Educators Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal
For 10 years, hundreds of Atlanta public school teachers and principals changed answers on state tests in one of the largest cheating scandals in U.S. history, according to a scathing413-page investigative report released Tuesday by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal.
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.
[Read about testing scandals in other states.]
"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