Federal complaint details cheating allegations at D.C. public school "The falsification of DC CAS test scores is systemic, and the veracity of the testing process and DC CAS scores has been questioned by other DCPS principals," the complaint says, referring to the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests, which measure student performance and were used as benchmarks for teacher and administrator bonuses. D.C. schools officials have maintained that widespread cheating did not occur in the city despite unusually high numbers of wrong-to-right erasures on student answer sheets. Officials cite investigations by Caveon, a company that the school system retained to investigate those erasure rates, and by the D.C. inspector general's office, both of which discovered only minor test-security problems. D.C. schools officials did not respond to a request for comment Monday night. Cothorne's attorney also declined to comment. The inspector general investigated Noyes for 17 months before concluding in August that no widespread cheating had occurred there. The inspector general interviewed dozens of teachers and parents to reach that conclusion, but Cothorne says she was not among them. On Monday, the U.S. Education Department's office of the inspector general said it, too, completed an investigation and found no evidence of widespread cheating. The Education Department's investigators looked into allegations that possible cheating meant city officials might have misrepresented the truth about test scores in their claims for payments from the Race to the Top program and other federal programs. Those programs provided millions of dollars in aid to D.C. schools. Working with the D.C. inspector general, federal investigators found one instance of cheating that may have affected federal funding. That incident had already been reported by the D.C. inspector general, and the individual involved was fired. "Our investigation was unable to substantiate the allegations that false claims were made to [the Education Department] for payment of funds, and the U.S. Department of Justice declined to intervene," the federal inspector general said in a statement Monday. The Education Department's probe was spurred by Cothorne's lawsuit, officials said. Cothorne now could pursue the case as a civil action against the city. Cothorne was seeking a percentage of whatever funds the government would have recovered at trial, according to the complaint. The lawsuit details the impressive test-score gains made under Cothorne's predecessor, Wayne Ryan, which resulted in cash bonuses of $10,000 to the principal and $8,000 to teachers in both 2008 and 2010. After scores rose by more than 20 percentage points in 2007, former Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee allegedly challenged Ryan to match those gains in 2008. The reward was to be dinner for the staff at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. In 2008 scores jumped again, and the Noyes staff was treated to dinner, according to the court documents. In her complaint, Cothorne says shortly after she arrived at Noyes, an elementary level teacher pulled her aside and said: "You know, they cheat on their tests." Cothorne identifies three staff members she saw in November 2010, sitting in a room with hundreds of test booklets and erasers following the administration of a midyear practice exam, according to the complaint. Cothorne also alleges that she reported what she saw to two central office administrators, who both asked to be kept abreast of the situation but never followed up with her. When Cothorne tightened security for the end-of-year standardized tests in 2011, students" math and proficiency rates dropped more than 25 percentage points from the year before, she told "Frontline." Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.