Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, blamed "test-crazed" education policies in sharp comments released Tuesday regarding a massive standardized-test cheating scandal in Atlanta.
A 65-count indictment, announced by prosecutors Friday, alleges that more than 35 educators were involved in a conspiracy to inflate students' test scores within Atlanta Public Schools.
In a joint statement Tuesday, Weingarten and Verdaillia Turner, president of the Georgia Federation of Teachers, declared, "Standardized tests have a role in accountability, but today they dominate everything else and too often don’t even correlate to what students need to know to succeed." They added that school districts in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere have put "enormous pressure" on teachers to improve scores.
As the first of the indicted educators surrendered Tuesday, critics of standardized-testing policies are describing the alleged misdeeds in Atlanta as a natural reaction to this pressure.
In a blog post published Monday, David Callahan, editor of Cheatingculture.com,blamed an excessive focus on quantitative performance measures and called the scandal the human answer to the question, "What happens when you change incentives so that low test numbers translate into pain and high test numbers