City schools hire woman tied to Cleveland scandal
Bill Bush and Jennifer Smith Richards
The Columbus Dispatch, Feb 23, 2006

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Feb. 23--Joyce Hicks was director of data quality for Cleveland schools when the district was nailed for falsifying its student attendance numbers. On March 6, she will become director of accountability systems for Columbus Public Schools. Her new bosses say she is highly qualified to analyze student data and they don't hold her accountable for what happened in Cleveland, because she was following orders.
"She was doing what was asked of her by a supervisor," said Columbus schools spokesman Greg Viebranz. "She was operating under direction from the chief information officer." But those orders -- to mark as "present" students who were absent with an excuse -- presented a rosier view of attendance. The Ohio Department of Education warned Hicks that the method of calculating Cleveland's attendance rate was inaccurate, spokesman J.C. Benton said. Under the method the attendance rate went from 89 percent in 2000-01 to 96.7 percent four years later, surpassing the required state standard of 93 percent. The Cleveland district reported hav- ing 620 excused absences for the 2004-05 school year; the real number was more than 500,000. Hicks didn't return phone messages left at her home and office yesterday. Columbus school board President Terry Boyd said board members weren't aware of Hicks' connection to falsifying attendance when they approved hiring her for the job that pays $84,275 a year. "For the sake of interest now, I think it's fair that I ask the superintendent how the administration feels about having this woman aboard," Boyd said. Steve Tankovich, the Columbus district's accountability supervisor, said Hicks will be creating "what I call informational reports for middle management" and "there's no chance of her making a similar mistake, if that's what she did" in Cleveland. The Cleveland district blamed former employees, some of whom pointed fingers at the district's CEO, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who resigned Feb. 10. Bennett responded that her staffers were lying.
A June 2002 e-mail from the Cleveland schools' attendance office instructed the computer department staff to count students with excused absences as being in school "per the CEO's directive that the attendance percentage not fall below 93(.)5 (percent) at all cost." In a return e-mail, Peter Robertson, who was then Cleveland schools' chief information officer and Hicks' boss, told attendance office head Mark Curtis that he should make sure copies of the e-mail ordering the change "disappear."
"I'm sure (Bennett) does not mean to suggest that the district is only interested in the end result, NOT the accurate collection of data," Robertson wrote. Two days later, Robertson instructed Hicks and others on the technology staff to begin changing the computer records because the district had determined that the new method of counting absences was legal. Hicks, an $80,000-a-year district director, continued using the method after Robertson left his post. In October, the district said it had made a mistake and no longer would count absences that way. It told the Ohio House Education Committee in December that it was recalculating the attendance rate for the 2004-05 school year, data that Hicks had certified as accurate. Hicks resigned on Feb. 13, the new interim CEO's first official work day and three days after applying for the Columbus job. bbush@dispatch.com
jsmithrichards@dispatch.com
Copyright (c) 2006, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

District staff aimed to skew absence data
Monday, October 17, 2005
Janet Okoben, Plain Dealer Reporter

