Education

The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Frank Kummer and Melanie Burney expose the findings of a New Jersey Department of Education report on irregular test scores in the region. While avoiding the use of the word cheating, the report found that “adult interference” was the likely culprit of unusually high test scores in the Camden area. The Department…

Jeff Hansen and Marie Leech of The Birmingham News report on black flight from Birmingham’s public schools and its impact on suburban school districts. In the past five years, Birmingham schools have lost 20 percent of their students. Nine of every 10 of those 7,300 children who left the city were black.

Kent Fischer, Tawnell D. Hobbs and Molly Motley of the Dallas Morning News analyzed local school district credit card transactions to find that “only a fraction of purchase receipts are scrutinized, and thousands of purchases run afoul of DISD policy and state purchasing laws.” Among the $20 million spent each year by district employees with…

Ruth Teichroeb of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer studied university job records and found that Terry Tafoya, known across North America as a pre-eminent American Indian psychologist and a sought-after speaker for continuing education at schools such as Harvard University, “has scripted his own life, embellishing his academic credentials and past.” The tribe he claims to be…