A12 • ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
M 2 • SUNDAY • 09.23.2012
FROM A1
School officials gloss over cheating scandals Report cites elementary school in East St. Louis, in which tampering with tests was ‘accepted practice.’ ASSOCIATED PRESS
ATLANTA • School administrators and state education officials across the country have received complaints about cheating on standardized tests since a scandal in Atlanta, but authorities often treat them as isolated or aberrant events, according to a newspaper report. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which exposed widespread cheating on achievement tests in Atlanta Public Schools in 2009, reported this year that 196 districts nationwide exhibit patterns of suspicious test scores similar to those found in Atlanta. The paper is reporting now that some of those districts have responded the same way Atlanta did: by minimizing, isolating or glossing over improprieties. The Journal-Constitution said it reviewed about 130 files of cheating investigations in Mobile, Ala., Dallas, Houston, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis and East St. Louis, Ill. — all cities the newspaper identified as hav-
MUSEUM
•
ing, along with Atlanta, extreme concentrations of suspicious test scores. In some cases, investigations uncovered wrongdoing and led to punishment for a handful of educators. In others, inquiries glossed over glaring irregularities. Nearly always, officials focused narrowly on a single classroom or, at most, a single school — the approach the Atlanta Public Schools used for years before a scandal over systemic cheating erupted three years ago. In Mobile, middle-school students taking an achievement test in 2008 discovered that someone had changed their answers from a previous testing day, according to state files. They told the teacher, who told the principal. But according to the state’s report, the principal’s response was “sleep on it.” Two days later, the report says, the principal told the teacher that “we’re going to let the situation rest, and we need to keep quiet.” Mobile Superintendent Mar-
tha Peek, who presides over the largest school district in Alabama, told the newspaper she’d rather have bad scores than illegitimate ones. “We can fix academic problems,” she said. “You cannot fix problems with integrity.” But Peek said she was unaware that, at roughly the same time as the cheating case unfolded at Scarborough Middle School, close to a dozen other Mobile schools posted test scores with inexplicable gains and decreases. Investigating allegations of cheating remains a low priority in many states, despite highprofile scandals in Atlanta, Philadelphia, the District of Columbia and other school districts. Only 10 states even have a budget for such investigations, according to a recent survey of state education agencies by the Journal-Constitution. And at least 19 states don’t look for high numbers of erasures or other
changes that correct students’ answers. Seven states decided to begin or resume the analyses after Atlanta’s cheating scandal, in which the state found a virtually impossible number of wrongto-right erasures. The newspaper cited numerous other examples of cheating allegations and the way they were investigated. In East St. Louis, cheating was “accepted practice” at Annette Officer Elementary School, the district said in a recent report. Test scores rocketed and plunged over several years at the school, a telltale sign of tampering. But it wasn’t until this spring, after a teacher reported improprieties, that the district opened an inquiry. Among the things it learned: The culture of cheating was so advanced that administrators had developed a code: When outsiders came to the school during testing, an announcement would go out over the PA system: “Will Abraham Lin-
coln please come to the office?” This served as a warning to staff members to stop cheating. The school’s principal and two instructional coaches later quit, bringing the investigation to a close. But the district saw no need to check other East St. Louis schools for irregularities, Beth Shepperd, an assistant superintendent, said recently. “This was public in our community,” Shepperd said. “If any teacher at another school felt there was a concern, that teacher had an opportunity to come forward.” The newspaper also cited a case at Detroit’s Bethune Academy, where an anonymous teacher told Michigan officials that the principal “directs the staff to have the students write the answers on a piece of paper instead of their answer documents. Then the central office collects all the answer documents and pieces of paper and goes into the office and changes the answers.”
FROM A1
Missouri History Museum commissioners say they are shut out of major financial decisions, including 2006 land deal
Contributions $4.8
2011 expenses In millions
Insurance and other $1.41 Tax revenue $10.1
Total revenue: $16.8 million SOURCE: History Museum tax filings | Post-Dispatch
Delmar
Contracted services $.54
Exhibits, events, education $2.7
Salaries & benefits $5.5
Goodfellow
Tickets $.27
Delmar
History Museum property St. Louis
Forest Park Pkw
y.
