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Search for school cheating stories today and you’ll find a slew of articles and news reports on parents charged in the recent college admissions scandal. But skip back to 2015 and the eyes of the education world were on Georgia, where the state’s longest-running criminal case (the “Atlanta public schools cheating scandal”) involved teachers and administrators, predominantly Black, accused and convicted in a RICO case of changing student test results to improve test scores.
“It was true that out of the thirty-five indicted educators none were white, and only one wasn’t black, even though there were white educa- tors from majority white schools implicated in the 2011 GBI report. I also noticed that out of the forty-four schools named in the first report, the indicted educators all came from just eleven schools located in or near tax allocation districts that covered some of the poorest areas of Atlanta, the west and south sides.” – Shani Robinson
A new book, None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators, aims to correct the record on the story and draw attention to the broader issue of how our system has failed both educators and students and how a grab by corporate interests from public housing to charter schools is at play putting profits over people. Joining us in this episode are co-authors Shani Robinson, a teacher who was charged and incarcerated in the case, and Anna Simonton, reporter and writer.
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