The city needs to do more to prove widespread cheating on state tests isn’t an issue — particularly given its hefty score gains over the years, State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said yesterday.
During an education forum in Union Square, Tisch suggested the city should reinstate checks on cheating that were all but eliminated under Mayor Bloomberg, but that helped uncover major scandals implicating teachers and administrators in school districts nationwide.
“I think the city has an obligation to show the public that what they’ve done here is real,” she said.
Among the checks the city has cut is a procedure called “erasure analysis,” where student answer sheets are scanned to detect patterns of wrong answers being changed to right.
Tisch’s comments come at a time of heightened concern about cheating as student test scores are increasingly being used to make major decisions — such as whether to promote students, close schools or grant teachers tenure.
But Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky maintained that the city’s preventive measures are already stricter than the state’s — and that it’s not the city’s responsibility to conduct large-scale erasure analysis.
He said the state already audits answer sheets from 200 city public schools each year, so that it could do additional analyses without much trouble.
“These are state exams, it’s the state’s obligation to have a system of controls and we will actively continue to supplement their system,” he told reporters.
The number of cheating allegations reported to the Office of Special Commissioner of Investigation have tripled since 2005 — to 225 last year, records show.
The vast majority of those cases each year — including more than 97 percent last year — were referred to the Department of Education’s internal investigative unit.
Education officials said they’re in the process of compiling statistics on the outcomes of those probes.
A state task force is set to announce more stringent guidelines to prevent cheating in coming weeks.