"Mean," however, is not the same thing as "strict." Now in her 25th year of teaching, Guzman likes being known as a disciplinarian, as a teacher who doles out big doses of homework. On the third day of school this year, Guzman sent work sheets home with her charges. "Hey," she says, "they're lucky I waited three days."
The 50-year-old Guzman has taught for the past 15 years in the same classroom in Winkelman, a small copper-mining town east of Phoenix. A native of nearby Kearny, she knows most of her pupils' families and taught many of their brothers and sisters, not to mention some of their parents. Guzman says she likes teaching second graders because their "brains are like little sponges."
Her classroom is of the standard variety: cinderblock walls, an American flag and alphabet charts that define the second grade, the year that pupils trade stubby pencils and printed letters for skinny pencils with built-in erasers and cursive writing. Taped on the wall above where Guzman sits during reading is a motivational poster depicting Smurf characters building a pyramid, with the caption: "It isn't easy staying on top."
The teacher would agree. For two years, state education officials have accused Gloria Guzman of cheating.
Thanks to the recent movie Stand and Deliver, it's a familiar story: A Hispanic teacher is accused of cheating after students excel on a national test. In the movie, calculus teacher Jaime Escalante takes a dramatic victory stroll down an empty hallway after his barrio students cram overnight and pass the test again. Cheating allegations are dropped.
In the Guzman case, it hasn't been quite that simple. Allegations of cheating, based on the circumstantial evidence of unusually high test scores, stretched into the longest investigation in the history of the state Department of Education, according to Ray Borane, deputy state superintendent.
Nobody won this war. Gloria Guzman wound up being censured by state education officials. The episode triggered the bitter ouster of Amelia Kame, a school-board member whose complaints started the investigation.
The dispute spilled out of Guzman's little classroom. Shouting matches erupted at school-board and town-council meetings. Tears were shed in Guzman's defense at state hearings. Children were grilled by investigators.
The dispute split families and neighbors in the tightly knit mining towns of Winkelman and Hayden. Amelia Kame had raised hackles when she questioned the quality of the district's "homegrown" teachers--people who had grown up in the towns and returned to spend the rest of their lives teaching the children of their friends and families. IN 1989, GLORIA Guzman's pupils ranked in the 85th and 94th percentiles nationally in reading and language on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and in the 79th percentile in math.
Amelia Kame didn't believe it.
Kame, a mother of four, is a former Catholic nun who says she once taught deaf students. At Hayden-Winkelman School District board meetings, Kame used to ask: "How come we're not sending kids to Harvard? How come we're not sending kids to Yale?"
Kame says she was "turning over rocks" when she drew charts for board meetings and challenged district officials about how they were spending money on their 530 students.
Other school officials paint it differently. "She just had an ax to grind against everybody and everything," says counselor Phil Masters, the district's testing coordinator. "She was kind of a reformer that didn't have a vision for what she wanted to do."
That spring of 1989, David Jones, whose wife taught in the district, pointed out to Kame what he perceived as discrepancies in the district's Iowa test scores. Jones, who was studying the school's third graders to test a math computer program he wanted to market, says some of the pupils seemed confused by simple concepts. Pupils who had been in Guzman's classroom the previous year were performing "at a very low level," Jones says. "It looked like they missed the second grade."
At the same time, records showed that Guzman's pupils far outclassed the district's other second-grade class, taught by beginning teacher Lydia Martinez. Those kids scored at the 31st, 37th and 25th percentiles in reading, language and math. (Overall, the state's second graders scored at the 49th percentile in reading, the 57th in language and the 59th in math.)
Kame complained at a spring board meeting about the apparent discrepancies and called state officials on May 12, 1989.
Based on those complaints, district superintendent Lalo Serrano questioned Guzman and school principal Jack Rostal. On May 16, Serrano ruled that "no discrepancies occurred." (Both Serrano and Rostal say they consider Guzman an outstanding teacher. "She's one of the best teachers in the district--in the state, perhaps," Serrano tells New Times.)
Kame wasn't satisfied with that four-day probe, so she complained again to state education officials.
The state Department of Education's testing coordinator, Steve Stephens, drove to Hayden and Winkelman and set up interviews with two of Guzman's pupils, Bianca Amado and Gilbert Ochoa. (Both were selected by Principal Rostal.)
According to Stephens' report, Bianca told him she recognized her test booklet because she was the only pupil to have answered a particular question correctly. Stephens asked her how she knew that, and she said Mrs. Guzman read the question, listed possible answers, let them mark their answers and then asked them how many pupils got the correct answer. The boy, Gilbert, agreed with Bianca's recollection.
