Office of

Inspector General
Chicago Board of Education
Nicholas Schuler, Inspector General

SIGNIFICANT ACTIVITY REPORT

T U E S DAY , S E P T E M B E R 1 2 , 2 0 1 7

AN OIG INVESTIGATION REVEALED EXTENSIVE IMPROPER PRACTICES
AT SCHOOL SERVING DETAINEES IN THE COOK COUNTY JAIL

The Office of Inspector General determined that a CPS high school serving detainees
at the Cook County Jail falsely inflated its enrollment and attendance data and
awarded course credits that were not earned. Through these practices, the school
artificially inflated its School Quality Rating Policy scores. On June 30, 2017, the OIG
issued a summary report (OIG 16-00276) to the Chicago Board of Education
detailing its findings and recommendations in this matter. This marks the fifth
consecutive year the OIG has reported on the falsification of student records in CPS
schools.
Some key takeaways from this investigation are as follows:

o From the 2012–13 school year through the 2015–16 school year, 342
students were kept on the rolls improperly after their release from jail a total
of 352 times. On average, those students were listed falsely as being enrolled
at the school for 42 days following their release from jail. In 54 instances
those students were kept on the rolls for more than 100 days after their
release.

o The school also falsified attendance. During the 2015–16 school year alone,
45 students were reported falsely as being present for the full school day a
total of 351 times after they were already released from the jail. The
attendance of students still in the jail was inflated as well.

o The school frequently awarded students credits when the students had not
received enough classroom instruction to qualify for them. One teacher told
the OIG the school was a “credit mill.”
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 o One student was shot to death a week following his release from jail, and on
the day he was killed the school was still reporting him on the rolls and
present for classes even though the school knew he had been released. After
he died, he was given a full course credit (for a semester’s worth of a class)
even though the principal had learned of his death and knew that he only had
attended classes for a brief period of time prior to his release. The principal
then pressured two of the student’s teachers to issue him more credits, but
the teachers refused because the student had not received enough classroom
instruction. Indeed, the student’s records show that he did not receive
enough classroom instruction to receive a credit for any course, and
according to reports from his teachers his instruction time was even less than
what was eventually reported officially. Notably, although he had attended
three classes for a short period of time, he never attended the course for
which he was given credit.
o The school also employed a questionable blended-class structure whereby
teachers were expected to teach multiple courses simultaneously to
classrooms comprised of a collection of students enrolled in different
courses. For example, students enrolled in chemistry had to share the
teacher’s time with students enrolled in biology and earth science.
Particularly troubling was that teachers reported they often were unaware
which subject each individual student was supposed to be learning.

o The school’s 2016–17 SQRP scores show that its attendance rate was 92.5%
and its credit-attainment rate was 85.4%, both of which were the second
highest of any CPS school in its category. However, the OIG found that those
scores were inflated due to falsified data.

BACKGROUND

The school at issue is an alternative high school located within the Cook County Jail.
It is designed to afford an opportunity for the school-aged detainees in the jail to
continue their high school education while they are detained. When the current
principal took the helm at the school, she implemented changes to maximize the
number of credits that students could potentially earn. One of the changes she
implemented was a block-scheduling system with three, 100-minute class periods in
a day. The long class periods allowed students to finish courses within condensed
terms that were only seven weeks long. Under this system, the principal was able to
fit six terms into a school year. Students could take up to three courses in a term and
complete up to 18 courses in a year.
Within this unique setting, the school, under the principal’s leadership, engaged in
several improper practices discussed below that undermined its academic integrity.
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 IMPROPER POST- RELEASE ENROLLMENTS

The OIG discovered that a former student, who was killed one week after his release
from the Cook County Jail, was still on the school’s rolls and marked as attending
class on the days following his release, including the date of his death. Given that he
had left the school upon his release, he should not have been kept on the rolls and
certainly should not have been marked as attending class. To make matters worse,
after he died, the school issued him a credit for a course he was falsely recorded as
taking after his release from the jail. Although he spent minimal amounts of time in
three classes prior to his release, his records show that he did not receive enough
classroom instruction to qualify for any credits. Moreover, the credit he was given
was for a course he never attended. Worse still, the principal subsequently
pressured two of the student’s teachers to issue him more credits, but the teachers
refused.

