I am willing to bet that you can find widespread cheating of this kind in many large school districts in this country. And we can all thank Mr. George W. Bush and his silly "No Child Left Behind" nonsense for all this sh!t. Every Federal dollar that is tied to student performance is a major incentive for school districts to make fraudulent representations about the performance of their students.
The one thing that might vary is the manner in which this cheating is carried out.
“Mark my words, folks — this Atlanta case is just the tip of the iceberg.”
You bet! But it’s not limited to large or even urban school districts. My children attended Fairfax County (VA) public schools, purportedly the No. 1 public school system in the country, and one of their class valedictorians (4.2 gpa) required remedial reading in her first semester at UVA! (And UVA is no academic bulward.) The assessments of high schools in northern Virginia, in particular, were based on preposterous criteria—family income, residence lot-size and whether owned or rented, number of children in family, parents’ education and employment data, student grade-point averages, SAT scores, Advanced Placement offerings (in approximately that sequence, along with at least ten other stats). And don’t let the student grade-point or SAT average statistics fool you: one of my daughters learned after she began teaching middle school that an F-grade in any subject for any student was simply beyond the pale. “Can’t you give the child a make-up test or an opportunity for extra credit?” SATs, on the other hand, during my older children’s HS years were either dumbed down or (as they were later described) “recentered” FOUR TIMES! Sure, some students will shine regardless of the inferiority of the education they’re getting, but most won’t graduate with even rudimentary skills. Worse still, not even an elected school board hell-bent on correcting the situation has the time to influence any part of the system, a system wholly owned by teachers’ unions.
No Child was/is far from perfect, but the defense used by Atlanta’s and so many other teachers—too much pressure—is utterly criminal. County, state, and even national testing seems to be the only answer; but the composition, administration, and evaluation of such testing ought to be handled exclusively by private or nonschool-related entities.
Which will never happen. Better simply to home-school.