Story highlights
Dougherty County educators took part in "criminal conduct and wrongdoing," a task force says
The task force looked into suspiciously high scores given to public school students
The report's authors blame "failure of leadership at the principal level," administration and board
They also blamed the alleged corruption on pressure from No Child Left Behind rules
Nearly 50 schoolteachers and administrators in Georgia’s Dougherty County School System participated in “criminal conduct and wrongdoing” in influencing results of standardized exams, investigators say.
The allegations were detailed in a report released Tuesday by members of a special task force appointed by former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue to look into suspiciously high scores on the exams, called the Criterion Referenced Competency Test, or CRCT, a multiple-choice test given annually to all public school students in the state.
Eighteen educators working in 11 of the system’s 26 schools admitted to cheating, the report said.
“Hundreds of schoolchildren were harmed by extensive cheating in the Dougherty County School System … We found cheating on the 2009 CRCT in all of the schools we examined. A total of 49 educators were involved in some form of misconduct or failure to perform their duty with regard to this test,” members of the task force wrote.
CNN attempted on Tuesday to contact Joshua W. Murfree Jr., superintendent of the Dougherty County School System, for comment on the report, but he did not respond.
Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal called the findings “alarming.”
“They paint a tragic picture of children passed through with no real or fair assessment of their abilities. To cheat a child out of his or her ability to truly excel in the classroom shames the district and the state. We’ll now send the results to the Professional Standards Committee and to the Dougherty County district attorney’s office. It is my hope that brighter days are ahead for the children affected by this unfortunate situation,” he said Tuesday.
The report’s authors concluded that cheating occurred because of a “failure of leadership at the principal level and, to some extent, by the system’s administration and the Board of Education.”
Investigators also blamed the alleged corruption on pressures of meeting the requirements of No Child Left Behind, a Bush-era bill that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2001 that set up a regimen of state reading and math tests for students in third through eighth grades.
Critics have said that the Bush administration, which championed the bill, never properly funded the effort and that states needed more flexibility in meeting those goals. States faced the possibility of losing federal education dollars if goals were not met, and schools were encouraged to lower standards rather than improve, they say.
In September, President Obama announced an overhaul of No Child Left Behind, changing states’ requirements to enact accountability standards that don’t treat all schools the same. Specifically, schools will have to implement new teacher and principal accountability standards. Local districts will have to set basic guidelines to evaluate a teacher’s performance based on a number of factors, not simply student performance.
The Obama administration said many states are already moving toward new guidelines and are requesting waivers to certain requirements imposed by No Child Left Behind, which could be granted in early 2012.
Georgia investigators uncovered systemic misconduct in the Atlanta Public Schools system this year, finding evidence of cheating on the 2009 CRCT in 78% of the schools they examined. Officials accused 178 educators, of which 38 were principals, of being involved in cheating.
Of the 178 educators, about 120 are still employed with Atlanta Public Schools, spokesman Keith Bromery said.
“Most of the people who have left have either retired or resigned,” he said.
The remaining employees are still on paid administrative leave, pending investigations that will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, contingent on the availability of the information from investigators who compiled the report and the various agencies involved, Bromery said.