Teach For America Corps Members Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal

Per 11 Alive in Atlanta, Teach For America corps members are among the teachers guilty of cheating in Atlanta schools.  Three teachers confessed and it seems there are others who may be identified.  Kwame Griffith, the Executive Director of Teach For America Atlanta called the teachers' actions "unacceptable."

Hat tip @BobSikes

Another Perspective on the Atlanta Cheating Scandal

Kevin Carey of The New Republic writes that perhaps the Atlanta cheating scandal shouldn't just be blamed on standardized testing.  After all, teachers are choosing to act inappropriately.  In other industries, we don't blame the entire system for the actions of a small minority of individuals.  Excerpts below.

TO BE SURE, people (and teachers) will succumb to dishonesty. They cheat on their taxes, spouses, and golf partners. Cheating corrodes trust in all things, especially education. Students whose test scores are manipulated upward don’t the get the extra attention they need. And, since teachers are increasingly being evaluated by how much their students’ test scores improve, a teacher who inflates scores could potentially cost her colleagues in the next grade of their job performance.

But cheating also means that public schools finally care enough about student performance that some ethically challenged educators have chosen to cheat. This is far better than the alternative, where learning is so incidental and non-transparent that people of low character can’t be bothered to lie about it. Blaming cheating on the test amounts to infantilizing teachers, moving teaching 180 degrees away from the kind of professionalization that teacher advocates often profess to support.

Indeed, it’s not a coincidence that cheating scandals tend to erupt in municipalities whose public institutions suffer from corruption. 

Atlanta Schools Cheating Details

The AP provides details of exactly how cheating in Atlanta schools occurred.  Teachers actively changed students' wrong answers to right ones, and also sat struggling students next to their high-scoring peers so they could copy answers.  172 teachers were identified in a report on the matter, and 82 have admitted their guilt.  They may face a variety of charges.

The article quotes teachers describing the intimidation they faced from principals who threatened their job security.  It's clear that there was incredible pressure from school administrators to raise student scores, regardless of how far behind students were when the year began.  And now it seems the district may have to repay hundreds of thousands of dollars earned for good test scores at a time when funds were short to begin with.

It's disheartening to think that faced with thousands of struggling students in a huge urban school district in a major city with millions of people, educators put all their heads together, used the wisdom of their professional experiences and all of their schooling, took advantage of whatever resources they had access to and decided the best way to bring scores up would be... to hope everyone cheated off the smart kids and to rebubble the tests of the kids who didn't.