Atlanta Schools Created Culture Of Cheating, Fear, Intimidation

This is a truly sad story. The teachers failed the students and the students failed themselves. Not to mention the parents, where is their culpability in all of this? No Child Left Behind was instituted to provide standards. I wonder how many of our children have been left behind since this law went into effect?

Teachers spent nights huddled in a back room, erasing wrong answers on students' test sheets and filling in the correct bubbles. At another school, struggling students were seated next to higher-performing classmates so they could copy answers.

Those and other confessions are contained in a new state report that reveals how far some Atlanta public schools went to raise test scores in the nation's largest-ever cheating scandal. Investigators concluded that nearly half the city's schools allowed the cheating to go unchecked for as long as a decade, beginning in 2001.

Administrators – pressured to maintain high scores under the federal No Child Left Behind law – punished or fired those who reported anything amiss and created a culture of "fear, intimidation and retaliation," according to the report released earlier this month, two years after officials noticed a suspicious spike in some scores.

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