There were massive problems at the schools in Atlanta. Funding problems choked schools from needed capital investments and programming dollars. There was pressure to perform well on standardized tests under the No Child Left Behind Law, with fewer resources.
That pressure was too much for some principals and school teachers. They cheated and changed answers on their students tests.
Shanti Robinson is one of the teachers who went to trial for cheating on the standardized tests. She tells her story in None of the Above.
The cheating was discovered with statistics. The tests for the whole school system were reviewed to see how often there were signs of erasure which resulted in answers being changed from wrong to correct. They found some statistical anomalies where some classrooms had a much larger amount of those correcting erasures. So much so, that the only way it could have happened was someone changing the answers.
Post-test, Ms. Robinson and other teachers were told to erase “stray marks” from the test booklets. Some teachers interpreted that to mean fix the wrong answers. Ms. Robinson claims that she just erased the doodles in the test booklets.
The problem is that Ms. Robinson’s class was one of those with a statistically high number of erasures from wrong to right answers. Someone changed her students’ answers.
She goes down a common path of criminal mentality by loading up None of the Above with all of the other problems with the Atlanta school system and all of the other people who are doing things that hurt the students in the school system. The authors attack real estate deals that use a projected increase in tax revenue in an area to help fund a real estate development project. They attack charter schools and the state bureaucrats. There were lots of problems in the Atlanta school system greater than Ms. Robinson’s alleged cheating.
Spoiler alert: Ms. Robinson goes to trial after prosecutors play hardball with the principals, teachers and administrators accused of cheating. They bring RICO charges. Ms. Robinson complains about the prosecutor’s zeal and overly harsh charges. She complains about the fairness of the judge.
I didn’t find Ms. Robinson’s story compelling or believe her claims of innocence. I’m not sure she made the changes, but she fails to acknowledge that someone clearly made changes.
There are better sources for discussions of public education, testing and charter schools. I found the authors’ discussion of them to merely be a distraction from the cheating scandal.
Disclosure: The publisher sent me a copy of the book and asked for a review.