Richmond Public Schools administrators, Carver Elementary School parents and others attend a meeting about the future of the school's PTA at Virginia Commonwealth University. (Photo courtesy Jerome Legions Jr.)
Editor's note: This story was updated on Aug. 7.
Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras will hold a community meeting tonight to address a damning report from the Virginia Department of Education, released Monday, detailing how Carver Elementary School administrators and staff helped unwitting third-, fourth- and fifth-grade students cheat on the state Standards of Learning (SOL) tests.
The Aug. 1 meeting will take place at the elementary school, located at 1110 W. Leigh St., beginning at 6 p.m. The community is invited to ask questions and address concerns in the wake of the testing irregularities.
“The parents are angry, and they have lost trust,” Mariah White, the unofficial former PTA president, said at a sparsely attended Tuesday meeting to focus on rebooting the organization — which has not been a formal Parent Teacher Association since 1998 — following the cheating scandal.
In a statement posted on the RPS website in response to the state’s report, Kamras wrote, “What most disturbs me about what occurred at Carver is that it effectively robbed our young people of the opportunity to demonstrate their learning free from suspicion. In doing so, it helped perpetuate pernicious stereotypes about what children from low-income families and children of color can achieve.”
The VDOE investigation was catalyzed by a series of anonymous tips questioning the data integrity of the Carver SOL scores, which show a dramatic shift in pass rates: Fewer than 70 percent of students passed the tests through 2013-14 — consequently deeming Carver unaccredited under state standards — but there was a sharp increase beginning in 2014-15, with nearly 100 percent pass rates across the board.
Former Carver principal Kiwana Yates (File photo)
“Some parents were very loyal to [ousted principal Kiwana] Yates … it’s a chalk line, and you can’t have three parents in the PTA for a whole community,” White said at the Tuesday meeting as she glanced around the room. The 18 attendees included just three Carver parents along with Kamras and members of his administration, 2nd District School Board member Scott Barlow, and interim Principal Tiawana Giles.
White, the mother of two Carver students, says in an interview that although the school was unable to meet requirements to organize an official PTA, she stepped up during the past school year to provide leadership in an effort to build relationships between the school and the parents. "I was trying to get it organized," she says, adding that Carver has struggled with low parent involvement. Now, White plans to return to mentoring and volunteering at the school. If a PTA does form, she adds, she will join it.
“I want this to be a school system where we bring school to communities,” Kamras said at the meeting, “not where we wait for the community to come to the school." To help increase parent involvement, he suggested that PTA meetings could be held in the Gilpin Court public housing community, home to a substantial number of Carver's students.
Attendees at Tuesday's meeting to discuss the future of the Carver PTA talk in small groups afterward. (Photo by Sarah King)
According to the report, a “core group” of staff would assist students in varying capacities while administering the SOL tests. The report details the investigation’s methodologies, including interviews with students, staff and school administrators, as well as testing data.
The cohort of students who tested in reading as third graders in 2013-14 at Carver averaged a 76 percent pass rate. As fourth graders, more than 94 percent passed the test. The next year, their last before starting middle school, 100 percent passed the reading SOL.
But in 2016-17 — when the same cohort of students started middle school at Albert Hill — fewer than 40 percent of the sixth graders passed the test. In 2017-18, barely half of the students passed.
Math scores offer an even more stark comparison: Roughly half of third graders passed the SOL test in 2014, but bounced up to a whopping 100 and 94 percent pass rates in 2015 and 2016, respectively. When those students were sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders at Hill, however, roughly 60, 85 and 70 percent of the cohort failed the math SOL.
Some students who were passing standardized reading tests at Carver transferred to other schools, where, in one case, a student went from scoring “pass/advanced” (more than 500 points) in third and fourth grades, to a failing 278-point reading score at their new school in grade 5. Students must score at least 400 out of 600 points to pass the SOLs.
Yates, who was principal since 2012, has been removed from her position, although she remains employed by the school division. Under her leadership, Carver was a recipient of the VDOE’s “Board of Education Distinguished Achievement Awards” and was named a “National Blue Ribbon” school by the U.S. Department of Education in 2016.
The VDOE report released Monday concludes by stating a request will be made to the Virginia Board of Education at its September meeting to withhold school accreditation for Carver.