Did Guzman and her pupils cheat? In a June 1989 memo, Stephens identified four signs of suspicion:
* The pupils' test booklets contained few erasure marks and were surprisingly neat. Most second graders erase often during testing, wrote Stephens: "We have never seen a complete group of answer documents that were completed so neatly."
* Guzman's pupils scored much higher than the district's other second-grade class. In 1989, her class reached an average composite score in reading, language and math of 88, while the second-grade class right next door scored only 28.
* The pupils scored far higher on the Iowa test in second grade than they did a year later as third graders.
* Guzman's pupils were exceptional spellers. The national average for the spelling portion of the test is 18.35 correct answers, but Guzman's kids had an average of 24 items correct. Only two Arizona second-grade classes earned higher marks in spelling.
"As a result of the analysis of the test data," Stephens wrote, "it was our opinion that some sort of intervention occurred either during testing or after testing was completed."
In July 1989, Kame and another school-board member, Richard R. Copetillo, signed a formal complaint with the state seeking revocation of Guzman's teaching certificate.
In January 1990, state investigators returned to Winkelman Elementary for another set of interviews.
Bianca Amado and Gilbert Ochoa again were questioned, as were six others selected from the pool of pupils who had been in Guzman's class the year before. This time, Principal Rostal notified parents and invited them to sit in on the interviews. Rostal restated the questions posed by state officials, because he thought the children didn't understand what they were being asked. Upon further questioning, Bianca said her teacher had given the class answers only during the test's practice questions. Gilbert again agreed.
The case dragged along. That summer, a state screening panel determined that there wasn't enough evidence supporting Kame's complaint to hold a hearing, so it dismissed the matter. But the state Department of Education continued its own investigation, and the Professional Practices Advisory Committee heard the case in October 1990.
The hearing revealed a rift among experts in the field of testing. Thomas Haladyna, an educational psychology professor at Arizona State University, says Guzman's test scores speak volumes. MDRV"Those scores are so goofy looking," he tells New Times. "We've got a lot of good teachers in this state. Nobody has a record like that. Something funny happened. You don't have to be a test expert to know that."
Mary Lee Smith, another education professor at ASU, disagrees with Haladyna. "Those test scores?" Smith says. "They are, of course, unusual. They are statistically rare. They could be produced by a variety of things other than her cheating."
Smith is referring to the common technique of "teaching to the test," in which teachers drill their students specifically on the types of questions they would be asked on exams such as the Iowa test. Gloria Guzman has acknowledged that she has used that technique in her classes.
Haladyna contends that the scores from Guzman's pupils indicate that more than just good drills took place. He says most students maintain their scores or increase slightly as they progress to the next grade. When students lose ground dramatically, test experts label the pattern "spiking." Guzman's classes show a dramatic pattern of spiking, he says. For example, the composite scores of Guzman's 1988 class reached the 85th percentile; the same students only scored at the 51st percentile the next year when they were in third grade.
But Smith says the state's testing report shows other classes that display similar spiking patterns between the second and third grade. She attributes that to the way the test is written, asking rote memory questions of second graders and comprehension questions of third graders. In addition, third graders are asked to transfer responses to a computer answer sheet for the first time, a difficult test-taking skill.
After a hearing that included testimony from dueling test experts Haladyna and Smith, the committee recommended that no action be taken against Guzman. But the Board of Education voted to continue the investigation, against the recommendation of its own advisory committee. Borane, the state deputy superintendent, labels that decision "unprecedented." He says board members were curious about the high test scores.
The board was scheduled to hear the case in May 1991. That's when Guzman agreed to settle the case. She still denied the allegations, but she accepted a letter of reprimand in her file, admitting that she didn't follow instructions while administering the Iowa test, that she advised pupils not to erase. The letter, dated July 23, 1991, reads: "You are hereby reprimanded for failure to follow the test directions exactly when you administered the Iowa Test of Basic Skills to your second-grade class in April 1989."
Ray Borane, the deputy superintendent, says a letter of reprimand is the mildest form of discipline that the state measures out.
AMELIA KAME, WHO had been on the school board only a year, took a drubbing from her neighbors in Hayden and Winkelman.
In mid 1989, long before the state finished its probe of Guzman, a group of people organized a recall campaign against Kame. "The air was thick," recalls Hayden resident Della Soliz. "You knew something was going on."
Some people in the twin towns say the accusations against Guzman were racially motivated. "I feel that if they would have had more Anglos in that classroom, the state wouldn't have questioned the scores," says Virgie Lease, who owns a beauty parlor in Hayden.
Guzman herself raised that specter, but state officials, including Superintendent of Public Instruction C. Diane Bishop, deny the investigation was racially motivated.
