Beverly Hall

Make no mistake, the state's top education official said: The cases against 53 Philadelphia public schools and three city charter schools - 56 in all - now under investigation for possible cheating on state achievement tests are very strong.

"The data is pretty compelling," Education Secretary Ronald Tomalis said of the Philadelphia schools and dozens more statewide that have come under scrutiny for irregularities in the tests, known as PSSAs. "These don't seem to be random acts that are just a student erasing more than the norm."

The Philadelphia School District declined to release the schools under investigation for possible improprieties on the 2009, 2010, and 2011 PSSAs, but The Inquirer has obtained a copy of the list.

The 53 Philadelphia district schools being investigated - one in five of all district schools - come from every part of the city. They span every grade level. Some even bear the Philadelphia School District's designation for its highest-achieving schools - "vanguards," which receive flexibility in curriculum and budgeting.

Eleven of the 25 Vanguard schools - 44 percent - are on the list, including Cayuga Elementary School in Hunting Park, where numerous staff members, teachers, and even a student have told The Inquirer they witnessed widespread cheating on state exams over several years. The principal has said she did nothing wrong.

In some schools, the evidence of cheating "is not isolated or limited exposure," Tomalis said in an Inquirer interview, adding that the state and the district must take "more aggressive action."

With a new round of PSSAs set to begin Monday, extraordinary security measures have been imposed on city schools, including requiring teachers administering the tests to sign statements acknowledging that criminal penalties may be sought if wrongdoing is found.

State monitors will be inside many city schools suspected of cheating during the PSSAs. Citywide, teachers have also been barred from administering their own students' exams.

Of the 56 schools under investigation, 11 "Tier One" schools are subject to the most scrutiny, with investigations handled by the Pennsylvania Inspector General's Office.

In the Tier One schools, evidence of cheating indicates the manipulation was not isolated to individual grades or subjects. They are: Cayuga, Emlen, Forrest, and Locke Elementary Schools; Clemente and Roosevelt Middle Schools; and Bok, Communications Tech, Frankford, Martin Luther King, and Northeast High Schools

Author: Haim
Subject: The Icon, The Scandal And the Fall From Grace

Mainly, the article below is a non-descript puff-piece quickly and mercifully forgotten. But, I was struck by one passage I thought to share with the forum.

In one part of the article, Beverly Hall responds to a characterization that surprises her,

>"This thing of me being autocratic and removed from the
>schools and whatever whatever is just crazy to me."

and she further explains,

>She pointed to a June retreat with principals.
>
>"The principals who were so intimidated and couldn't
>reach me gave me three standing ovations," she said. "I
>always felt that the principals respected me but also
>had a real connection to me."

That standing ovations are her proof of the respect she got from her subordinates made my head spin. Every autocrat, every tyrant, every megalomaniac with power gets standing ovations. Sadam Hussein got standing ovations. The "Dear Leader" of North Korea, Kim Jong Il, gets standing ovations and day-long parades of adoration.

Of course, I am in no position to judge the relationship between Beverly Hall and her subordinates, but standing ovations? That is a bad sign.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/us/08hall.html?_r=1&hp
September 7, 2011
The Icon, The Scandal And the Fall From Grace
By KIM SEVERSON

ATLANTA — Sitting in the polished offices of a lawyer who specializes in corporate criminal defense, Beverly L. Hall looked tired.

It is not easy being the pariah of a major American city.

Dr. Hall, once named as the nation’s school superintendent of the year and a veteran of 40 years in tough urban districts including New York and Newark, now stands marked by the biggest standardized test cheating scandal in the country’s history.

As Atlanta tries to sort fact from fiction and get back to the business of educating the 50,000 children in its public schools, Dr. Hall is left to defend her reputation, prepare for any possible legal action and consider whether her philosophy of education and style of leadership brought her to what is the lowest point in her career.

“I will survive this,” said Dr. Hall, 65, in her first public interview since a scathing 800-page report by state investigators outlined a pervasive pattern of cheating at 44 schools and involving 178 educators.

