even more remarkable: in 2014, the pass rate for disabled and non-disabled students was roughly 60 and 40 percent, respectively.
The next year, disabled students were still outperforming their non-disabled peers -- hitting almost a 100 percent pass rate -- while non-disabled students passed at a rate of 85 percent on the reading exam. The data for 2016 and 2017 indicate Fairfield Elementary’s disabled students’ SOL pass rate dropped, but was still above 80 percent -- again higher than the state average for non-disabled students.
Similar trends exist at Ginter Park Elementary: In 2013, 50 percent of disabled students passed the fifth grade reading SOL -- a rate not good enough for accredited status (75 percent or more), but still double the roughly 25 percent pass rate among their non-disabled peers on the same exam.
By 2015, however, both disabled and non-disabled students were passing the fifth-grade math exam, with 80 and 70 percent of disabled and non-disabled students passing the test, respectively.
As for the detrimental impacts of the testing irregularities at Carver, parents and staff expressed the need for healing and regaining of trust among the community.
Kamras began Wednesday’s meeting by outlining measures his administration is already working to implement: helping students understand what happened at their school by facilitating conversations with staff members when school resumes in the fall; Saturday and after-school enrichment programs for interested families and a sixth-grade diagnostic test administered to students who attended Carver and will be entering middle school, many at Albert Hill.
Last July, VDOE documents show School Board Chairwoman Dawn Page signed an application to have Hill’s accreditation status deemed “Partially Accredited: Reconstituted School.”
The latter indicates a school labeled “Partially Accredited” for three consecutive years and at risk of being denied accreditation the fourth year may apply for the special “reconstitution” status, which, if accepted by VDOE, mandates that accountability actions are put in place to improve performance and instruction.
As for moving forward in the immediate days and weeks ahead, Kamras took strides to start those conversations directly with the affected Carver students on Wednesday night before he gave opening remarks.
After inviting the roughly half-dozen Carver students up to the front of the auditorium, he told them: “I know theres a lot of craziness going on, but I want you to know that we love you, we believe in you, and we’re gonna do anything we need to for you to be successful.”
