Atlanta schools created culture of cheating, fear (& some got AWARDS for it!)

Fox News ^ | 7/16/11

[Libloather]

Atlanta schools created culture of cheating, fear
Published July 16, 2011
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-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.

One teacher told investigators the district was "run like the mob."

[RobbyS]

Easy enough to explain: she set “quotas,” Scores had to go up of the underling lost his position.

[Pride in the USA]

You have to wonder how widespread the whole cheating thing is in other states as well. In our state this year, our 12th grade students scored over 90% on both the reading and the writing state tests. This is the fourth year in a row for such high scores. I have administered the middle school state reading tests for a number of years and I know the tests at those two levels are NOT easy. I can’t imagine that the 12th grade tests are either, but I could be wrong. My point is that I find it hard to believe that the scores could be this high year after year. Either the tests are too easy at the senior level, or the results are “manipulated.”