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The absurdly low number of excused absences reported in the Cleveland schools last year - 620 for 63,500 students - was no clerical error but the result of an orchestrated effort to keep student absences off the books.
And while no evidence shows that schools Chief Executive Barbara Byrd-Bennett knew of the numbers game, this latest scandal illustrates the pressure that some of her subordinates felt to please her. At times, they were able to get changes through simply by dropping her name.
Mark Curtis, former manager of the district's attendance office, came up with an idea in 2002 to boost the district's attendance rate by counting absent students as present, so long as they were given make-up work.
Peter Robertson, former chief information officer for the district, took the idea a step further, ordering that all students with excused absences be counted as present for the official attendance numbers sent to the state.
The goal was to boost the district's average attendance to 93 percent, the mark the state expects districts to hit. Byrd-Bennett had stressed the need for the district to improve on its state report card, which includes the attendance benchmark. That measure could be met more easily than performance standards because it simply involved getting students into the building.
Neither Curtis nor Robertson works for the district anymore, but the calculation methods that they started in 2002 have continued to be used under Joyce Hicks, the district's present director of data quality.
Even though a second look at the numbers last week found that the real number of excused absences was closer to 519,000, internal e-mails that discussed the plan to thwart the reporting of excused absences make it hard to believe that any, let alone 620, had been reported in the district since 2002. The only thing that kept Cleveland from a 100 percent attendance rate the last few years was its unexcused absences, which total hundreds of thousands a year.
Curtis said the idea to count excused students was one of many he had to improve the attendance rate, which had been in the mid-80s percent range through the late 1990s.
"I was trying to be creative and trying to look at avenues that we may not have taken advantage of," he said. "It was my job to explore every possibility under the law to improve our attendance."
Curtis said he checked with the state Department of Education and got a "nonanswer, sorta, kinda, thing."
"My logic was that, if we're allowed to give credit to kids who are out for suspension and doing work, why can't we do the same thing for kids who are home sick if they're doing work, too?" he said.
Curtis said he never told anyone at the district that the practice was legal, but Adrian Thompson, the district's chief legal counsel, said he has found otherwise.
"Mark said the response [from the state] was noncommittal, that we could either do it or we couldn't do it," Thompson said. "So he took that to mean that it was OK. And I've talked to other people in the district, and they say that when they talk to Mark, Mark always says, 'Well, the state has given the district authority to do this.' "
But Curtis, in the attendance office, could not make changes to the district's computer system. And changes would be needed to implement his plan.
Robertson, who led the information technology office, announced in a June 2002 e-mail to staffers that "the District" had found that absent students who did make-up work could be counted as present and that Byrd-Bennett told principals specifically to make sure all absent students got make-up work. Therefore, he told staffers, the attendance calculations would list all excused absent students as present.
Robertson now says that he was simply carrying out directions from Curtis and Rasool Jackson, who at that time was the district's director of student services. Robertson said he had second thoughts, "but ultimately, I agreed because I thought I had enough evidence that this change was directed by the CEO through Mark Curtis and Rasool Jackson on the advice of the legal department."
He said he made the memo ordering the change sound as if it were his idea because his technology workers often would not follow orders from the attendance office.
Curtis denies that he asked Robertson to make the changes. He could not have given orders to someone at Robertson's level, he said.
Regardless of what happened, the plan worked. Attendance rates jumped from 89 percent in 2001 to 93.8 in 2002. The rates have climbed to 96.7 percent for the last two years, the highest, with Solon, in Northeast Ohio.
State officials became suspicious, though, and now a new count is under way by the district. Last week, state officials said they probably won't change the district's previous numbers because the data-collection period for last year has closed.
A livid Byrd-Bennett said Friday that she had never known about the bogus numbers. "I wouldn't see information at that level of detail," she said.
"You hire people to look at that. You hire Mark and/or Rasool, people who head that department, to bring in the aggregated information. You trust that they're having conversations with the state. You get the numbers. You ask reasonable questions. But to drill down to that level, it wouldn't have happened in a school district this large."
Both Robertson and Curtis tried to imply Byrd-Bennett's acceptance of the plan by dropping her name in e-mails to staffers. Robertson did it in his explanation about make-up work and Curtis, through an e-mail to technology staffers.
The e-mail screams in all capital letters, "IT IS MANDATORY PER THE CEO'S DIRECTIVE THAT THE ATTENDANCE PERCENTAGE NOT FALL BELOW 93(.)5 AT ALL COST."
The message goes on to order that coding in the computer for absent high school seniors be changed to "W," which stands for an excused absence with homework, a code that would eventually be counted as present.
Curtis said he invoked Byrd-Bennett's name without her knowledge because her clout would keep technology workers from resisting the attendance office's orders.
"If we needed something done, you have to say it came through the CEO's office," he said.
Lorri Hobson, who now holds Curtis' job and is the one who typed the all-caps e-mail noting the CEO's directive, said the office "used that term freely, all the time," but without actual contact with Byrd-Bennett. She sent the e-mail for Curtis because he was on vacation at the time, but she said the wording was his.
Robertson contends that Byrd-Bennett and other high-level administrators had to have known about the new calculations because the topic of how to legally boost the district's attendance rate was discussed at executive cabinet meetings for months. Thompson said that although attendance had been discussed at those meetings, this specific plan had not. Byrd-Bennett was even more emphatic.
"That's a lie. Liar," she said. "That is a lie. And for me to even think to use the legal department, to figure out, 'Is there a legal way?' I'm not about exploiting the system. It's about doing what's right. He's a liar. Never, ever, ever, happened."
Byrd-Bennett, known as a charismatic leader, is also known to show her temper to staff, and her ire was on display when discussing Robertson and Curtis on Friday.
"There's a big difference between present and excused," she said.
"And if there's a lack of clarity and Mark developed a plan, and Peter implemented it, that violated the purity of what the law says, not only am I disappointed but I'm glad those people don't work here because I'd take the action to fire them."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
jokoben@plaind.com, 216-999-4535

