Cheating alleged at Baker Middle School

Officials from the Baker School District, the Oregon Department of Education and a state commission are investigating allegations of cheating on state tests at Baker Middle School.

In conjunction with the allegations, an anonymous complaint has been filed with the state Teachers Standards and Practices Commission (TSPC) against BMS Principal Mindi Vaughan.

“It’s under investigation, and until the investigations are complete, we’re going to take it seriously,” Baker Schools Superintendent Walt Wegener said Thursday.

“A resolution is not currently at hand."

Wegener said he expects the TSPC investigation will be finished by November.

“I hope it shows there’s no protocol violations on our part that were intentional and wrong,” he said. “We believe we haven’t done anything wrong.”

The investigation centers on what seem to be irregular results in a sampling of results from reading/literature tests that BMS eighth-graders took in 2009 and 2010.

The anonymous complaint filed with the TSPC in late June mentions the test results, which show several students making significant improvement in their scores during a period ranging from one to five months.

The Oregon Department of Education has denied the Baker City Herald’s request, under the state Public Records Law, to release a copy of all results from the eighth-grade tests for that year (with students’ names redacted to protect their privacy, but with students identified by number so their test scores can be tracked over time).

State officials cited state and federal privacy laws in rejecting the Herald’s request.

Here are four examples of BMS test results:

• Student 1, who took the standardized reading/literature test three times, scored in the 29th percentile in November 2009. The student’s test score dropped to the 14th percentile in January 2010. Four months later, in April 2010, the student scored in the 91st percentile.

• Student 2, who also tested three times, scored in the 22nd percentile in November 2009, the 25th percentile in January 2010, and in the 91st percentile in April 2010.

• Student 3 scored in the 25th percentile in January 2010; in the 22nd percentile in March 2010; and in the 82nd percentile in April 2010.

• Student 4 scored in the 19th percentile in January 2010; in the 22nd percentile in March 2010; and in the 79th percentile in April 2010.

Wegener said the increase from the 22nd percentile to the 82nd percentile and from the 22nd percentile to the 79th percentile over a one-month period raise red flags for him.

But when he sees a student scoring in the 29th percentile one month, the 14th percentile two months later and then four months later hitting the 91st percentile, Wegener can’t help but think that that student didn’t take the tests seriously on the first two tries.

 Vaughan contends that student improvement, not only in eighth-grade reading scores in 2009-10, but throughout the middle school in 2010-11, are the result of hard work by students and staff. Cheating had no part in the gains, Vaughan said Thursday.

“We’ve done a ton of things at the middle school to prepare kids for the state test and to align our curriculum,” she said.

As part of the school improvement plan, the middle school has worked to emphasize, to both staff and students, the importance of doing well on the tests, she said.

Students in the BMS Leadership Class were recruited to develop a video that was shown in classrooms to encourage all students to do their best on the statewide assessments, Vaughan said.

As an added incentive, students who meet standards receive a hand-delivered Dilly Bar from Dairy Queen, she said.

Reading classes have incorporated practice questions in their lessons and testing is done in smaller groups to help eliminate distractions.

Students who don’t meet standards in the first two rounds of testing take the test for the third and final time, which the state allows, one-on-one with a test proctor.

“We take the distractions away so the kids can focus,” Vaughan said.

She says she’s had students come up to her excited to take the test for the third time in the hope of improving their results and afterward they’ve thanked her for putting them in a quiet room for the testing.

She denies allegations that she helped students cheat.

“I feel bad,” she said. “I wish whoever the person was would have come and visited with me and I’d have done whatever I could to resolve the issue.”