DeBaliviere
2011 revenue In millions Facilities, catering, miscellaneous $.49 Membership dues $.54 Investment income $.66
Hamilton
MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM
Des Peres
ago that raised questions about the 2006 purchase from former Mayor Freeman Bosley Jr. Both men have denied that personal or political connections influenced the purchase. The museum wanted the property to establish a community center that would offer more usable space for community groups and exhibits. It spent months looking for property, hired a real estate consultant to represent its interests and got a good deal, he said. “If you look at the price we paid for the property, it was on the low end,” he said. Former commissioners such as Saunders criticized the museum for buying the property without an appraisal. But Archibald argued Friday that it didn’t need one. “People can question the structure. People can question lots of things,” he said. “But in your reviewing of that transaction, I don’t think you can find an ethical lapse on my part. “Nobody tried to fool anybody here,” he concluded. Saunders disagreed. She said Archibald didn’t listen to her ideas and didn’t take her commission seriously. The Delmar Boulevard purchase, for instance, never came in front of the commission’s budget committee, and was mentioned as an afterthought when the commission was asked to approve the budget, she said. This summer, Saunders quit her post. She had been on the commission for 12 years. Political leaders and commissioners have grown increasingly concerned with oversight of the region’s five tax-supported cultural institutions. In response to these concerns, the St. Louis Metropolitan Zoological Park and Museum District, which oversees the institutions, sought an auditor’s report on the History Museum by Kerber Eck & Braeckel. The report revealed that in addition to buying the Delmar Boulevard land without an appraisal, the museum paid at least $100,000 in additional expenses for the property. Bosley coowned the land, which was the site of his failed barbecue restaurant. He and a partner paid $150,000 in 1999. And the auditors went further. Their 36-page report shed light on an organization that critics say is run with little government oversight, despite millions of dollars a year in tax support. Last year, taxpayers sent about $10 million to the History Museum, accounting for about 60 percent of its funding, the second-highest proportion of the five cultural institutions. The St. Louis Zoo takes in about $20 million in tax funding, yet adds at least double that in private dollars and sales. The Missouri Botanical Garden receives $10 million in taxes out of a budget of nearly $50 million. Yet the museum almost entirely ignores the directions and requests of the government commission that oversees it, said Saunders and other commissioners. That was not how the commission was created, said Charles Valier, a local attorney who sponsored the legislation that created the Zoo-Museum District.
Lindell
Utilities, maintenance, advertising, office $4.6
Forest Park
Total expenses: $14.8 million
Missouri History Museum Post-Dispatch
STEPHEN DEERE • sdeere@post-dispatch.com
The Missouri History Museum spent $875,000 in 2006 to buy the site of a closed barbecue restaurant at 5863 Delmar Boulevard. The building has since been torn down, and officials want to sell the property.
AREA CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS Ranked by percentage of 2011 total revenue funded by Zoo-Museum District taxes. Institution Percentage St. Louis Art Museum** 62 Missouri History Museum 60 St. Louis Science Center 49 St. Louis Zoo 34 Missouri Botanical Garden 22
Total revenue $33.6 million $16.8 million $21.2 million $60.9 million $47.1 million
Tax funding $20.8 million $10.0 million $10.4 million $20.8 million $10.2 million
Attendance 363,447 364,820 926,331 3,019,597 898,780
Employees* 164 118 185 300 78
* Full time ** Construction at the St. Louis Art Museum has contributed to a significant drop in attendance. Source: Individual institutions
His intention, he said, was to create a strong governing board, accountable to the taxpayers, for each institution.