Students rarely marked absent
Cleveland schools' 620 excused absences so low that state doubts figure
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Janet Okoben, Plain Dealer Reporter

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The Cleveland school district reported only 620 excused absences for its 63,000 students last school year, a number so low that the Ohio Department of Education has a hard time believing it.
"From looking at the data, it appears that Cleveland is way, way underreporting," ODOE spokesman J.C. Benton said.
Cleveland's 620 excused absences compares with 303,550 in Columbus, a district of about 60,000 students, and 144,000 in Cincinnati, which has about 36,000 students.
Cleveland school officials, who have boasted about the dramatic rise in attendance rates in recent years, say they're following the law. The district reported an attendance rate of 96.7 percent last year, the same as Solon's and the highest figure in Northeast Ohio.
Ohio school districts must report at least a 93 percent attendance rate to meet the state's standard. Attendance is one of 23 standards districts are judged by on the annual state report cards.
Teachers who want to remain unnamed have continually complained to The Plain Dealer about the way attendance is handled, saying they're discouraged from marking students absent.
State officials have not accused Cleveland of wrongdoing but suspect there are many more excused absences than the district reported.
Over the same time period, Cleveland reported 333,357 unexcused absences, students who couldn't be accounted for or didn't have a valid reason to miss school.
That's on track with the numbers reported by Columbus and Cincinnati.
Joyce Hicks, Cleveland's director of data quality, said she assured state officials the district was following the rules.
The district's chief of staff, Lisa Marie Ruda, said she was still assembling documents Wednesday night and could not specifically respond to how the district sent the number 620 to the state.
"If there's a problem, we're going to fix it," she said.
Cleveland's attendance rate would take a hit if there really are more excused absences than are being reported. Districts are not supposed to count either excused or unexcused absences toward their attendance rate, with some exceptions such as suspended students who are still doing school work.
One week a year though - during Average Daily Membership week - they can count students who are absent with a valid excuse, such as illness. The special count happens this week for most districts, except for those who got exemptions for their Rosh Hashana observance. Each student counted during ADM week brings in a set amount of state money.
Cleveland schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett said the district had a problem last year with staff at 19 schools who weren't recording attendance properly. Those numbers were recalculated, but Byrd-Bennett said the differences in the numbers wouldn't have caused the district's attendance rate to drop much.
Byrd-Bennett said students with excused absences are not considered present except in the case of students with long-term illnesses who receive in-home tutoring. Lorri Hobson, who tracks attendance for the district, said about 600 students a year qualify for this special home instruction.
Tammy Strom, spokeswoman for Solon schools, said her district is confident its 96.7 percent attendance rate shows a true picture of students present or missing during the school year.
"If they're absent, they're absent," she said.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
jokoben@plaind.com, 216-999-4535

Cleveland Graduation Rate Soars

We at parentadvocates.org believe that a small group of very wealthy people run the Human Resources Department of America's public schools. This small group obtains jobs for public school personnel implicated in corruption, scandal, or abuse of students in order to keep the secrecy, wrong-doing and criminal acts hidden and paid for by taxpayer money.

For example:
Bruce Irushalmi

Mr. Irushalmi retired from his long-term position in Region 1 as Director of Family Support Services on June 31, 2005. Mr. Irushalmi was, despite his improprieties as Director of the BOE Office of School Safety in 1992 when the Special Commissioner Edward Stancik exposed his crimes, working with The Wallace Foundation as part of their LEAD Project from about 1997. We called the Communications Office at the Wallace Foundation and asked for a comment on Mr. Irushalmi's participation on this project, but we have not received a return telephone call.
After Mr. Irushalmi's "retirement" in June, 2005, from Region 1he moved to the Bronx Institute of Lehman College. See also GEAR UP.

Similar examples can be seen across America:
U.S. Public Schools Failing to Combat Predatory Employees

Peyton Wolcott: Education, Inc. and the big pot o'money