Schools Caught Cheating In Atlanta, Around The Country

Ikea-sized warehouse turned de facto crime lab last fall, professor Gregory Cizek got his first look at the Atlanta test papers that would beget an education scandal of historic proportions.

Cizek, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a leading figure in psychometrics, the obscure field of mental measurement that includes setting and deciphering testing standards. He is often asked to seek out proof of tampering with student work. This case, however, was different.

In the Indianapolis warehouse, far from both his office and the schools where the suspect tests were taken, he saw clear evidence of what has become the most widespread episode of cheating ever documented in U.S. public schools, one which has diminished one of the nation's few education success stories of the past decade.

"Here you have a kid, this fourth-grader who sat down to take a test, who wrote his name on top of an answer booklet," Cizek recalls. "You see it was obviously changed through an awful lot of erasing. That's when you say, 'Something is going wrong here.'"

It was a long first day on the case for the professor, whose eyes burned as he left the warehouse on Sept. 20. Amid reams of stored paper and gigantic scanners, he had examined 1,000 answer sheets for the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test -- a standardized test administered in Georgia -- looking for signs of a teacher or principal erasing wrong answers, filling in right ones and trying to make them look like a student's work.

He found a lot of signs. Further erasure analysis, coupled with interviews of educators from flagged schools, led investigators to implicate some 178 educators in 44 of the 56 schools examined. The resulting report, released by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R) last month, found "systemic misconduct within the district as far back as 2001" and concluded that "thousands of school children were harmed by widespread cheating in the Atlanta Public School System."

The 413-page report reads like a thriller, with tales of teachers holding "erasure parties" and principals publicly humiliating their employees. "A culture of fear and a conspiracy of silence infected the school system, and kept many teachers from teaching freely about misconduct," the report's authors concluded
Spotted @ Huffpost