Public Schools: Fraud Equals $500,000 in Bonus

[Jerome]

Public Schools: Fraud Equals $500,000 in Bonus

The report concluded that 178 Atlanta schoolteachers and principals—82 of whom have already confessed—either assisted students to cheat on the state’s standardized competency tests or deliberately corrected wrong answers themselves. Of 56 Atlanta public schools examined, 44 were found to have engaged in statistically significant cheating.

For a decade, Atlanta’s public schools had been depicted as a shining national star that dared leave no child behind as dedicated educators and their eager-to-learn pupils joined hands, chanted slogans, marched together, chest-bumped and fist-pumped one-another’s self-esteem, established a clear vision, looked to the future, kept their eyes on the prize, and made countless other ultimately hollow gestures. For a decade, it seemed as if Atlanta was a real-life example of every cloying Hollywood movie where loving-yet-stern teachers grabbed gaggles of shiftlessly misbehaving urban youngsters by the scruffs of their necks and taught them that teaching was something worth being taught and that learning was a valuable thing to learn.