“I feel badly for myself, but I feel just as badly for all the people in this district who are working hard,” she said. “Now everything they read and hear is negative. That is taking a tremendous toll on me.”

From 1999 to June, Dr. Hall was the forceful, erudite and data-driven superintendent of a once-failing urban school district that became a model of improvement.

During her reign, scholarship money delivered to Atlanta students jumped to $129 million from $9 million. Graduation rates, while still not stellar, rose to 66 percent, from 39 percent. Seventy-seven schools were either built or renovated, at a cost of about $1 billion.

Dr. Hall maintains that she never knowingly allowed cheating and does not condone it, but acknowledges that people under her did.

Still, the scope of the report — which she and others argue was overreaching and contained inaccuracies — shocks her.

“I can’t accept that there is a culture of cheating,” she said. “What these 178 are accused of is horrific, but we have over 3,000 teachers.”

The devastating report came in July. Two longtime government lawyers who were asked by the governor to investigate charges that answers had been changed on state standardized tests found that students had sometimes simply been given correct answers. In other cases, they said, staff members erased wrong ones and filled in the right ones. One school held weekend pizza parties to fix tests.

No criminal charges have been filed, but the district is scrambling to respond to two sweeping grand jury subpoenas. It will turn over at least 20 hard drives of information containing communication among school lawyers, board members and staff members, along with scanned records dating back to the 1990s, said Keith Bromery, spokesman for the district.

The report asserted that Dr. Hall, while not tied directly to cheating or the direct target of a subpoena, had to know about it or should have. She tried to contain damaging information, it said, and did not do enough to investigate allegations, especially after 2005 when “clear and significant” warnings were raised.

And she was, investigators and people who worked closely with her said, more interested in adoration than achievement. Some said they believed they would be ostracized if they did not deliver the results Dr. Hall wanted.

Dr. Hall says she tried to create a culture that demanded achievement, based on her core belief that every child — no matter his or her life circumstances — can learn enough to meet certain standards.

But even her supporters say that belief was so unbending that people would rather erase wrong scores — and reap the financial and workplace perks associated with improved test scores — than tell her children could not pass.

Others say she failed to consider the immense social problems facing some Atlanta schoolchildren.

“The problem came when every child was expected to reach an arbitrary standard that didn’t include a consideration of where they are coming from,” said State Representative Kathy Ashe, a Democrat.

All of which leaves Dr. Hall baffled.

“The Beverly Hall as they characterize me is foreign to me,” said the Jamaican-born graduate of Fordham University’s doctoral program, who began teaching in some of New York’s toughest classrooms while Atlanta was still battling to desegregate schools. “This thing of me being autocratic and removed from the schools and whatever whatever is just crazy to me.”

Although she acknowledges that she should have given more attention to testing security procedures and to evidence that cheating might be widespread, she bristles at the suggestion that children should not be held to high standards or that she was intimidating and isolated.

She pointed to a June retreat with principals.

“The principals who were so intimidated and couldn’t reach me gave me three standing ovations,” she said. “I always felt that the principals respected me but also had a real connection to me.”

She remains personally stung by how she is being portrayed by the local news media, especially The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which began investigating potential cheating in 2008 and has continued to dig deep into Dr. Hall’s performance.

She was taken to task for her car and driver, an Atlanta police officer on the school district payroll who made nearly $100,000 a year, including overtime. (“You can’t get around this system and do what’s asked of you if you are thinking about parking,” Dr. Hall said.)

Her bonuses were also questioned. In addition to a $273,156 annual salary, she made $581,860.82 in bonuses since she began in 1999. They stopped in 2009, Mr. Bromery said.

Investigators are also examining the role that bonuses to staff members whose schools performed well on standardized tests might have played into the cheating — something Dr. Hall dismisses.

“The money was not a lot,” she said. “It’s hard for me to believe for $1,000 or $750 you would cheat.”

As she examines what she might do next, Dr. Hall is contending with the sudden absence of public support in a city that once considered her a savior.

