The city investigator charged with rooting out corruption in public schools fielded 880 allegations of academic fraud in the last three years, but probed less than a dozen, The Post has learned.
The Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools told The Post the agency probed only 11 complaints such as test-tampering and grade-fixing between Dec. 6, 2016 and Nov. 21, 2019 — or 1 percent of the total.
SCI substantiated one of the 11 cases it looked into — a Bronx teacher giving Regents exam questions to a student who shared them on Facebook.
The SCI, which is independent of the DOE, referred the vast majority of allegations — 823 — to the city Department of Education to investigate itself, an SCI spokeswoman told The Post.
“It’s the fox guarding the henhouse,” said Councilman Robert Holden, who has called on the feds to conduct a criminal probe of the DOE
What happened to those complaints is unknown. Commissioner Anastasia Coleman would not say if she followed up on whether DOE investigated or substantiated the cases. The DOE refused to answer any questions about them.
The lack of action and accountability alarms City Councilman Mark Treyger, chairman of the education committee.
He called on the SCI to do its job, or explain why not.
“If SCI is in receipt of hundreds of complaints related to test integrity and grade fixing, that, to me, is crystal clear evidence that they must conduct a systemic review of test integrity practices across the school system,” Treyger told The Post.
“This is the very reason why SCI was created. You do not punt that responsibility, you embrace that responsibility,” he said. The City Council can give funding for more staffing if needed, he added.
The late Edward Stancik, who led the SCI for 12 years after its founding in 1990, took an aggressive and systematic approach. His investigators looked for red flags, such as schools that showed unexplained hikes in performance, and detected dishonesty.
Stancik found “widespread” test-tampering, and an education bureaucracy making little effort to fight it.
“Not only did the Board of Education fail to vigorously pursue reported irregularities, it ignored information pointing to suspicious patterns which could have uncovered cheating,” Stancik wrote in his 1999 report, “Cheating the Children: Educator Misconduct on Standardized Tests.”
After blowing the whistle, Stancik issued another report in 2000 with more cases of test proctors giving students answers, encouraging kids to ‘check’ wrong answers, and changing wrong responses after the tests were collected.
Last week, Stancik’s then-deputy Robert Brenner, now chief operating and legal officer at K2 Intelligence, a corporate investigations firm, did not second-guess Coleman, but said a deeper look is critical.
“Where there is evidence of systemic misconduct and cheating, trained investigators really ought to get involved and consider where there should be referrals to law enforcement,” Brenner said.
Test and grade fraud can pump up school performance data and graduation rates, giving DOE and city officials more to boast about. In a celebratory press conference last week, Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Richard Carranza announced that 83 percent of grads had enrolled in college, a vocational course, the military or a “public service” program like AmeriCorps — up 3 percentage points from last year.
Last January, Carranza trumpeted a “record-high” graduation rate of nearly 76 percent.
Councilman Holden, a Queens Democrat, was contacted over the summer by teachers from Maspeth High School who say they quit after administrators strong-armed them to pass students even if the kids didn’t show up or do the work, help them cheat on Regents exams, and change grades. The school boasts a near-perfect graduation rate.
Several Maspeth teachers told The Post they met with SCI investigators, who said the agency doesn’t investigate academic misconduct. The teachers’ evidence was turned over to the DOE’s own Office of Special Investigations. The Queens DA is overseeing the case.
Coleman, who took became the Special Commissioner in February 2018, declined to comment on the cases she dumped on the DOE.
SCI spokeswoman Regina Gluzmanova said allegations of academic misconduct make up 3 percent of the complaints the agency gets.
The DOE told The Post to file a Freedom of Information Law request for any investigatory findings. The last time The Post filed a FOIL request for such records, it took two years and a lawsuit against the DOE to pry them loose. Cases obtained last year, under a settlement, showed dozens of teachers, principals and other staffers engaged in cheating from 2013 to 2015.
David Bloomfield, a Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center education professor, blasted the stonewalling by both agencies.
“If we are to believe DOE takes this seriously, they need to be transparent about the almost 1,000 misconduct allegations during the last three years,” Bloomfield said. “This game of investigatory hot potato instills little confidence in their commitment to academic integrity.”
“We take any allegation of misconduct seriously, and when SCI refers an allegation to us, we investigate it in a thorough and timely manner,” DOE spokeswoman Danielle Filson said.
The Special Commissioner of Investigation (SCI) for city schools has probed only 1 percent of the allegations of academic fraud it has received in the last three years.*
