Nearly half of the roughly 60 schools flagged for multiple statistical irregularities are in Philadelphia - 22 Philadelphia School District schools and seven charters.
Five suburban districts and one local charter school outside Philadelphia were named in the report and will also be asked by the state to investigate the 2009 results.
The Bristol Borough school system had one school, Snyder-Girotti, where two grades had multiple flags. Cheltenham, Strath Haven, Pennsbury, and Spring-Ford High Schools all had multiple flags for their 11th grade tests. Chester Community Charter School was flagged for four grades.
Though the report was finished in July 2009, it languished for two years until the Philadelphia Public School Notebook began asking questions about it recently.
Tomalis said he first read the report this week.
"Reading it, there are some red flags," Tomalis said. "And it really didn't see the light of day in 2009. It was lost, buried. Some of the indications are that there are things we certainly need to follow up on."
He said the department had begun a probe of why the report disappeared.
Test security was a key issue for him even before questions were raised about the 2009 PSSA scores.
After he was named Gov. Corbett's secretary of education in January, Tomalis said, he began asking questions about what kind of extra security the state had in place to analyze tests.
"I was told there was none," he said.
The state spent $108,000 on the 2009 forensic analysis, but that was cut from the 2010 budget. Tomalis had earlier ordered the report to be reinstated for the most recent Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) exams.
"That amount of money is a very, very good investment," he said.
Now, Tomalis said, he's asked for the results to be analyzed for 2010 as well.
"That way, we won't just get one snapshot," he said. "If there are trends that are disturbing, we will continue to act aggressively."