Shirley Franklin, the former mayor of Atlanta, gave her a warning when things began bubbling up six months ago.

“Get prepared,” she said, “because the silence will be deadly.”

Dr. Hall says, “I just didn’t understand that at the time.”

Many in the Atlanta business community who once were her champions have distanced themselves, as predicted, or joined the critics. Some have been more harsh.

“We’ve had long series of unbelievably poor leaders, and we really shouldn’t be too surprised with what we got,” said James B. Miller Jr., chairman of Fidelity Bank in Atlanta. “Anybody who starts acting like they are the emperor is in trouble.”

Still, many here maintain that the reforms are real and worry that the district’s progress will be overshadowed.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the GE Foundation, which together have pumped more than $50 million into Atlanta schools, will keep financing them, people from both organizations said.

In a coming study based on results of recent National Assessment of Educational Progress scores, Atlanta schools show significant and consistent improvement, said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents 65 large urban school districts and plans to release its study this fall.

The real legacy of the cheating scandal will probably be that educators and legislators re-examine the emphasis placed on standardized tests, Mr. Casserly said.

And it certainly will make urban administrators reconsider the cost of pushing teachers and students — especially students facing difficult social circumstances — to achieve high test scores.

“History may ultimately be the judge of how that was balanced and ultimately implemented,” Mr. Casserly said. “But I can’t fault her underlying motive to expect more of kids that society had low expectations of.”

It’s one thing to say there was widespread cheating on standardized tests in Atlanta public schools, as the newly released results of a state investigation showed. It’s another thing to actually read the volunimous report. The details are shocking.

For those who haven’t been paying attention, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R) on Tuesday released the results of a 10-month state investigation he had ordered into suspicions of cheating on state standardized Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (or CRCT) in the Atlanta School System.

The results confirmed the suspicions and then some: The report said that cheating on 2009 standardized tests in Atlanta Public Schools was widespread and didn’t start that year, “significant and clear” warnings were ignored by top administrators, an environment of fear and intimidation ruled the system and thousands of students and resulted primarily from “pressure to meet targets” in the data-driven system.

The superintendent at the time, Beverly Hall, had been hailed for years for driving up standardized test scores. She just left the post, her reputation shattered. Hall has denied knowing about any cheating despite repeated assertions in the report by investigator that she and other administrator must have known.

Investigators went school by school, interviewing teachers, principals, top administrators and others to get to the bottom of the scandal, and then detailed what they learned.

I found a copy of the report on this Web site of CBS Atlanta affiliate. Here are some of the revelations, taken directly from the report, which give you an idea of how the cheating was done:

“Of the 55 flagged classrooms at Connally, 47 (85 percent of the total) had standard deviations that exceeded five, and 32 classrooms exceeded ten standard deviations. At five standard deviations, the probablity that the number of wrong-to-right erasures occurred without adult intervention, or cheating, is no better than one in a million. At ten standard deviations, the probability is no better than one in a trillion.”

“During the 2009 CRCT, Jocelyn Mack was a first grade teacher. Her reading and language arts classes were flagged for high wrong-to-right erasures with standard deviations of six and five. Principal [Mable] Johnson asked Mack if she wanted her tests early. Mack received her tests by 7:00 a.m., when they normally were not distributed until 8:15 a.m. Mack also was told to erase stray marks, but was not comfortable doing so. Tony Allen [testing coordinator] erased stray marks for Mack and other teachers.

“Mack was surprised that two of her students passed the 2009 CRCT. One student sat uner a table, then randomly filled in answers and still passed. There was a student Mack wanted to keep in first grade at the request of the student’s parent. Johnson said the student had to be promoted to second grade because the student passed the CRCT. Several students passed first grade reading but are now struggling to read in the third grade. Everyone at the school was afraid of Johnson.”

During Johnson’s first interview with investigators, she answered questions and “denied any knowledge of cheating on the CRCT test.”

