Every year, Atlanta Public Schools held a district-wide celebration in the Georgia Dome, where the Atlanta Falcons play. Attendance was mandatory. Schools that had met their test targets sat on the floor. Schools that hadn’t were sent to the uppermost sections. Teachers spoke nervously all year about whether they would “make the floor.”
The targets came from the superintendent, Beverly Hall, who arrived in 1999. They were set from the state’s multiple-choice test, the CRCT, and they went up every year. Schools that reached 70 percent of their targets paid every employee a bonus, from $50 to $2,000. Principals who missed for three years would be replaced. Hall’s motto was “No exceptions. No excuses.” In 2009 she was named national Superintendent of the Year.
The scores climbed. Then The Atlanta Journal-Constitution started asking how some of them were statistically possible.
In February 2010, the state had the testing company examine every answer sheet from the spring 2009 CRCT and count one thing: erasures where a wrong answer had been changed to a right one. Across Georgia, about 1,800 elementary and middle schools outside Atlanta gave the test, and 54 of them were flagged because more than a fifth of their classes were far above the state norm. In Atlanta, 52 of its 90 schools were flagged on the same test. One classroom sat 53 standard deviations above the state norm. The investigators’ expert said the odds were like filling the Georgia Dome to capacity and finding that every person in it was seven feet tall.
The governor appointed special investigators. They conducted more than 2,100 interviews and reviewed more than 800,000 documents. Their report, released in July 2011, confirmed cheating in 44 of the 56 schools they examined. They named 178 educators, including 38 principals. Eighty-two confessed. Cheating went back as far as 2001.
The bonuses, the investigators concluded, provided little incentive to cheat. Fear did the work: of being fired, and of being ridiculed in front of colleagues. Because each year’s target was built on last year’s inflated score, keeping up required more cheating than the year before. “Once cheating started it became a house of cards that collapsed upon itself,” they wrote.
Thirty-five educators were indicted. Hall was ruled too sick to stand trial and died of breast cancer in March 2015. On April 1, 2015, a jury convicted 11 of the 12 educators on trial. Each was found guilty of violating Georgia’s racketeering law, a charge usually aimed at organized crime. Ten of them were handcuffed and taken to jail that day.
The overview of the investigators’ report opened with a line about none of the adults: “Thousands of school children were harmed by widespread cheating.” Children whose scores had been inflated were denied remedial education because of those scores.