This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Atlanta public schools has no shortage of disheartening stories coming out of its colossal cheating scandal – which concluded on Wednesday with 11 of 12 teachers on trial convicted of racketeering.

Shawnna Hayes-Tavares, a mother of four children from south-west Atlanta, could tell you two of them.

Hayes-Tavares, a local activist who testified during the seven-month APS trial, initially struggled to believe that educators had inflated two of her children’s test scores.

Georgia cheating scandal: 11 teachers found guilty of racketeering Read more

Her daughter, now a high-school honors student, had already performed well on tests at Peyton Forest elementary school, which went from being ranked one of Georgia’s worst schools to one of its top performers in a year.

Teachers bumped her daughter into an accelerated math class that led to some academic struggles for her.

Hayes-Tavares’s son, a deaf student who attended Slater elementary school, saw his test scores rise to the top of his class. The inflated results gave him a false sense of security and robbed him of additional academic resources he would otherwise have qualified for.

“If teachers were cheating on the tests, of course they’re cheating the students out of opportunities to learn,” Hayes-Tavares says.

APS has long struggled to fulfill its students’ needs.

A major effort last decade to boost student performance in one of Georgia’s lowest-performing public school systems unraveled into one of the nation’s largest public school cheating scandals ever.

But Atlanta’s cheating scandal formally ended on Wednesday inside a Fulton County courtroom, concluding a painstaking process that included years of investigations, millions spent on prosecutions, and the indictment of nearly three-dozen former school employees.

After a grueling seven-month trial, jurors decided that 11 of the 12 teachers were guilty of racketeering. Only one of the 12 educators on trial, Dessa Curb, was acquitted of the racketeering charge.

‘Atlanta is the tip of the iceberg’

Atlanta’s rampant test manipulation amplified calls for nationwide education reform. Seven years after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution first reported on testing problems, policymakers have failed to make significant progress toward changing the way students take standardized tests and how teachers interpret those scores.

In fact, the problem has worsened, resulting in documented cheating in at least 40 states, since the APS cheating scandal first came to light.

“Atlanta is the tip of the iceberg,” says Bob Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, a nonprofit opposed to current testing standards. “Cheating is a predictable outcome of what happens when public policy puts too much pressure on test scores.”

Some experts, including Schaeffer, point to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 as a source of today’s testing problems, though others say the woes predated the law.

Then-president George W Bush, who signed the measure in January 2002, aimed to boost national academic performance and close the achievement gap between white and minority students.

To make that happen, the law relied upon standardized tests designed to hold teachers accountable for classroom improvements. Federal funding hinged on school improvements, as did the future of the lowest-performing schools.

But teachers in many urban school districts already faced enormous challenges that fell outside their control – including high poverty, insufficient food access, and unstable family situations. Though high-stakes testing increased student achievement in some schools, the federal mandate turned an already-difficult challenge into a feat some considered insurmountable.

The pressure led to problems. Dr Beverly Hall, the former APS superintendent who was praised for turning around student performance, was later accused of orchestrating the cheating operation.

During her tenure, Georgia investigators found 178 educators had inflated test scores at 44 elementary and middle schools.

Prosecutors have since spent millions building a case that led to 35 indictments. Twenty-one teachers ultimately accepted plea deals. Hall, who resigned in 2010 and denied all wrongdoing until the end, and another defendant lost battles against cancer prior to standing trial.

US secretary of education Arnie Duncan downplayed Atlanta’s falsified test score report as a “very isolated” incident. That’s something Department of Education officials continue to stand by given that the nation has more than 14,000 public school districts.

But cheating has nevertheless continued in cities of all sizes such as Baltimore, Camden, New Jersey, Las Vegas, Houston and Norfolk, Virginia. In El Paso, Texas, Lorenzo Garcia, the school district’s former superintendent, pleaded guilty to fraud charges for boosting test scores, receiving a three-and-a-half year prison sentence. More recently, investigators arrested eight Philadelphia educators involved in manipulating standardized test answers.

A warning sign and a call to arms

Atlanta’s classrooms, once a model of the school-reform movement, became both a warning sign for test advocates and a call to arms for critics. The Council of the Great City Schools, an organization working with larger inner-city school systems, last year found that students on average take 113 tests by the time they graduate high school.

Barack Obama has said that he would be willing to “cut back on unnecessary testing and test preparation”.

Paul Hill, founder for the Center for Reinventing Public Education, says administrators should embrace testing, but avoid directly linking scores to teacher success or failure.

“Nobody wanted to be the next Atlanta,” says Gregory Cizek, an education professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He consulted for the APS investigation and has since seen other states strengthen their testing protocols. “Everyone around the country wanted their test scores to be valid.”

Schaeffer says a growing number of parents want to boycott or opt their children out of standardized tests. Cizek, who sees most over-testing taking place at the school district or classroom levels, says testing opposition has partially arisen from a philosophical disagreement against Common Core, federal education standards that have sparked a backlash in some states.

But Joanna Lack, the chief of performance for Camden city school district, where a testing scandal in the mid-2000s prompted security protocols to be strengthened, says she doesn’t see a connection between cheating and support for opt-outs in her district.

Looking ahead, US senator Lamar Alexander, Republican from Tennessee, the former secretary of education who is now chairman of the Senate’s education committee, is leading a charge to rewrite No Child Left Behind’s testing mandate, which is technically still in effect despite expiring in 2007. Bipartisan talks started this year and could lead to changes that most officials support. But Capitol Hill’s perpetual partisan discord, GOP infighting, or a presidential veto could deter such progress.

On a local level, lawmakers in Colorado, Florida, and other states have started to look at scaling back state testing requirements. In the interim, the Obama administration has granted No Child Left Behind waivers to states through the 2018-19 school year that agree to work on closing achievement gaps, preparing kids for college and careers, and adopting teacher evaluations.

Until major No Child Left Behind testing revisions take place, public school educators will continue to navigate the endless testing and the rising opposition from families entering their classrooms. Back in Atlanta, the verdict will likely offer some closure to parents and students. Current APS superintendent Meria Carstarphen, who started on the job last summer, has her eyes set on improving a roughly 50,000-student system with a 58% graduation rate, where most students receive subsidized lunches, and one that continues to tussle with massive inequity issues.

A newly elected wave of school board officials have followed suit in starting a new chapter focused on mending communities, strengthening a fragile school district, and not looking back.

“The cheating scandal is a thing of the past,” Atlanta board of education chair Courtney English says. “I know it’s in the headlines externally. But it’s not what we talk about. APS for far too long has failed children. We’re at the beginning of that work.”