“During her second interview, Principal Johnson invoked her Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer all the questions asked.”

“District Leadership knew Principal [Christopher] Waller was cheating.... Dr. Hall also should have known Waller was cheating at Parks because once he became principal, the school immediately made dramatic gains on the CRCT and other tests. For example, between the 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years, eighth-graders meeting or exceeding standards in reading increased by 31 percentage points, from 50 percent to 81 percent.... In math, the percentage of eighth-graders who met or exceeded the standards increased from 24 percent to 86 percent.”

Teacher “Latasha Smiley admits to cheating in 2009 [at Parks Middle School]. Francesa Thompson-Flagle, a PEC teacher, gave Smiley a copy of the 2009 CRCT. The copy was difficult to read. Later that day, Gregory Reid told Smiley that Damany Lewis had a ‘gift’ for her. Smiley found a manila envelope containing a legible copy of the tests on her desk. During the test, Smiley improperly gave students the correct answers.

“One afternoon, Lewis told Smiley to come with him. They went to [Testing Coordinator Alfred] Kiel’s office and Smiley erased answers with the other teachers in the room. After the testing period was complete, Lewis came to Smiley’s classroom and told her to come with him. They went together to Kiel’s office where Lewis took pictures of the room so that he could place everything back in its original place after they changed the tests. Smiley erased answers with the other teachers in the room.

“Principal Waller told Smiley to let him know if anyone contacted her regarding this investigation.”

“Damany Lewis was the first teacher to assist Principal Waller in cheating. He admitted to cheating in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. In 2006, Waller asked Lewis, ‘Do you think you could get into something undetected?’ Lewis was not sure what Waller meant, but said yes. A few days later, Lewis was summoned to the main office where he found Principal Waller and [Success for All Facilitator] Sandra Ward with the CRCT booklets. Principal Waller looked at Lewis and then immediately looked at the test booklets. Lewis then knew what Principal Waller was asking him to ‘get into undetected’ — the test booklets. Lewis found a key in his desk drawer that opened the room where the tests were kept. Lewis used a razor blade to open the plastic wrapping around the test booklets, copied the test for each grade, and resealed the wrapping using a lighter to melt the plastic. Once Lewis copied the booklets, he placed a copy of the social studies test in [teacher] Damien Northern’s car and a copy of the reading and language arts test in [teacher] Dorothea Wilson’s car.’

Teacher “Damien Northern confessed to cheating in 2008 and 2009 and possibly in 2007 as well.”

Teacher “Dorothea Wilson confessed to cheating in 2008 and 2009.... Principal Waller walked by her classroom often and said, ‘I need the numbers, I need the numbers.’”

Dr. Alfred Kiel [the testing coordinator] “would not allow cheating so Principal Waller orchestrated Kiel’s absence from the school building so the cheating could take place. On one occasion in 2009, Principal Waller took Kiel out for a ‘retirement lunch.’ In another year, Principal Waller scheduled an impromptu after-school dance so that the teachers could stay late in the afternoon and cheat without raising suspicion. Kiel once noticed that things in his office had been disturbed while he was out and became angry. After that occasion, teacher Damany Lewis took pictures of Kiel’s office before he altered the tests so that everything would be put back in exactly the same place so as not to raise Kiel’s suspicions. No one implicated Kiel except Principal Waller.”

Success for All Facilitator Sandra Ward “refused to answer questions after invoking her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself.”

Teacher Francesca Thompson-Flagle “denied knowledge of cheating or that she gave a copy of the test to anyone.”

“We conclude that Testing Coordinator Donald Bullock and Principal Rogers directed and orchestrated a schoolwide scheme to erase and change student answer sheets. Mr. Bullock provided teachers access to student answer documents by allowing them to pick up tests early, keep them throughout the day, or by returning tests to certain teachers each day after the testing period ended. Bullock instructed teachers to change answers to make sure their students made their targets.”

--
“Principal Rogers denied participating in, or having knowledge of, cheating on the 2009 CRCT or any other year. She denied ever making a statement in f aculty meeting that ‘if Johnny can’t read he’d better be able to read on test day.’

