Here’s why Fayette County schools got 23 violations on statewide tests

The 2016-17 reading test scores of six Southern Elementary students in Lexington were invalidated after the students told state investigators that they made changes on their tests based on their teachers’ comments during the exams.

Because of the length of the state investigations, Fayette County Superintendent Manny Caulk was not notified of some of the violations by letter until as late as July 2018, according to documents the Herald-Leader received under the Kentucky Open Records Act. Test violations from the 2017-18 school year are still being investigated.

In a letter sent in June, Kentucky Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis told Caulk about investigative findings in which students said the teacher pointed at words, indicated what the answer was, told them to “sound it out or break it down to erase, to go back and redo, or pointed to a line.”

The case marked one of 23 in Fayette County for that school year in which state officials found a testing violation. The six scores involved in the case were among 11 in Fayette County that were lowered or invalidated for 2016-17.

The teacher at Southern Elementary told investigators “she may have said too much in her efforts to provide words of encouragement to to the students during the testing session,” according to the letter sent to Caulk.

One student said that the teacher pointed to the answers he got wrong and he went back to them.

Six of 21 students interviewed by state officials said that based on the teachers’ comments they “added a little more to their response, realized they had a wrong answer and made changes.”

The teacher told state officials that she made several comments to students about missing answers, told students to go back and check their work, sometimes pointing at a test item, and polnted out skipped answers by running her hand over a test booklet and saying , ‘read over this.’” She was required to get additional training.

Schools are rated according to their performance on some of the tests, some of which are officially known as the Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress. Violations of other required tests also are investigated by the state.

“Our district is committed to following all guidelines and regulations related to the administration of state tests.” Fayette district spokeswoman Lisa Deffendall said in response to the violations that the state found. “ All of the employees who are still with the district have completed the additional training required and we will continue to be diligent in reporting testing irregularities to our partners at the Kentucky Department of Education.”

According to the documents that the state provided to the Herald-Leader, Fayette County saw more violations in 2016-17 than in the previous year, when there were only 20 violations found and three test scores lowered to zero.

In addition to the Southern Elementary incident, scores were invalidated in 10 other cases, including math scores that were lowered for two students at Edythe J. Hayes Middle School after one student used a calculator when it was not allowed and another student who returned to a previous part of the test and filled in an answer after time was up. Reading scores were lowered for a student at Stonewall Elementary after the teacher gave a student a test booklet intended for another student who had the same first name.

Other Fayette staff members will be required to have training because of violations that did not result in lowered scores, including a SCAPA at Bluegrass teacher who was looking at paperwork instead of monitoring a student, a Bryan Station Middle teacher who left maps which contained content for solving problems on the wall during testing in violation of testing rules. and a teacher at Yates Elementary who did not notify the building testing coordinator that a student kept falling asleep and did not complete any part of reading tests. Teachers are supposed to notify the coordinator of any irregularities.

This story was originally published April 1, 2019 at 2:55 PM.