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The Atlanta Cheating Verdict: Some Context

Former Deerwood Academy assistant principal Tabeeka Jordan is led to a holding cell. She is one of 11 Atlanta educators found guilty of racketeering.
Kent D. Johnson
/
AP
Former Deerwood Academy assistant principal Tabeeka Jordan is led to a holding cell. She is one of 11 Atlanta educators found guilty of racketeering.

Today an Atlanta jury found eleven educators guilty of racketeering in a case that implicated dozens of schools and hundreds of educators. Their scheme: inflate scores on high-stakes standardized tests.

The case has drawn national attention, exposing widespread abuse and unethical behavior in the school district. Those convicted face decades in prison. But how much does it tell us about high-stakes testing in general?

Here's our post from August when the trial began, talking about larger issues of testing and the pressure on students and educators alike:

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Anya Kamenetz is an education correspondent at NPR. She joined NPR in 2014, working as part of a new initiative to coordinate on-air and online coverage of learning. Since then the NPR Ed team has won a 2017 Edward R. Murrow Award for Innovation, and a 2015 National Award for Education Reporting for the multimedia national collaboration, the Grad Rates project.