Atlanta Schools Created Culture of Cheating, Fear

[The Northerner]

Teachers spent nights huddled in a back room, erasing wrong answers on students' test sheets and filling in the correct bubbles. At another school, struggling students were seated next to higher-performing classmates so they could copy answers.

Those and other confessions are contained in a new state report that reveals how far some Atlanta public schools went to raise test scores in the nation's largest-ever cheating scandal. Investigators concluded that nearly half the city's schools allowed the cheating to go unchecked for as long as a decade, beginning in 2001.

Administrators — pressured to maintain high scores under the federal No Child Left Behind law — punished or fired those who reported anything amiss and created a culture of "fear, intimidation and retaliation," according to the report released earlier this month, two years after officials noticed a suspicious spike in some scores.

The report names 178 teachers and principals, and 82 of those confessed. Tens of thousands of children at the 44 schools, most in the city's poorest neighborhoods, were allowed to advance to higher grades, even though they didn't know basic concepts.

Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=14086928

[KamaAina]

1. This is also the school district that banned recess

now we know. Recess wasn't on the test.

A case study in how NOT to run a district.

[AnneD]

2. This is why......

Teachers should have tenure or at the very least seniority and union protection. This is exactly why they got tenure in the first place. Good teachers were let go so politicians could give jobs to their frequently unqualified cronies or in this case they could intimidate honest employes.

[Dulcinea]

3. The CRCT should be abolished.

My daughter is going into 4th grade. We live in the Atlanta suburbs. Her entire school year revolves around this test. They have pep rallies for it!

When jobs and careers are dependent on this single test, are you surprised that this went on? Sadly, I'm not.