After learning about that incident, the OIG conducted a broad review of the school’s
data and discovered that the student discussed above was not an isolated case. To
the contrary, the school consistently kept students enrolled, reported them as
present for class and awarded them credits after they left the jail and could no
longer be in attendance. From the 2012–13 school year through the 2015–16 school
year, the OIG identified 352 enrollments involving 342 students that continued
improperly past the date those students were released from the jail. Those postrelease enrollments resulted in those 342 students being maintained on the rolls for
a total of 14,664 days longer than they should have been. On average, the postrelease enrollments lasted 42 days. In 54 instances they lasted longer than 100 days.
Furthermore, the school issued credits to those students during those false
enrollments 126 times.

The school also falsified attendance on a wide scale during those improper
continuing enrollments. In the 2015–16 school year — the only year in question for
which the OIG was able to obtain the full attendance data set — 45 students were
recorded as present at school for the day 351 times after they had already been
released from the jail. Because those daily-attendance entries reflect that the
students were present for all their classes those days and the students can take up to
three classes in a day, those 45 students were falsely reported as present for as many
as 1,053 classes that year. Thus, on average, each of those students was falsely
reported as being present for as many as 23 classes after leaving the school.
Significantly, in terms of reporting students as earning their credit requirements, the
impact of the falsification was twice as large because the school’s class periods were
100 minutes long — twice the length of a typical CPS class. And given the short
terms at the school, these periods of falsified attendance were the equivalent of
students being marked present, on average, for 20% of a term after they already left
school.
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 OTHER EXAMPLES OF IMPROPER ENROLLMENT , ATTENDANCE AND CREDIT PRACTICES

As stated above, the principal designed the school year to include six short terms to
maximize the number of credits students could receive. As a result, the terms were
so short — often 36 to 38 days — that they provided little margin of error for
students to miss class or enroll late and still receive sufficient minutes of classroom
instruction. The principal scheduled cutoff dates approximately seven days into a
term that were supposed to serve as the last day in which students could enroll and
still receive credit for the course. However, the principal did not always enforce the
cutoff dates, and students regularly received credits without spending enough time
in class. Even if the cutoff dates were followed, they would not ensure that students
received 3,600 minutes of classroom instruction, as required to earn a credit
according to CPS policy (Board Report 04-0128-PO1, § I(A)), because the classes
were 100 minutes long and the terms shortened at the cutoff dates were fewer than
36 days.

Within these curtailed terms, where perfect attendance was critical, students
nevertheless frequently missed class. At times, those students were reported by the
school as present when their teachers had marked them absent. One student
received a credit for a course, even though his teacher only marked him present for
class seven times during the course of a seven-week term. Another student received
a credit for a course after his teacher only marked him present 17 times in a sevenweek term. According to teacher reports, many students received credits without
having received enough classroom instruction due to 10-day stays in solitary
confinement. One teacher reported that a student received a course credit simply for
watching Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a science-documentary series presented by
Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Teachers at the school stated that the principal pressured them to issue credits over
their objections when students had not spent sufficient time in the classroom. The
principal denied pressuring teachers in such circumstances, but the evidence shows
that, at the very least, she encouraged them to issue credits in those instances. Based
on the totality of the evidence, the principal clearly established an environment at
the school where teachers were expected to overcome their concerns about short
enrollments and missed classroom instruction and find a way to distribute credits to
students.

The OIG also found that the school enrolled numerous students beyond their 22nd
birthdays in violation of CPS guidelines requiring that students be disenrolled before
turning 22. Some of those students who were 22 years of age or older also received
credits. Notably, a few students were as old as 27, 28 and 29 at the time they were
enrolled. While those students did not receive credits, they were still enrolled in
violation of CPS guidelines.
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 Additionally, the school often misreported student attendance, in part, because it
relied on information from the Department of Corrections, rather than the teachers’
record of observed attendance in the classroom. Based on the system in place at the
school, each morning the DOC was supposed to inform the principal’s
administration if any of the students refused to attend class that day. If they did not
refuse, the school clerk reported them as present for the entire day. Nevertheless,
students sometimes skipped classes despite initially indicating that they would
attend. In fact, the principal admitted that the school did not always report
attendance accurately because students were reported as present for courses they
missed later in the day so long as they appeared for their first class of the day.
QUESTIONABLE BLENDED - CLASS STRUCTURE

