Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Analysis

The line that separates what doing the right thing as opposed to doing the wrong thing is often very thin. This line holds a grey area that prevents many things from being deemed as either right or wrong. For example, a lot of times somebody does the wrong thing, but for reasons that are not explicitly wrong. The Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal demonstrates this example well. The Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal refers to the 44 Atlanta schools that were found to have cheated on standardized tests a few years back. Educators manipulated the tests to make the students score higher and were eventually caught. The grey area regarding this situation does not include the cheating, but the underlying issues that led to the cheating.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution refers to Beverly Hall on their website observing: “Beverly Hall came to Atlanta Public Schools in 1999 with the reputation as an urban school reformer bringing tough school standards and voicing a mantra of “no excuses” for failure.” The pressure that educators at Atlanta Public Schools felt, not only by the government but also by higher administrators such as Beverly Hall, was certainly enough to result in cheating. According to Georgia Public Policy Foundation (2015), investigators found more than 178 educators, including 38 principals, to have cheated on the standardized Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT) that were given in Georgia at the time. This cheating determinedly spread across 44 different Atlanta schools out of the 56 that were examined, making it one of the largest cheating scandals in public school history. The vastness of the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal raises the inquiry of how it was accomplished. While some educators simply erased incorrect answers on student’s tests and replaced them with the correct ones, some educators went as far as sneaking tests out before they were given to the children and copying the answers or making cheat sheets for their students. Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker wrote a piece that featured the story of a math teacher, named Damany
Students felt an immense pride in themselves, having not known what their authority figures had done, and educators felt a sense of relief that their jobs were now safe. This jubilant state did not last for long, as things began to unravel with the publishing of an Atlanta Journal-Constitution story in 2008. The story illustrated a substantial increase in scores on the CRCTs in an Atlanta school and also doubted the likelihood of such an increase. This story is what sparked the first state investigation of some Atlanta Public Schools. In 2009, the investigation reported having found cheating at 12 Atlanta schools. However, another Atlanta Journal-Constitution story was released and it suggested that investigators had not looked at all of the schools that they were supposed to. This prompted former Governor of Georgia, Sonny Perdue, to order a special investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in which they find evidence of cheating at 44 Atlanta