“I want to stress that this does NOT mean that all of these schools cheated,” Kathleen Mathers, executive director of Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, wrote in an e-mail.

Her office conducted an investigation of fifth-grade math scores on the state’s Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests. The investigation – the office’s first investigation into cheating – focused on only the six most extreme improvements, those improvements of 3.5 standard deviations or more.

Ms. Mathers, however, told the State Board of Education last week that about 20 schools would have been scrutinized had 2 standard deviations, the more common statistical approach, been used as the threshold.

“Summer school is unusual in that considerably smaller numbers of kids are tested, which makes it easier to post bigger score gains than what we’d see with larger groups of students,” Ms. Mathers said in her e-mail to The Chronicle. “I don’t want readers to get the impression that the schools that were not investigated cheated simply because they posted impressive gains.”

Improvement of just one deviation would be significant and a great success, said Gordon Eisenman, dean of the College of Education at Augusta State University.

“Two is quite a bit as well, but three is almost out of the realm of possibility, especially in that time frame,” Dr. Eisenman said.

For one student to improve by three deviations is statistically similar to winning the lottery, he said. For an entire class to make such an improvement is like someone winning the lottery multiple times.

A school making a two-deviation improvement is so significant that it’s worth looking into, he said.

“I think every educator in America would like to know what they are doing so it can be duplicated,” Dr. Eisenman said.

The Governor’s Office of Student Achievement contracted with the Georgia Center for Assessment at the University of Georgia to further investigate the six most suspicious schools by analyzing the number of erasure marks and how often wrong answers were changed to right answers.

Through that process, insufficient evidence was found to continue investigations into Fair Street Elementary School in Gainesville and Adamsville Elementary in Atlanta. But such strong evidence was found that the State Board of Education tossed out the test scores of the other four schools last week. Those schools were Deerwood Academy of Atlanta Public Schools, Atherton Elementary of DeKalb County, Parklane Elementary of Fulton County and Burroughs-Molette Elementary of Glynn County.

Walter Jones of Morris News Service contributed to this story.

SUSPICIOUS IMPROVEMENT

The following schools scored improvements of 2 standard deviations or more last year on math portion of the fifth-grade Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests:

School system - School

DeKalb County - Atherton Elementary

Glynn County - Burroughs Molette Elementary

Gainesville - Fair Street Elementary

Atlanta - Adamsville Elementary

Fulton County - Parklane Elementary

Atlanta - Deerwood Academy

Jefferson County - Louisville Academy

Oconee County - Oconee County Elementary

Brantley County - Waynesville Elementary

Savannah-Chatham County - Gould Elementary

Savannah-Chatham County - Ellis Elementary

Savannah-Chatham County - Georgetown Elementary

Dougherty County Lamar - Reese School of the Arts

Atlanta - Slater Elementary

Lowndes County - Clyattville Elementary

Lowndes County - Hahira Elementary

Oconee County Colham - Ferry Elementary

Floyd County - Alto Park Elementary

Source: Governor’s Office of Student Achievement