Schools, Standardized Tests | featured news

Thirty-five Atlanta Public Schools educators and administrators were indicted Friday on a myriad of charges in connection with alleged cheating in standardized testing, one of the largest cheating scandals to hit the nation's public education system.

For 15 years, teachers in three Southern states paid Clarence Mumford Sr. — himself a longtime educator — to send someone else to take the tests in their place, authorities said.

Teachers helped students correct mistakes on standardized tests, prepared them with actual test questions or left instructional posters displayed in the classroom during testing, according to school district reports.

With school in full swing across the United States, the littlest students are getting used to the blocks table and the dress-up corner - and that staple of American public education, the standardized test.

The exams will require students to upload photos and provide their gender when they sign up for the tests, the Nassau County district attorney said Tuesday.

Teachers spent nights huddled in a back room, erasing wrong answers on students' test sheets and filling in the correct bubbles. At another school, struggling students were seated next to higher-performing classmates so they could copy answers....

Atlanta's schools will flag suspicious test scores and achieve a culture of integrity in the wake of a cheating scandal that could lead to criminal charges, officials said Thursday.

Former District of Columbia public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee now says that she is "100% supportive" of a broader investigation into standardized test scores in the school district she used to oversee, just days after she dismissed a USA TODAY investigation that showed high rates of corrected answers on student test sheets.