Teacher “Bahji Varner’s first year at Peyton Forest was the 2009-2010 school year. Varner was not at the school for the 2009 CRCT, but witnessed cheating in 2010.

“Varner saw teachers cheat on the APS district-wide benchmark tests. She proctored during this test and saw teachers point to certain questions and then identify the correct answer. After completing, the tests were scanned and scored at the school. [Teacher] Enolar Callands would watch the tests as they were scored. If the scores were not high enough, the teachers would review the tests with the students. Then, the students with low scores were sent to Callands’ or [teacher] Bess Mae Paschal’s classroom to retake the test.

“On the Fifth Grade Writing Test, Paschal instructed students to write drafts, and bring them to her to review and revise. Only after her revisions were the students allowed to write the essay on the official paper.”

“On her first day at East Lake in 2009, Principal [Gwendoyn] Benton told [teacher] Raqketa Williams, ‘At East Lake we do whatever we have to do even if it means breaking the rules,’ pointed to the prior year’s CRCT scores and said, ‘See the scores? East Lake makes its targets.’ ”

“Principal Benton instructed [teacher] Stephanie Walls to create a seating charter for her students to be used during the 2010 Fifth Grade Writing Test. Principal Benton instructed Morresia Withers to pass out the writing test to [teacher Stephanie’ Walls’ students in a particular order. Walls explained that by passing the tests out in the order Principal Benton wanted, the lower performing students would receive easier writing questions. Walls and Withers discussed Principal Benton’s instruction and decided to ignore it. They passed the tests out randomly.

Teacher Morresia Withers said “that Principal Benton and [Testing Coordinator Fran] Standifer instructed Withers and Walls to seat the students in a particular order for the Fifth Grade Writing Test.”

“Teacher Stephanie Walls said ‘Principal Benton instructed Stephanie Walls to create a seating chart for her students to be used during the 2010 Fifth Grade Writing Test.’”

“Testing Coordinator Fran Standifer described Principal Benton as overbearing... Fran Standifer denies any knowledge of cheating.”

“Principal Benton denied any knowledge of cheating on the CRCT at East Lake.”

“Three teachers confessed to cheating. Two teachers pointed to answers, re-read questions, or used other cues to ensure their students chose correct answers. One teacher confessed to erasing and changing answers in the principal’s conference room where teachers were gathered by grade levels to erase stray marks.”

Teacher Ashley “Daniel said that there were several reasons teachers would cheat. Principal Paden linked test scores to evaluations, and told Daniel that she needed better scores to get a better evaluation. Scores were posted at faculty meetings and teachers were singled out in front of their colleagues. Principal Paden threatened teachers in a meeting, and told them if she was going to be on a PDP [a professional development plan developed and implemented to correct perceived deficiencies in performance of teachers and administrators] then they should be on one also. Principal Paden made threatening statements, like ‘The door swings both ways,’ and ‘Walmart is hiring.’ ”

“Principal Paden admitted that she had been placed on a PDP more than once . .. for not meeting targets... She denied pressuring teachers to meet targets, stating that the pressure was just their ‘perception.’ ”

Teacher Arlette “Crump admits to ‘bumping’ students’ desks when she noticed a wrong answer on the CRCT and instructing the student to ‘look at that again.’ ”

Teacher Yolanda McQueen reported that “Principal [Marcus] Stallworth told the teachers that they should ‘use whatever means necessary’ to ensure students passed the CRCT.”

“Douglas Rozier taught at Fain for fifteen years. When Stallworth was principal, Principal Stallworth told teachers during faculty or grade-level meetings to use voice inflection to assist the students on the CRCT. He instructed teachers to ‘make it work’ and that when monitoring the room, teachers should direct students to the correct answers. Principal Stallworth also said teachers should give students additional time on the test....”

Principal Marcus Stallworth “denied cheating on the CRCT or encouraging teachers to cheat.”

