Atlanta Schools Created Culture Of Cheating, Fear, Intimidation

[Derechos]

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."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/16/atlanta-schools-created-c_n_900635.html

[sixmile]

1. The whole thing makes me sick

There should be no pensions, paid leaves, etc. for those who facilitated the cheating. There should, in fact, be criminal penalties.

[proud2BlibKansan]

3. It's a felony in my state

I believe at least a few of those involved will end up behind bars.

[CurtEastPoint]

2. And yet the much-touted 'Dr.' Beverly Hall left with accolades...off to Hawaii. Where she dodged

reporters. She was trying to 'get well.'

Yeah, I'd be sick to if I were responsible for what happened in APS.

[dkf]

4. Isn't this the same reason students cheat?

Why anyone cheats?

[immoderate]

5. They kept their jobs because they cheated.

It's the American way. :patriot:

--imm

[cy18]

6. Thoughts

We need a culture of people that values hard work. Why did America lose that way?

[Selatius]

7. Because the people who run the country value money instead.

It's also why the owners on Wall Street shipped all the manufacturing jobs, the jobs that built the middle class, to third world dictatorships.

[immoderate]

8. Because hard work would just get them fired. The fix is in.

To shorten an old joke: A farmer explained the prosthetic limb on his pig, "Prize hog like that, you don't want to eat him all at once!"

--imm