Cheating In Atlanta Public Schools Essay

Cheating is something that everyone, at one point, deals with. Whether it is in a relationship, in board games like Monopoly, on their taxes, or at school or work, everyone has encountered it. Cheat is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “to deprive of something valuable by the use of deceit or fraud, to elude or thwart by or as if by outwitting.” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.) In the case of the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) system, it was a combination of the two. Greed and/or peer pressure were the causes of the Atlanta educator’s downfall. After what amounted to an almost two-year investigation, which led to 35 educators being indicted. Steven Almasy, a writer for CNN, quoted former Georgia attorney general Michael Bowers as saying,

Focusing on honesty, integrity, and being able to interpret test score data should have been the focus of the educators, but instead pushing up test scores was a fallout of the No Child Left Behind Act and an act of greed. If the students’ grades and performance weren’t up to standards for the school’s Adequate Yearly Progress in standardized testing for reading and mathematics, the school system had to take some of the federal funding they received to obtain tutors and pay for students to pick their school of choice. If the school system continually showed no progress and did not meet the standards based on the No Child Left Behind Act, then they would face even harsher sanctions, which could possibly include having the state step in and either shut them down or turn them into charter schools. Also, it’s worth mentioning that, if the school system met, or exceeded, their Adequate Yearly Progress checkpoint outlined by the No Child Left Behind Act, then each individual educator was eligible to receive up to $2,000. Perhaps if there hadn’t been such pressure on APS to show improvements, and if honesty and integrity had outweighed greed, then maybe the educators wouldn’t have felt duty-bound or pressured into altering the