A retired teacher upset over news reports that Atlanta Public Schools was acting on its commitment to fire any educators who cheated on state exams wrote me a long letter voicing her disapproval.
Had The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ever considered, she said, “that the teachers may have been forced to cheat on their CRCT tests?”
The writer continued: “I know how far administrations will go when it comes to making their schools look good. They make teachers pass students that have 20s for grades because the fewer students fail, the better the school looks. I have seen administrators bully teachers into doing things that aren’t legal, and the teachers’ only options were to follow orders, report it or refuse and lose their jobs as a result.”
The former teacher closed her letter with a question: “Is Atlanta going to find the root of the problem and ask these teachers why they cheated and look into the administrative involvement, or are they just going to cut off the head of the problem by firing the teachers so that it appears to the public eye as though everything is solved?”
It’s been surprising to me how many people have defended educators charged with cheating by citing the unrelenting and unrealistic pressures they were under to improve test scores.
Their contention is that the blame should not fall on any individual but on a flawed system.
This defense is proffered even by teachers who maintain that they’d never cheat under any circumstances.
As one teacher wrote, “There is no way on God’s green earth that test results can be taken as valid when a teacher is giving her own students a test that is going to be used to make her or break her. There are a few totally honest, truthful and honorable people in this world, but not many, though I was among the few. And I would like to share another bit of information, and again hold onto your seat: Most people would sell their mother’s last kidney to protect themselves. And anyone who believes otherwise needs to face the facts.”
But the facts thus far don’t support the scenario that teachers are resorting to cheating in overwhelming numbers because of the demands on them to raise student achievement by any means possible.
Consider that there are 7.2 million teachers in the k-12 system, according to the most recent U.S. census data.
Reviewing all the cheating scandals of late across the country and tallying the number of educators entangled in them, fewer than 400 are currently under any shadow.
Even assuming that there are 10 times or even 100 times more educators cheating without detection or suspicion, those numbers would still represent a small percentage of the total work force.
In its 2010 erasure audit of all 2009 CRCT answer sheets, the state of Georgia found many systems with no indication of tampering by teachers or administrators.
And that includes Georgia districts that teach struggling students from poor households, the group least likely to perform well on high-stakes state exams.
Atlanta schools had the highest number of improbable wrong-to-right erasures. In their 10-month probe, the state’s investigators confirmed cheating in 44 of the 56 APS schools they examined and found credible evidence of test tampering against 178 educators, including 38 principals.
Those principals represent 54 percent of the leadership of Atlanta’s elementary and middle schools, a startling rate that certainly suggests systematic problems with how APS selected its school-based leaders or how much pressure school chief Beverly Hall and her staff put on these leaders to boost test scores.
But the proportion of incriminated teachers was far less.
In its analysis, the AJC noted that 2,370 Atlanta teachers taught students who took the CRCT. That means that 6 percent were implicated in the CRCT scandal.
But it also means that 94 percent were not.
When their dismissal hearings are held, the teachers accused of cheating will each offer a personal defense. But it shouldn’t be that everyone was doing it and he or she had no choice.
The majority of their colleagues teaching next door or down the hall did not make the same self-serving choice.
And most teachers in Georgia didn’t make that choice.
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