from the NY Times:

“…People trust Ms. Mezzacappa to get it right. After the panel discussion, an executive for a testing security company suggested she ask state officials if they had done a study flagging schools with suspicious numbers of erasures on state tests. In May, the state responded, sending Ms. Mezzacappa a file so large she needed technical assistance to download it.

For two months, that 2009 study sat unexamined. (Being one-third of the reporting staff, Ms. Mezzacappa doesn’t have a ton of free time.) Then last month, The Notebook’s editor, Paul Socolar, entered into a partnership with the local public radio station, WHYY, which enabled him to hire a fourth reporter, Benjamin Herold.

Mr. Herold’s first day was July 6. On July 8 about 9:30 a.m., Ms. Mezzacappa suggested he look at the enormous state file, and by 11:30 that night The Notebook had posted its biggest scoop. A total of 89 schools – 28 in Philadelphia – had been flagged by the state for, among other things, an improbably high number of erasures, as well as questionable gains on reading and math tests.

Mr. Socolar, a data fanatic, calculated that at some of these schools, the odds that the erasures had happened randomly were one in 100 trillion, and Ms. Mezzacappa verified those numbers with Andrew Porter, the dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

And that is how Pennsylvania became the latest in a growing list of states facing a cheating scandal…”

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