A Culture That Rewarded Cheaters

Georgia Governor Nathan Deal released a scathing 413-page investigative report that says, for 10 years, hundreds of Atlanta public school teachers and principals changed answers on state tests in one of the largest cheating scandals in U.S. history.

The report says widespread cheating has occurred since at least 2001 and that orders to cheat came from the top. This infection was in 44 of the 56 schools investigated and showed cheating on a 2009 standardized state test, with 178 educators implicated, including 38 principals. At last count 82 teachers confessed to erasing students' answers and correcting tests.

"Superintendent Beverly Hall and her senior staff knew, or should have known, that cheating and other offenses were occurring," the report says. Hall retired in June, after serving as the Atlanta Public School System superintendent for 11 years. Hall's lawyer told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which originally uncovered testing anomalies in Georgia public schools last year, that the former superintendent "definitely did not know of any widespread cheating."

In 2009, she won the national Superintendent of the Year award for the gains Atlanta public schools made. Between 2002 and 2009, eighth graders' reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test jumped 14 points—more than that of any other urban area. At the time, Hall said Atlanta's students were "digging out of a deep hole and doing it at a significantly fast rate."

The misconduct extended beyond erasing answers—teachers admitted to placing lower-performing students next to high achievers so they could cheat more easily, pointing to correct answers while students were taking the tests, and reading answers aloud during testing.

The report says a "culture of fear and conspiracy of silence infected this school system, and kept many teachers from speaking freely about misconduct."

These teachers are supposed to be helping our children, not cheating them of their education. That is what these teachers did. They cheated the children of their education while they stole taxpayer money in the name of teaching these children.

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