Atlanta Public Schools:
Teachers Thrown under the Bus

Mar 5, 2012

Last July, a Georgia report indicated widespread cheating on student curriculum tests in the Atlanta Public Schools.

For ten years, APS administrators–from the Superintendent on down through school principals–pressured their teachers to change student answers on the tests in order to show great gains year-to-year. Teachers were threatened with firing if they didn’t change the scores or with lawsuits if they tried to blow the whistle on the practice.

Needless to say, some teachers felt they had no choice but to go along for the sake of keeping their jobs. Meanwhile, the Superintendent, Dr. Beverly Hall, was showered with praise for her “miracle work” in the APS.

Now that her work is exposed as fraud, who is being made to pay? The teachers.

Last week the district, led by new Superintendent Erroll Davis, gave 120 educators a choice: resign within 24 hours, or be fired.

Davis is blaming the lowest rung of the totem pole for practices forced on them from the top!

Not only that, but this cheating is no surprise. It’s practically been forced on every school district in the country by George Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” law, passed, hmm, 10 years ago, mandating yearly progress toward 100% proficiency by 2013. An impossible goal, even for the best schools!

If schools don’t meet the goals, they can be shut down, gutted of all their employees, or turned into charter schools. And, of course, the government is not giving the poorest school districts any extra resources so that they can even try to meet those goals.

Of COURSE school districts across the country have been discovered cheating! The whole education “reform” is a fraud from top to bottom!