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Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2007 > May > 16 > Entry
City Day sponsor urges firing
City Day Superintendent Roseda Goff
The news I reported today about a move by charter school sponsor Education Resource Consultants of Ohio (ERCO) to aggressively push for the firing of City Day Community School Superintendent Roseda Goff actually is a bigger deal than it might seem.
The move may be unprecedented for a charter school sponsor in Ohio.
ERCO attorney Phyllis Brown told me a sponsor all but ordering one of its charter schools to make a personnel move, as ERCO effectively has done by threatening to take disciplinary action against the school if it doesn’t, is exceedingly rare. ERCO has never done it before, she said, and she is not aware of another sponsor in the state who has.
The action was prompted in part by, amazingly, another incident of testing irregularities this year that occurred while ERCO staff was administering the Ohio Achievement Test — a move the was supposed to ensure protocols were followed to the letter this year.
The City Day governing board is an independent body that has sole discretion to manage the school as it sees fit. But it can’t operate without a sponsor. It appears to have two choices — follow ERCO’s lead or find another sponsor. The board is supposed to meet Thursday, although it canceled its monthly meeting in April.
For a recap of our City Day coverage follow these links:
Here is the original City Day story from early February.
Here are City Day’s practice test questions compared with real state exam questions.
Here’s a follow up story with data that shows how remarkable the school’s test performance change was.
Here’s when the state said it would investigate City Day.
Here’s the story from when City Day was placed on probation by ERCO.
Here’s another blog post about the lessons in test security that can be drawn from this case.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, City Day Investigation, Testing
Comments
By David
May 16, 2007 10:14 PM | Link to this
It’s amazing that people accept having corporate sponsors for local schools as okay. It’s amazing that people still feel the charter schools are doing okay, even that they are doing better than the public schools in general, not just in comparison to DPS. As far as the questions being on the website it was my understanding that questions released would not be reused. Has that changed. They learned from the proficiency tests earlier. As for drastic performance improvements just happening by change at City Day, humbug. The State Department of Education worked over a few teachers early in proficiency testing, but I haven’t heard they actually withdrew teaching certification in recent years; the day they remove certification for a superintendent’s license would be a big surprise to me. Teachers, yes; upper echelon folk, no.By lou
May 16, 2007 3:55 PM | Link to this
Irst, I don’t know if there was cheating or not. I have not seen all the evidence and you can take questions off the ODE web site for the OGT. Some of these questions are still used on the test, but I don’t know about the achievement test questions. If she was involved, knew about, or authorized any deception in test security she should be fires, as well as lose all teaching credentials. We all want our kids to pass, but cheating to get them to pass is wrong and not fair to the other students who work so hard to pass. There are a lot of ways to help students pass the test. You can talk about the working of the questions, how to write a good answer, even how to get a point or 2 without really knwoing the answer. But you do not take it for them.