Blue Ribbon School Suspected Of Rigging Superior Test Scores Stratfield Consistently Topped Other Schools In Connecticut

When Bill and Julie Beck decided to move from Brooklyn to the Connecticut suburbs last year, their goal was to find the best school for their three children. They zeroed in on the Stratfield School, an elementary school hailed as one of the nation’s finest.

Now it turns out that Stratfield’s stellar reputation - built largely on its superior exam scores - may be the result of test-tampering by the staff.

“It’s very, very unsettling,” said Julie Beck, a former banker who is now a full-time mom. “It bothers me because it takes people’s attention and energy away from the important things, and that’s educating the kids.”

It was Stratfield’s excellence that proved the undoing of its reputation: The school district, hoping to duplicate Stratfield’s success, compared the scores on a standardized test given in January to third-graders to those of the two nearest-ranking schools.

Noticing a high number of erasures on the Stratfield tests, the district notified the test’s publisher. On close inspection, the publisher found a high number of answers - 9 percent - had been erased and changed on the exams taken by both third- and fifth-graders, Superintendent Carol Harrington said this week.

That rate was three to five times higher than at the other schools. And of the Stratfield answers that were changed, 89 percent were changed from the wrong answer to the correct answer.

The test’s publisher, Riverside Publishing Co., a division of Houghton Mifflin Co., ran a follow-up sample test in March under strict supervision. It did not reveal scores but said an analysis showed no difference this time in erasures between the three schools, and it found “clearly and conclusively” that tampering occurred.

All the pupils will be retested later this month.

The school district is investigating. No one has been accused of any wrongdoing, and many parents, in fact, think the allegations are unfounded.

“I just hope they resolve it quickly,” said Beck, a financial consultant to an investment house. “It is better to get it out in the open.”

Stratfield has consistently outscored other schools in the state on the reading and mathematics portion of Connecticut’s own skills exams.

The school, serving a section of this 53,000-resident bedroom community outside New York City, has also won numerous academic awards, including two blue ribbons from the U.S. Education Department. In 1993, Redbook magazine listed Stratfield as one of the best elementary schools in the nation.

Historically, there has been fierce competition to get into the school. Many parents moved across town to get their kids into Stratfield. And those who didn’t live within the district applied for out-of-district placements, limited to about 40 and snapped up every year.