It appears that almost two hundred teachers and administrators have been caught in a massive cheating scandal in which teachers were changing their students' grades on standardized tests in order to render the results less embarrassing to the district. The scandal reaches all the way to the top and includes the district superintendent.
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution reports:
Across Atlanta Public Schools, staff worked feverishly in secret to transform testing failures into successes.How can adults teach children that it's wrong to cheat when so many of them do it themselves? If this is the quality of educator that Atlanta's children are learning from it's little wonder that scores are so low that cheating is needed to raise them to meet standards. On the other hand, it seems that to their credit many of the teachers objected to having to change answers but were coerced and intimidated by their administrators into doing so. According to the AJC article a number of those administrators face felony charges:
Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students’ answer sheets.
Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible.
Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.
For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests. The scores soared so dramatically they brought national acclaim to Hall and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.
In the report, the governor’s special investigators describe an enterprise where unethical — and potentially illegal — behavior pierced every level of the bureaucracy, allowing district staff to reap praise and sometimes bonuses by misleading the children, parents and community they served.
The voluminous report names 178 educators, including 38 principals, as participants in cheating. More than 80 confessed. The investigators said they confirmed cheating in 44 of 56 schools they examined.
For teachers, a culture of fear ensured the deception would continue. “APS [Atlanta Public Schools] is run like the mob,” one teacher told investigators, saying she cheated because she feared retaliation if she didn’t.These people, like their colleagues in Wisconsin who defrauded the taxpayers by securing phony doctor's excuses during the budget debate in Madison last spring, are an embarrassment to public school professionals everywhere and have no business in any position where they work with kids or collect a salary and benefits paid by the taxpayer. They should be fired, decertified, and deeply ashamed of themselves.