Texas Plans New Test-Security Measures as Cheating Allegations Swirl

Amid renewed allegations of cheating on statewide standardized tests in Texas, the Texas Education Agency is pressing ahead with plans for tighter testing security, while stressing that it uses a high threshold in making charges against schools or school districts that their students cheated on the state’s tests.

Debbie Graves Ratcliffe, the communications director for the agency, said that a Dallas Morning News series published last week was correct in saying that the state has cleared many school districts of possible charges of cheating, despite a state investigation that found highly irregular results on tests given during the 2004-05 school year school year. ( "Texas Launches Cheating Probe," Jan. 11, 2005.)

The state agency has exonerated those districts after hiring Caveon, a Midvale, Utah-based firm, in 2005 to investigate those with irregular test results. But the Dallas newspaper hired George Wesolowsky, a professor at McMaster University in Canada who studies cheating on tests, to work with the paper in analyzing test scores in...