To others, Kame's complaint against Guzman seemed to be an indictment of all the district's teachers--especially the "homegrown" ones. That's what Lydia Martinez told state officials. Martinez, a physical-education graduate who is working on her elementary-education certificate, is the MDRVsmall school district's "other" second-grade teacher--she acknowledges that she's known that way.
Martinez doesn't appear to resent Guzman's popularity. In fact, in sometimes tearful testimony to state officials, Martinez stoutlMDRVy defended Guzman.
Martinez testified at the state's hearing in October 1990 that she herself felt the wrath of Kame when the accusation against Guzman first was made in 1MDRV989.
"You were afraid to come to work the next day," Martinez told the hearing board, "because Mrs. Kame not only attacked Mrs. Guzman. She attacked all our teaching staff there.
"I was born and raised in Hayden. I went off, went to college, came back to teach in my hometown. And [Kame] made several references that we were homegrown material. We weren't capable of teaching like someone brought in from Tucson or Phoenix."
Kame's own brother-in-law, Jake Kame Jr., says he thinks Guzman does "a great job." A teacher of junior high math and high school welding, Jake Kame Jr. says his sister-in-law "was trying to say that the teaching staff was not doing their job." He wound up going door to door in the recall campaign against his sister-in-law.
"A lot of our staff are homegrown kids," he says, "and this is our greatest advantage--that we know the families, we know the kids that have problems at home. Our teaching staff is involved in community affairs. We don't come in at 8 and leave at 4."
Jake Kame Sr. says the family suffered because of the controversy. He and his wife's 50th wedding anniversary passed without a party because of the rift. "We were speaking to each other," he says, "but things weren't like they used to be." Jake Sr. says he didn't campaign against his daughter-in-law, but he did vote against her.
In the fall of 1989, voters kicked Amelia Kame out of office by a vote of 362-190. The dispute spread into municipal politics as well. "It split up the community a lot," says Terry Cruz, a supporter of Kame's who says she wound up losing her seat on the Hayden Town Council over the school issue.
Cruz pulled her children from the district and sent them to school in Kearny, another mining town in the area. Her support for Kame led to a recall campaign. In March 1991, Cruz was ousted from the town council. She says she still feels the shock waves.
"What it cost me was losing my friends," says Cruz. "A lot of people to this day don't talk to me. It stays deep."
"I THINK THE DEFENSE is saying she's the Jaime Escalante of Arizona," says test expert Thomas Haladyna of Gloria Guzman. "Not even Jaime Escalante got scores like that."
And neither did Gloria Guzman's class the next year.
Guzman's 1990 class earned a composite average score of 23 on the Iowa test, in contrast to the previous year's class, which scored an 88. She offers a reason why her pupils' test scores plummeted: She simply wasn't as good a teacher as usual that year.
Guzman didn't organize her usual corps of parent volunteers after she was accused of cheating. "Everything was in such an uproar around here," she says, "that I didn't want to bring them into a situation that would be uncomfortable for them." Without her parent helpers, her pupils had less individual attention, she says.
The teacher also seemed gun shy about the Iowa test. She invited the state to send a monitor into her classroom during the test. And because she wanted to go to a professional conference in her other role as a board member for Central Arizona College, she gave the test in two and a half long days, instead of taking a week to administer it.
Guzman later acknowledged to state officials that the uproar affected her teaching. "In all my years of teaching, I had never been so devastated," she testified during the fall 1990 hearing. " . . . I had always tried to do the best job for every child that came into my classroom. And to think that I was being punished or trying to be, you know, just thrown out of the teaching profession because I was doing a job with children that were put in my responsibility, I mean that was more than I could almost accept."
Even now that the matter is officially closed, Gloria Guzman knows there are some people who still believe she might have cheated. She says she liked the ending of the movie Stand and Deliver better than her own real-life version.
For the first time in two years, Guzman has invited her parent volunteers back in her classroom. "My kids are benefiting from a great teacher," she says. "That sounds boastful, but I feel like I'm a great teacher. If you don't feel that yourself, nobody will."
The dispute spilled out of Guzman's little classroom. Amelia Kame used to ask: "How come we're not sending kids to Harvard? How come we're not sending kids to Yale?"
Records showed that Guzman's pupils far outclassed the district's other second-grade class.
"It was our opinion that some sort of intervention occurred either during testing or after testing was completed."
"Something funny happened. You don't have to be a test expert to know that."
"I feel that if they would had have more Anglos in that classroom, the state wouldn't have questioned the scores."
"What it cost me was losing my friends," says Terry Cruz. "A lot of people to this day don't talk to me. It stays deep."
"I think the defense is saying she's the Jaime Escalante of Arizona," says a test expert. "Not even Jaime Escalante got scores like that."
"In all my years of teaching, I had never been so devastated.
