COLUMBUS, Ohio – Two former Columbus school principals who were terminated for falsifying student test data are blaming the district’s top brass for their misdeeds in their fight to keep their jobs.     

Tiffany Chavers, left, Pamela Diggs, right.

“Really the problem here is that the district has made a bad decision in not standing up and saying look we did this, to these principals, and we should not be coming after them,” Renny Tyson, attorney for former Linden McKinley STEM Academy principal Tiffany Chavers, told Fox.

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“It’s pretty clear there was policy and practice by the district for years,” he said.

Chavers, as well as former Marion-Franklin High School principal Pamela Diggs, are appealing the district’s decision to fire them in the wake of a two-year student data rigging investigation. The scandal has already resulted in a criminal conviction for the district’s former data czar, Stephen B. Tankovich, as well as the resignations of other administrators, the Columbus Dispatch reports.

Chavers will spend this week in a civil service employment hearing that’s expected to run until at least Friday and involve the testimony of as many as 40 witnesses. Diggs is expected to have a similar hearing this fall.

According to a report by the Dispatch Tuesday:

In a hearing in which she’s trying to keep her job, former Linden-McKinley STEM Academy Principal Tiffany L. Chavers agreed that she told her secretary to change student data in her school. But in hours-long testimony yesterday, Chavers said she never questioned why some of her superiors told her to withdraw kids who had never left.

She also placed blame on what she described as her savvy school secretary who had been “well trained” to manipulate student data, sometimes by entering fictitious transfers to other schools. The kids had actually never transferred, or left at all.

“I don’t question the policy or the practice. I do it,” Chavers testified.

District attorneys, however, pointed out that Linden McKinley showed that in the 2010-11 school year nearly 70 students were fraudulently withdrawn from the school’s data rolls, more than any other school in the district.

Chavers testified that she was following orders from Tankovich, who allegedly insisted she unenroll students with at least 10 consecutive absences, then re-enroll them. The break in enrollment allowed the district to withhold their student test scores, so they didn’t count toward the school’s report card, the Dispatch reports.

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Chavers also testified that her immediate supervisor, Michael Dodds, pressured her into doing the same for students who had failed state standardized tests, according to the news site.

“In 2011, near the deadline to report student data to the state to calculate report cards, Dodds handed Chavers spreadsheets that included test scores and circles around the names of some students,” the Dispatch reports.

“Chavers explained that she never checked whether those kids had been absent for 10 days straight and never tried to understand why she needed to break their enrollment. She just ordered it done.”

Chavers’ attorneys worked to highlight the fact that Linden-McKinley was only one of 95 district schools that participated in the cheating scandal, and suggested that it is the district’s top administrators’ job to submit accurate student data to the state.

Regardless of whose job it is to do what, all educators have a responsibility to the public and their students to work in their best interests, and submitting false student data – either to school administrators or the state – is the opposite of that.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that falsifying government records is a no-no, and the city’s parents and taxpayers should insist that these unscrupulous school officials are held accountable for their manipulative ways.