CREATION OF DISTRICT
At first, only the zoo and St. Louis Art Museum were funded by tax dollars, and only by city taxpayers. In the late 1960s, a group of citizens proposed a new tax to be paid by city and St. Louis County residents for the zoo, Art Museum and St. Louis Science Center. Valier, then a state representative, sponsored the bill in Jefferson City. City and county voters added the Botanical Garden in 1983 and the History Museum about four years later. Taxpayers now pay up to 28 cents per $100 of assessed property value for the museums, with 8 cents apiece going to the zoo and Art Museum, and 4 cents to each to the other three. Valier’s law created five commissions, one for each institution, to oversee how the tax dollars were spent, plus the Zoo-Museum District board, to oversee the commissions. It has eight board members, half appointed by the mayor and
half by the county executive. Each institution’s commission is made up of 10 commissioners: five approved by the executive of St. Louis County, and five by the city mayor. The commissions are self-perpetuating: Commissioners pick their own replacements, who are voted on by the group before approval by their respective politician. But each of the institutions also has a nonprofit arm, with a nonprofit board of trustees, generally created to raise private funds or manage endowments. Most of the time, said Patrick Dougherty, executive director of the Zoo-Museum District, it is the commissioners who run their institutions, with the nonprofit trustees taking a back seat. But the History Museum is different: In 1988, the nonprofit trustees reached an agreement with the commissioners, which made the nonprofit (the Missouri Historical Society) responsible for the History Museum operations. Moreover, the agreement is renewed automatically unless commissioners vote against it 90 days before the new year. Valier said he intended for the commissioners to run the insti-
tutions, not the trustees. “This contract basically eviscerates all that,” Valier said. Valier, appointed by St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay to the ZooMuseum District’s board in March, said he began looking at the agreement soon after his appointment. He found it baffling. It didn’t make sense why the commission would willingly give up all its power. “The real issue is a policy one,” Valier said. “How can you contract away your responsibility to govern?” The auditors also questioned the agreement, saying they found no evidence that the contract was discussed or approved each year. For the contract to be effective, the auditors said, the commission needs to identify specific criteria and evaluate the History Museum’s performance yearly. Jeff Rainford, Mayor Slay’s chief of staff, said Valier and former History Museum commissioner Gloria Wessels were named to the Zoo-Museum District to improve oversight. Wessels has also criticized the land purchase and commission oversight.
“Our cultural institutions are vital,” Rainford said. “The public needs to have confidence that tax dollars in the institutions are spent wisely, carefully.”
A GOOD DEAL?
Last week, the Post-Dispatch filed a public records request for documents related to the Delmar Boulevard purchase. The History Museum contended that as a nonprofit it didn’t need to respond to the request but would provide the documents. Karen Goering, managing director of operations, on Friday provided records showing that real estate consultant David Hoffman was paid $10,000 to approach landowners in the area, so sellers wouldn’t know the museum was interested. Bosley told the Post-Dispatch after the audit report was released that he heard the museum was looking for property and he told Archibald he was interested in selling. He and his partner had taken out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans and owed at least three years of back taxes. City records showed the History Museum paid the back taxes after it purchased the property. Archibald and Goering dispute that. On Friday, Archibald said he wasn’t “directly involved” in the transaction. Goering said the museum made at least one offer on a different property, for $750,000, and a prior offer to Bosley, also for $750,000. The first landowner didn’t respond. Bosley declined the initial offer. Moreover, Goering said, the Missouri Historical Society board of trustees was deeply entrenched in the process and approved the museum’s decision to purchase land. Goering and Archibald insisted that the History Museum commission had ample knowledge of the efforts, and pointed to the minutes of multiple meetings as proof, including at least two trustee meetings attended by commissioners. But it wasn’t until February 2007 — three months after the purchase — that Archibald reported to commissioners that the museum had bought the land, according to the minutes. Archibald, however, insisted Friday that he didn’t need to get permission from the commission. “I do not report to the (commission),” he said Friday. Archibald’s compensation is estimated at $515,000 this year. Besides, he said, tax dollars weren’t directly used to buy the land — though he acknowledged the museum keeps public and private dollars in the same operating fund. Archibald has now abandoned plans for the community center. The country’s economic meltdown halted progress. Meanwhile, the museum developed online search engines and applications that make the building less necessary, he said. The lot, at 5863 Delmar Boulevard, sits vacant, the former barbecue joint demolished. Archibald said he would, as the auditor’s report suggested, get an appraisal within a few months and sell the lot when the market rebounds.