ATLANTA (CN) - A stunning and exhaustive report for the governor concludes that "thousands of school children were harmed by widespread cheating in the Atlanta Public School System," in institutionalized corruption of standardized tests, directed from the central office, for a decade. Teachers and administrators gave children answers, erased incorrect answers, hid and altered documents, offered monetary incentives to encourage the cheating, and punished employees who refused to cheat, according to the report.
More than 178 administrators and teachers from 56 elementary and middle schools in the Atlanta Public School System participated in the cheating on the standardized Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, according to the 3-volume report of more than 800 pages. (Volume 2, Volume 3, interview with retired superintendent.)
Investigators found cheating in 44 of the 56 schools they examined about the 2009 standardized CRCT tests, "and uncovered organized and systemic misconduct within the district as far back as 2001. Superintendent Beverly Hall and her senior staff knew, or should have known, that cheating and other offenses were occurring. Many of the accolades, and much of the praise, received by APS over the last decade were ill-gotten."
All quotations and references in this article are to the 3-volume report, and an accompanying 405-page interview with former Atlanta Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall. Throughout the report, prepared for Gov. Nathan Deal and delivered to him on June 30, the Atlanta Public School System is referred to as APS.
What Happened
"We found 178 educators as being involved in cheating," the report states. "Of these, 82 confessed. Thirty-eight of the 178 were principals, from two-thirds of the schools we examined. The 2009 erasure analysis suggests that there were far more educators involved in cheating, and other improper conduct, than we were able to establish sufficiently to identify by name in the report."
The cheating took root as far back as 2001. Originating from the office of Superintendent Hall, it permeated the school system, from the district headquarters to principals' offices and teachers' classrooms of a majority of schools in the district. The Atlanta Public School System has more than 48,000 students.
"A culture of fear and a conspiracy of silence infected this school system, and kept many teachers from speaking freely about misconduct," the report states. "From the onset of this investigation, we were confronted by a pattern of interference by top APS leadership in our attempt to gather evidence. These actions delayed the completion of this inquiry and hindered the truth-seeking process."
Nearly a year ago, former Gov. Sonny Perdue selected a three-member team of investigators, led by former Attorney General Mike Bowers, former DeKalb County Georgia District Attorney Bob Wilson, and a former Atlanta Police Officer turned investigator, Richard Hyde, to look into the widespread allegations of teacher- and administrator-led cheating on standardized tests in Atlanta public schools.
For the report, the governor's investigators - 51 agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, attorneys and staff from the Atlanta law offices of Balch & Bingham and Wilson Morton and Downs - interviewed more than 2,100 people and pored over more than 800,000 documents.
Money, promotions, tenure, federal aid, school rankings - and under the No Child Left Behind Act, their very existence - and students' college admissions and the resulting influence upon a school's reputation all are tied to the widely reported results of standardized tests.