"Atlanta schools built culture of fear to encourage cheating; State report cites pressure to raise student test scores" July 17, 2011|By Dorie Turner, Associated Press
ATLANTA - 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 cheating scandal. Investigators concluded that nearly half of the 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....
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.
One teacher told investigators the district was “run like the mob.’’
The stakes were high: Schools that fail to meet certain benchmarks under the federal law can face sharp sanctions. They may be forced to offer extra tutoring, allow parents to transfer children to better schools, or fire teachers and administrators who don’t pass muster.
Teachers complained to investigators that some students arrived at middle school reading at a first-grade level. But, they said, principals insisted those students had to pass their standardized tests. Teachers were either ordered to cheat or pressured by administrators, authorities said.
The educators could face criminal charges ranging from tampering with state documents to lying to investigators. Many could lose their teaching licenses.
Parents of children enrolled at the schools say they are frustrated and angry....
The schools could owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding they received for good test performance - money that would be lost at a time when the state’s education budget has already been slashed by millions.
And at least one member of the Atlanta school board wants to reclaim tens of thousands of dollars in bonus money that former Superintendent Beverly Hall received for the high test scores.
Hall, who retired just days before the investigation was made public, has said she did not know about the cheating.
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Related: Boston Globe Summer School: Taking the Test
"Students back to school after scandal" August 08, 2011|Associated Press
ATLANTA - Students return to Atlanta’s schools this week for what is likely to be a tough year. A cheating scandal has forced thousands of students to get remedial tutoring because they were promoted based on forged test scores and left the district with a shortfall of up to $10 million.
The new superintendent, Erroll Davis, has vowed to clean up the mess. More than 100 teachers were removed from classrooms less than a month before classes started, accused of spending nights huddled in back rooms changing the answers on students’ tests in a state investigation released in early July.
But teachers and parents hope students - many of whom live in the city’s poorest neighborhoods - will be focused on one thing come today: learning....
Something you are not going to do reading an AmeriKan newspaper.
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