Archive for July 10th, 2011
Atlanta Government School Educators Have Been Cheating For 10 Years!
According to a scathing 413-page investigative report released Tuesday by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, hundreds of Atlanta public school teachers and principals changed answers on state tests in one of the largest cheating scandals in U.S. history. The investigation revealed that the cheating has been going on for that past 10 years.
A state investigation in Georgia has found that Atlanta teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on standardized tests for students, a widespread practice that was covered up by Superintendent Beverly Hall.
More than three quarters of the 56 schools investigated cheated on a 2009 standardized state test, with 178 educators implicated, including 38 principals. Eighty-two teachers confessed to erasing students’ answers and correcting tests. The report says widespread cheating has occurred since at least 2001 and that orders to cheat came from the top.
“Superintendent Beverly Hall and her senior staff knew, or should have known, that cheating and other offenses were occurring,” the report says. Hall retired in June, after serving as the Atlanta Public School System superintendent for 11 years. Hall’s lawyer told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which originally uncovered testing anomalies in Georgia public schools last year, that the former superintendent “definitely did not know of any widespread cheating.”
In 2009, she won the national Superintendent of the Year award for the gains Atlanta public schools made. Between 2002 and 2009, eighth graders’ reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test jumped 14 points—more than that of any other urban area. At the time, Hall said Atlanta’s students were “digging out of a deep hole and doing it at a significantly fast rate.”
Governor Deal’s report says Atlanta’s school system didn’t deserve the praise it received. “Many of the accolades, and much of the praise, received by the APS over the last decade were ill-gotten,” the report says. “There was a failure of leadership.”
And who do you suppose is being blamed for this cheating scandal? It’s Bush’s fault! Yeah! Blame Bush for the cheating in Atlanta’s government schools. The ObamaMedia is actually pushing the idea that No Child Left Behind is the reason why educators voluntarily cheated in Atlanta.
ABC correspondent Steve Osunami said during a report:
Everyone here is pointing the finger at No Child Left Behind, the federal policy that made test scores king , closing schools with low scores, and rewarding schools with high ones. This former superintendent is accused of encouraging the cheating. She received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses tied to improved test scores. I’m personally friends with a good number of teachers in this community who tell me that they’re under tremendous pressure. They say that the same parents who are angry about all the cheating would be even more furious if the schools started reporting lower test scores …
What? … Parents would be even more angry is the schools had reported lower test scores? Are you serious? How about those parents should be more concerned about whether or not their children are actually learning anything in their government schools. Period. End of story.
I predict this massive scandal will not be isolated here in Georgia. This is going spread across the country as government officials nation wide begin to look into their own schools for cheating.
Government schools … The main reason why the dumb masses voted for a Community Organizer to lead our nation into economic disaster. They are the products of government education!
