A U.S. senator from Georgia and a national teacher union leader on Sunday called for investigations into possible cheating in school districts cited in an investigation into suspicious test scores by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The newspaper reported Sunday that 196 of the nation’s 3,125 largest school districts had a high degree of suspicious results on standardized test scores, which could point to instances of cheating.
The results of the AJC’s analysis of test scores from all 50 states do not prove cheating. But several officials said these school districts must now take the AJC’s statistical analysis and find out whether cheating is occurring in their schools. Extreme swings in test scores occurred in several major urban school systems, including Baltimore, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles and Mobile County, Alabama. Suspicious scores were most likely to appear in urban and rural school districts that served mostly poor children.