Two brief thoughts come to mind. First, this is surely only the tip of the ice berg. Second, as grisly as education statistics are, the reality is much worse.

Haim
Shovel ready? What shovel ready?
- -------------------------

>They represent a tiny fraction of the more than 1,250
>accusations of test tampering or grade changing that the
>special commissioner has received since Mayor Michael R.
>Bloomberg took control of the city schools...
>
>But as cheating scandals have engulfed school districts
>in Atlanta and Washington, as well as in New Jersey and
>Pennsylvania...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/nyregion/how-cheating-cases-at-new-york-schools-played-out.html?hpw

October 17, 2011
In Cheating Cases, Teachers Who Took Risks or Flouted Rules
By SHARON OTTERMAN

A charter school teacher warned her third graders that a standardized test question was ?tricky,? and they all changed their answers. A high school coach in Brooklyn called a student into the hallway and slipped her a completed answer sheet in a newspaper. In the Bronx, a principal convened Finish Your Lab Days, where biology students ended up copying answers for work they never did.

These are among the 14 cases of cheating by educators substantiated by New York City?s special commissioner of investigation for schools since 2002.

They represent a tiny fraction of the more than 1,250 accusations of test tampering or grade changing that the special commissioner has received since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of the city schools ? most are handled by the Education Department, which has declined to provide a full accounting of its investigations.

But as cheating scandals have engulfed school districts in Atlanta and Washington, as well as in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, a review of these substantiated cases in New York shows that cheating schemes can be mundane or audacious, with motivations that include inflating the statistics used to evaluate a school and helping a favorite student become eligible to graduate.

They portray stressed educators who take inappropriate risks ? and brash ones who appear to believe they can flout rules with impunity.

Three of the cases were announced as they were completed by the special investigator, Richard J. Condon, including one that led to the ouster of Ruth Ralston, an assistant principal at the High School for Contemporary Arts in the Bronx, who investigators found had erased hundreds of student answers on the June 2008 algebra Regents exam. Documents related to the other cases were provided to The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Law. Of the 23 educators named in the investigations, about a third have resigned or have been fired, sometimes after an administrative hearing that is required for those with tenure.

Jooyeon Kim, a third-grade teacher at the well-known Harlem Children?s Zone/Promise Academy I, for example, was dismissed in 2009 due to two words: ?Alligator Park.?

Ms. Kim?s students had been asked to correct the punctuation in a paragraph on the state?s English test in January 2009 that included this sentence: ?We saw alligators at an alligator park.? City testing officials noticed that each of her 22 students had made an identical change: first capitalizing both the A and the P in ?Alligator Park? (incorrect), then erasing it.

They began an investigation, and Ms. Kim, who could not be reached for comment for this article, ultimately acknowledged that she had warned the children, ?You?re on the last question, be careful,? saying it was ?tricky.? Eight of the children confirmed her account, though investigators did not find evidence that she had actually given them the answer.

Teachers at Promise Academy, run by the billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller and Geoffrey Canada, are not unionized, so it was easier to fire Ms. Kim than it would have been at a traditional school. ?Although we had no hard evidence,? explained Marty Lipp, a spokesman, ?the soft evidence led us to make a decision to let her go, because we can?t and won?t tolerate cheating on the tests.?

By contrast, only one of eight educators who investigators said had participated in a ?herculean and dishonest? effort at the High School for Youth and Community Development in Brooklyn to give students answers before the 2005 biology Regents exam was fired. The others received reprimands.

?Students were not merely permitted but were openly encouraged to cheat,? investigators wrote of the case, in which students were given answer keys to copy instead of completing required lab experiments in the days and hours before the exam. Several teachers said the principal, Marie Prendergast, had known about the copying, but investigators found conclusive evidence only that she had failed to properly supervise her staff. She received a counseling memo.

?It?s something my staff did,? Ms. Prendergast said in an interview. ?I have a different organization, that was an unfortunate incident, but that is not my school now.?

