Former USC Education-School Dean Pushed Flawed Rankings Data, Law-Firm Report Finds - The Wall Street Journal
The former dean of the University of Southern California’s education school directed administrators to omit information from its U.S. News & World Report rankings submission to boost the school’s placement at least as far back as 2013, according to an investigation released Friday by the university.
Last month USC said it was pulling the Rossier School of Education from consideration in the U.S. News & World Report graduate-school rankings, citing data errors going back at least five years. It asked the law firm Jones Day to investigate.
Jones Day said in its report it found the school had intentionally misreported information to U.S. News & World Report about the selectivity of its doctoral programs.
At the direction of the former dean—Karen Symms Gallagher, who is referred to in the report as Dean 1—the school only included information on its Ph.D. program, which has a lower acceptance rate than its Ed.D. programs. The school did so despite explicit instructions in the questionnaire to include both Ph.D. and Ed.D. programs beginning in 2018, the report said.
Dr. Gallagher stepped down in 2020 after 20 years as dean and is now a professor at Rossier. An attorney representing her declined to comment on the report or its findings, but said the dean “has always been and will always be dedicated to the students who commit to USC and Rossier.”
The report said that “the practice of omitting EdD data from selectivity metrics was no secret.” A vice president for admissions, members of the education school’s executive council and senior faculty also were aware. “Not all of these individuals approved of the practice,” according to the report.
Dr. Gallagher verified the accuracy of the school’s 2020 survey submission, and knew the school would get a higher ranking by omitting Ed.D. program data including average grade-point averages, acceptance rates and standardized test scores, according to the report.
Jones Day said it interviewed 27 people and reviewed more than 11,000 emails and documents in its investigation.
The probe turned up what Jones Day referred to as “irregularities” in how the education school calculated and reported research expenditures, and it identified other possible misreporting of faculty metrics, online program enrollment, graduates’ job-placement rates and more. The law firm said those findings warrant further examination.
Rossier’s current dean, Pedro A. Noguera, took the helm in July 2020.
The report said he authorized the continued omissions for the 2021 survey, after being told the school historically didn’t include Ed.D. data, and verified the accuracy of the submission. Ahead of the 2022 survey, Dr. Noguera was briefed on the exclusion of certain selectivity figures, and alerted Provost Charles F. Zukoski, according to the report. Before receiving guidance on how to proceed, the report said, Dr. Noguera told staff to continue omitting Ed.D. data in the 2022 submission; he updated that year’s response to include Ed.D. data after being instructed to do so by the provost.
An initial university investigation found other possible errors in the rankings submission, at which point Dr. Noguera withdrew the school from the rankings.
Dr. Noguera apologized in a letter to the education school community Friday for continuing the data omission during his first year. He said the rankings misrepresentation “has blemished our reputation” and it was his responsibility to ensure the school operated ethically.
“The most shocking thing to me was that this wasn’t done in secret,” Dr. Noguera said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “Even though the way they answered the questions seemed strange or questionable, the fact that the people around me said, ‘Well this is the way we’ve done it,’ I thought, ‘Well, this must be legitimate.’ I should have sought verification immediately.”
Dr. Zukoski said in a letter to Rossier students and staff that he and President Carol Folt support keeping Dr. Noguera as dean. “Dean Noguera and I will work to implement new oversight functions to ensure that the school always meets the highest standards of excellence and integrity,” he wrote.
Appeared in the April 30, 2022, print edition as 'USC Ex-Dean Cited on Ranking Data'.
source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-usc-education-school-dean-pushed-flawed-rankings-data-law-firm-report-finds-11651268455
Your content is great. However, if any of the content contained herein violates any rights of yours, including those of copyright, please contact us immediately by e-mail at media[@]kissrpr.com.