Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Former Atlanta supt. indicted in cheating scandal

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A Fulton County, Ga., grand jury handed down a 121-count indictment on March 29, charging former Atlanta Public Schools chief Beverly L Hall and 34 other Atlanta educators in connection with a cheating scandal, which allegedly occurred over several years on the state’s CRCTs, which are used for accountability purposes under the No Child Left Behind law, the New York Times reports.

Under Dr Hall’s leadership, teachers allegedly changed students’ wrong answers to correct answers on the Criterion Referenced Competency Tests, thus making it look as though students were achieving at levels far above their actual levels of competency. In some cases, bonuses were paid to teachers and principals for advancing test scores at a pace that defied logic.

She and the other educators will get their day in court, but in the meantime, an entire cohort of students has been lost. The good test scores cheated them out of funding for programs that might have helped them learn. A system of standardized testing stopped looking, a long time ago, at student performance and started punishing schools and teachers based on those test scores. These are kids who will never have those days back, those many days in third grade when they missed the entire lesson because they were still reading at a first-grade level and nobody knew about it due to the false inflation of their test scores.

We suspect, though the Atlanta case certainly represents the tireless work of investigators, including Richard Hyde, similar cheating incidents have occurred in other school systems across the country. Cheating has happened in places where teachers’ and principals’ livelihood, their ability to send their kids to college, and so on, depend on the performance of 9-year-olds on standardized tests. The tests used were originally designed to try to figure out what students know but have since been corrupted and denigrated to such an extent that their original purpose has been lost, and these instruments have been usurped by school reformers who claim, in error, that the scores actually have some validity and reliability in terms of measuring teacher effectiveness and quality.

Regardless of whether Dr Hall and the other educators in Atlanta are guilty, we believe the investigation has given all of us insight into the pressure educators face in the new world of teaching, pressure they didn’t ask for, pressure that has nothing to do with their reasons for pursuing education as a career, and pressure that cheats thousands of students in every case out of a quality education.

Paul Katulahttps://news.schoolsdo.org
Paul Katula is the executive editor of the Voxitatis Research Foundation, which publishes this blog. For more information, see the About page.

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