The school also employed a deficient and dishonest course structure in which
students sitting within the same classroom took multiple different courses
categorized within a general discipline. For example, science teachers taught
chemistry, biology and earth science to the same class at the same time, and social
studies teachers taught American history, economics, African-American studies and
world studies to the same class at the same time. Moreover, teachers often did not
know the courses the students were enrolled in until they issued the credits the
students were supposed to receive at the end of the term. Thus, science teachers did
not know which of their students were supposed to be learning chemistry and which
ones were supposed to be learning biology. At times, students received credits for a
subject that they were not taught at all. For example, some students received credits
for learning Spanish after taking a class where the teacher taught only French.
This system is dishonest and sets a horrible example for students. It also harms
students by depriving them of the opportunity to learn the courses in which they
enrolled. Although they were given credits, they were not provided with the
education that those credits were meant to represent.
INFLATED SQRP SCORES

As a result of the improper and dishonest practices discussed above, the principal
artificially inflated the school’s SQRP scores. As the principal told the OIG, she is
evaluated, in part, based on those scores. The SQRP data reflects that the school is
performing very well in comparison to the 47 other high schools that CPS classifies
as “option schools” (the category for schools primarily serving students who reenrolled after dropping out). The school’s 2016–17 SQRP scores, which are based on
2015–16 data, show that its attendance rate was 92.5% and the credit-attainment
rate was 85.4%. Both rates were the second highest of any option school. Its oneyear graduation rate was 97.8%, which was one of the highest rates of any option
school. Accordingly, CPS’s accountability status for the school reflects that it is in
good standing. Based on the practices discussed above, however, the OIG concluded
that the school artificially inflated its scores by falsifying data.
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 The evidence suggests that, despite the favorable graduation, credit-attainment and
attendance rates reported, actual student learning has been minimal. STAR
assessments (standardized tests used by CPS in option schools) show that students
at this school scored worse than any other option-school students in reading and
math growth. The principal acknowledged her students’ poor STAR scores, but
blamed teachers for the low scores. Given that under the principal’s policies, the
students (1) are able to receive credit for classes they only attended for a couple
weeks, and (2) attend blended classes where teachers cover multiple different
courses at once without knowing which courses the students are supposed to be
learning, the OIG concluded that the setting and framework likely prevented
students from receiving an adequate education.
UNDERREPORTING OF DANGEROUS INCIDENTS

Additionally, many teachers complained that the principal discouraged them from
reporting dangerous incidents at the school. According to the teachers, the
concerning incidents at the school include: assaults; chronic classroom
masturbation; students inebriated during class after drinking “hooch” that they
made in their toilets; flooding and water damage caused by students clogging toilets
with mattresses; and threatening conduct by an organized faction of students who
committed sexual assaults in the jail. Although the teachers complained to the OIG
about these ongoing problems, the principal never officially reported more than 10
incidents involving misconduct, injuries or safety concerns to CPS in a year. Most
CPS high schools report far more such incidents in a year. Given the teacher
complaints and the low level of official reporting, the OIG found that the school
almost certainly underreported the number of dangerous incidents and safety
concerns. CPS should be apprised of every incident that risks the safety of CPS
students and teachers, and it also should be aware of disruptive classroom
misconduct that makes educating exceedingly difficult.
OIG RECOMMENDATIONS

Based on the findings discussed above, the OIG recommended that the Board
terminate the principal’s employment. The OIG stresses that it appreciates that this
school has a unique mission and unique challenges. That being said, the school
cannot falsify data and award credits that were not earned. It appears that the
school’s improper and fraudulent practices are a means of distributing as many
credits as possible, with a heavy cost to academic integrity. To help remedy these
problems and prevent such improper practices in the future, the OIG recommended
that the Board implement the following policy changes:
The official attendance reported by the school should be based on teachers’ records
reflecting the students whom teachers actually observed attending their classes. To
adopt this more accurate system of reporting attendance, the school will need to
begin reporting period-attendance codes in addition to daily-attendance codes. The
Page 6 of 7

 school should also begin utilizing the half-day daily-attendance codes to report
attendance accurately. For example, when students are present for only two of the
three periods in the day, they should be reported as absent for half the day. (See CPS
Guidelines for Attendance Improvement and Truancy Reduction, p. 154.)

The length of the school’s terms should be extended beyond 40 days to ensure that
students receive enough classroom instruction in the event they miss a few days of
class. To accommodate longer terms, the school will probably need to decrease the
total number of terms in a year to four or five.

The school should abandon its course structure of simultaneously teaching multiple
different subjects within the same general discipline. Instead, it should adopt the
traditional course structure employed in other CPS schools.
Finally, the school’s administration should begin encouraging staff to report
dangerous incidents and safety concerns, and all such incidents should be officially
reported to CPS.

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