Ex-KC school leader had big motivation to falsify data, says former board member
A former Kansas City school superintendent had a strong motivation to falsify student attendance numbers, according to the district’s former school board president.
As The Star reported Wednesday, Kansas City Public Schools officials revealed that while Steve Green was superintendent from 2013 to 2015, employees had inflated attendance numbers in an attempt to score better on the state’s Annual Performance Review and regain state accreditation.
On Wednesday, Melissa Robinson, who served on the board during that time and is now a city councilwoman, said she was not surprised to learn the numbers were falsified during Green’s tenure.
Under Green’s contract, bonuses of up to $100,000 were tied to district performance points. Robinson said she believed that was the rationale for inflating attendance numbers.
The district stopped the practice of bonus incentives when Superintendent Mark Bedell was hired in 2016, Robinson said.
“We felt like there needed to be a set of standards, but we did not feel like we should pay you for APR points,” Robinson said.
Green told The Star on Wednesday that he had no idea employees were falsifying numbers.
“I don’t know why someone would do that,” he said. When he learned of the news from The Star this week, he was “caught off guard because there was no encouragement from me for anyone to misrepresent data, and there was no financial incentive to do that.”
Green’s contract, obtained by The Star, does show he stood to gain a bonus of up to $100,000 for any year the district scored high enough on the state performance review. On the low end, Green would be paid an additional $5,000 every year the district’s attendance increased by 7%.
Green recoiled at the idea that he might cheat to get bonuses.
“To imply that because I had incentives in my contract that I would tell someone, ‘Hey I will give you some money if you fake the data,’ well that just never happened and it never would happen,” Green said Thursday. “I am deeply sorry that those things happened under my watch. But everything I did, I did with integrity, transparency and honesty. I would never cheat to win. Incentives don’t carry over to cheating.”
Besides, he said, during his tenure, “we made some progress but never enough to get any of those (incentives).”
Green left the district in 2015 to take a superintendent position outside Atlanta. Last week, the Dekalb County School District in Georgia severed ties with Green. He has been under fire from the Georgia Department of Education, which, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is investigating him for failing to report to the state potential ethics violations by teachers.
Green said he did nothing wrong in Kansas City or Atlanta.
Kansas City school officials learned about the falsified data from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in January. A former KCPS employee had reported to the state that district employees, including several senior-level officials, were inflating the figures.
Bedell said this week that as soon as the district learned about the tampering, it immediately launched an internal investigation. Then in May, after a review of employee emails and other information implicating several current employees, the district hired a law firm to do a separate investigation.
That investigation found that seven employees had changed attendance records in the district’s student information system. Three no longer work for the district. The other four have been put on paid administrative leave and “are being separated from employment with the school district,” said a district statement issued Wednesday.
KCPS told the state about the investigation’s findings earlier this month. It plans to report them “to the appropriate prosecutors’ offices and stands ready to assist in that regard,” the statement said.
Green said the first he heard of the matter was when The Star called him about it this week. “Had I known I would have taken action,” he said. He said he had never been contacted by the district or the state.
Robinson said that while she was on the Kansas City school board, she was “100% certain” the board never noticed a jump in attendance numbers dramatic enough to call for alarm.
No discrepancies in attendance numbers have been found in data sent to the state since Bedell came onboard.
“The findings within the report revealed an unhealthy culture within parts of the school district’s staff several years ago,” Bedell said. “We have since worked tirelessly to build a new culture within the district.”
Does the district owe money?
The state education department said Wednesday it is working with KCPS officials “to correct the falsified attendance data and collect the money owed back to the state and the Kansas City area charter schools.”
Missouri districts are paid for every day that a child is in school. So the inflation of attendance numbers, Bedell said, raised the amount of state money the district received.
District officials know the money will have to be paid back. State officials said they expected to release a calculation of what the district owes by the end of this week.
Some of the undeserved money could be owed to charter schools because of the way state money is divided, said Doug Thaman, executive director of the Missouri Charter Public School Association. Thaman said he feels certain the charters will get any money due once the data tampering issue is fully cleared up.
Some charter schools in the state have also had issues with inflating attendance. In 2015, a state audit caught a now closed Kansas City charter school, Hope Academy, inflating attendance numbers. Hope had collected an excess of $4.3 million in state funds. Thaman said that mishap was the result of mismanagement.
Last month, a St. Louis charter school leader admitted submitting fake attendance sheets to the state for several years to fraudulently pull in more than $1.4 million to his charter.
While state officials say these situations cannot be compared because each occurred for different reasons, Thaman suspects that what might be at play “is the emphasis the state has put on student attendance as a metric for how good a district or charter school is performing.”
“It could be that that pressure from the state that puts undue importance on attendance and pushes districts to falsely inflate their numbers,” Thaman said. “There has been a lot of pressure, and maybe that needs to be addressed.”
Indeed, across the state, districts have tied enticements to attendance, offering students everything from electronics, to money and even brand new cars to get them to come to school every day.
But Thaman also said that seeing schools falsifying data makes him wonder if perhaps “the state needs to come up with a better system of oversight or a more frequent monitoring.”
The path to accreditation
Attendance is one of the criteria, along with such things as graduation rates, career readiness and academic performance, the state uses to measure how well a district is performing. Those performance scores determine whether a district is given full accreditation.
Currently, KCPS is provisionally accredited. To receive full accreditation status, KCPS must meet state requirements two consecutive years.
The state standard on attendance requires 90% of students to be in school 90% of the time. But a district can get some points if it reaches 80%. The attendance records that were changed during Green’s tenure showed the district scoring over 80%, when in fact attendance fell just short of that mark.
With attendance data allegedly altered by the previous administration, the district in 2016 received what was then its highest performance score ever, putting it in full accreditation range. But the following year the district failed to score at accreditation level.
Bedell said this week that he hasn’t hit 80% on attendance since he became superintendent.
Kansas City deals with a large population of poor students who, because of family circumstances, move frequently during the school year. The district has one of the highest student mobility rates in the state, which Bedell said makes hitting the 90/90 attendance mark a huge challenge.
But poor attendance numbers deter parents from enrolling their children in the district, said Carl Evans, a former school board member. “If kids don’t want to go to those schools, why would I send my child?” he said. The district has also struggled with declining enrollment as it faces competition from charter schools.
But Bedell remains hopeful. “While these ramifications might adversely affect our attendance data in the short-term,” he said, “ remain steadfast and determined to continue our positive course we began implementing when I arrived in 2016.”
This story was originally published November 21, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
