State Education Department bigs clearly knew for seven years that many teachers routinely boosted their failing students’ Regents scores — yet did nothing to curb the rampant fraud, The Post has learned.
The illicit deception likely led thousands of kids across New York state to get their high-school diplomas without actually passing all of the five Regents exams required to graduate.
While state officials had repeatedly insisted over the years that “scrubbing” scores was not a pervasive problem, internal departmental communications obtained by The Post show otherwise.
According to a December 2004 bombshell e-mail from former Deputy Commissioner James Kadamus to then-state education chief Richard Mills, officials appear to have known precisely what was behind the then-suspiciously high number of students scoring exactly the passing mark of 55.
“Obviously, teachers look for points to get kids to pass,” Kadamus wrote in the e-mail, which also was sent to current Deputy Commissioner of Assessment David Abrams and other top officials.
The matter-of-fact analysis by Kadamus does not include any sense of alarm or mention a need to address the issue. Kadamus declined to comment.
But, incredibly, Mills, who retired in 2009, denied to The Post that the e-mail indicated anything illicit.
Mills, reached at his upstate Clifton Park home, insisted that the absence of context made it hard to draw any conclusions from the e-mail.
“I cannot recall hearing that there was a systematic way of giving children credit that they didn’t deserve,” he told The Post.
Mills said the e-mail simply provides data and analysis on whether to introduce an appeals process for kids who fail a Regents exam by several points.
The e-mail points out that on the math Regents, 4,058 students scored a 55 while 3,369 scored in the 50-to-54 range.
But Kadamus appears to be clear as to why so many kids scored right at 55.
“There is already a de-facto compensatory scoring system being employed in the schools because of the high numbers scoring 55,” he wrote, adding the comment about the teachers’ involvement.
Mills — asked a question about “scrubbing’’ — even claimed not to know the common term for teachers’ point-rigging practices, which were first written about in The Post in January 2004.
“We never used that term, so I really don’t know what you mean,’’ he said.
When cases of scrubbing popped up over the years, state officials repeatedly insisted that the cheating was isolated and never called for a remedy.
Even when city Department of Education investigators substantiated the scrubbing of Regents exams at Cobble Hill HS in Brooklyn — just seven months after the Kadamus e-mail — then-state Education Department spokesman Alan Ray said, “We are certain that this kind of cheating is not widespread.”
Ray had been among the officials copied on the e-mail.
State rules have helped facilitate the fraud by requiring teachers to rescore math and science exams that fall just below the passing mark — supposedly for accuracy’s sake — and by allowing them to grade the tests of kids in their own schools.
The guidelines opened the door for teachers to manufacture additional points — often at the direction of their supervisors — to get more students to pass.
The higher graduation rates would be in everyone’s interest: students, teachers, schools and city and state education officials.
They make everyone look good — and save the state and city money by pushing kids along rather than keeping them behind for remedial work.
It wasn’t until the Wall Street Journal this year proved that scrubbing was epidemic that state educators finally, and without public announcement, barred teachers from re-scoring Regents tests.
State officials have since become much more vocal about combating cheating but have yet to take action on what critics see as the obvious conflict of interest of having teachers initially score their own students’ or school’s Regents exams.
The State Board of Regents is set to vote to alter that practice as early as this month.
Additional reporting by Erik Kriss