The embarrassed, apologetic and sometimes tearful testimony of Atlanta public school teachers taped by investigators in the aftermath of the widespread state achievement test scandal must not be forgotten as new superintendent Meria Carstarphen takes the helm of the 50,000-student system on July 7.
“I knew they (test scores) were inflated because my third-graders don’t know the alphabet,” confessed one teacher. Another tearfully admitted there had to be cheating because her third-graders “don’t know English.”
Sad to say, not much reform has occurred since February 2010 when the Governor’s
Office of Student Achievement dropped the bombshell announcement that 256,779 wrong-to-right erasures occurred in 58 Atlanta public schools on the 2009 CRCT tests. Of those 58 schools, 43 were classified as “severe.”
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