She added, ?Why are you going to crucify me for something that I was called green and stupid for, but I was exonerated??

Another case led to the retirement of a gym teacher at A. Philip Randolph High School in Manhattan, who was also a track coach, mentoring generations of students who included two Olympic runners. To help one of her athletes graduate in 2007, investigators found that the teacher, Phyllis Anderson, devised a scheme to substitute a failing essay in the student?s global history Regents exam.

The girl, who had written an off-topic essay that had earned her a zero, was told to write another one at home, according to the case file. She met a teacher from another school on a Bronx street corner, who passed her the new essay in an envelope. A custodian, investigators said, later slipped it into the test.

Ms. Anderson, who now coaches at a private school, said she ?was falsely accused of something I could not have done,? adding: ?I?m a physical educator. I don?t have access to exams.? Still, she agreed to retire ? and to drop a discrimination suit she had filed against the city and her principal ? so that the administrative hearing would be dismissed. The other people involved were briefly suspended or reprimanded.

In a separate case, Robert Sambone, a teacher and coach, and James Chiarchiaro, an academic coach paid by the National Football Foundation, wanted to help three volleyball players graduate from South Shore High School in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn.

The men secretly filled out bubble sheets for the January 2007 biology Regents, according to investigators, answering 24 of the 30 questions correctly. As the girls took the exams, the men passed them the answer sheets, either tucked into a newspaper or, in Mr. Chiarchiaro?s case, with a hug in a hallway caught on video, investigators said.

Mr. Sambone was terminated after an administrative hearing. He declined to comment. Mr. Chiarchiaro, who also lost his job, did not return several phone calls and e-mails.

Some cases seemed more like sloppiness than cheating. Kourtney Boyd, for example, failed to record properly 2005 English Regents exam scores of numerous students when she was an assistant principal at Cobble Hill High School; she received a letter of reprimand, and is now principal of a Brooklyn middle school.

And in 2009, Kalliopi Hatzivasilis, an assistant principal at the High School of International Business and Finance in Upper Manhattan, acknowledged to investigators that she had changed class grades for 10 to 15 students from failing to passing after they passed their Regents exams, saying she had misunderstood the city?s grading policy. ?I was just lazy,? she told investigators, when asked why she did not correct the error after becoming aware of it.

Ms. Hatzivasilis, who was demoted and now teaches at the High School for Global Citizenship in Brooklyn, declined to comment.

Fatai Okunola, a teacher at Middle School 219 in the Bronx, received a 90-day suspension without pay after investigators said he had written answers on the back of paper rulers for the eighth-grade math exam, and left the classroom while proctoring a test; answers were found on paper on the floor. During his administrative hearing, many of the charges were dismissed.

?I denied everything because I didn?t do any of those things,? he said. ?I didn?t have money to hire an outside lawyer to fight, so I just leave everything to God.?

Two other cases resulting in fines or reprimands involved a teacher who used his early access to the state exam to tutor a student on Long Island, and a paraprofessional in Staten Island who exchanged an e-mail address ? and a regular classroom science test ? with a student. But in an illustration of the difficulty of proving cheating, investigators confirmed tampering on the 2009 geometry Regents at the Academy for Social Action in Manhattan, but could not determine who had been involved.

Mr. Condon, the special commissioner of investigation, generally leaves the question of punishment to the Education Department. But in six cases his office unequivocally recommended termination: Rachel Henderson, the principal of P.S. 811, a special education school in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, whom investigators found had directed members of her staff to fabricate student portfolios; her assistant principal, Rosa Lien; Ms. Anderson, the track coach at A. Philip Randolph; the coaches who helped the Brooklyn volleyball players; and Ms. Ralston. All either resigned, retired or were fired.

Ernest Logan, president of the city?s Council of Supervisors and Administrators, said he believed that the process was working.

?What I?m starting to hear more and more is that we are looking to see if New York City is not on top of this,? he said, ?and I?m telling you, I think that we are probably better at it than anywhere in the country.?

Beverly Hall

LIAR