After a thorough investigation, I find myself not guilty!

Down in Texas the state education agency has cleared nearly 600 schools of cheating on the TAKS because....they filled out a survey. From the Dallas Morning News:

Nearly 600 Texas public schools have been cleared of suspicions of cheating, state officials said Thursday, leaving 105 other schools still under investigation.

Texas Education Agency officials cited the clearing of 592 schools as evidence of the integrity of the state's influential testing system.

.................

The investigation stems from a report produced in May by Caveon, a test-security firm. It analyzed schools' scores on the 2005 Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and tried to determine which schools had unusual patterns that could suggest cheating.

The report flagged 700 schools for a variety of reasons, including scores that jumped too quickly, answer sheets with too many erasures and students whose answer patterns suggested they might have copied off a classmate.

.................

After some deliberation, state officials decided this fall to investigate the schools. But the schools received different levels of scrutiny. Sixty-five received on-site visits by teams from the agency, in which investigators interviewed educators and other staff about test security.

Instead, the remaining 635 schools were asked to complete a questionnaire asking about a variety of test-security matters. Topics included school policies on cellphone use, the training provided to test monitors, security measures taken to protect test documents, and the straightforward "Did anything out of the ordinary occur that has not previously been reported?"

This seems rather akin to asking the WEA if they're doing a good job with the union dues issue, or asking the EFF how they feel about the schools.