PHILADELPHIA – The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers is blaming the recent Philadelphia test cheating scandal on the pressure of standardized tests.

Philadelphia school superintendent William Hite, thankfully, isn’t buying what the union is selling, and has highlighted the injustice of adults gaming the system.

“There is no circumstance, no matter how pressured the cooker, that adults should be cheating students,” he said, according to FrontPageMag.com.

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Philadelphia investigators contend teachers worked together to erase and correct students’ answers, and some even helped their students along during state tests in recent years.

In a recent Front Page editorial, Walter Williams explains that while the cheating was meant to hide students’ poor academic performance, it actually says a lot about the abysmal state of public education in Philadelphia.

“While there’s widespread teacher test cheating to conceal education failure, most notably among black children, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, published by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics and sometimes referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, measures student performance in fourth and eighth grades.

“In 2013, 46 percent of Philadelphia eighth-graders scored below basic, and 35 percent scored basic. Below basic is a score meaning that a student is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at his grade level.

“Basic indicates only partial mastery. It’s a similar story in reading, with 42 percent below basic and 41 percent basic. With this kind of performance, no one should be surprised that of the state of Pennsylvania’s 27 most poorly performing schools on the SAT, 25 are in Philadelphia.”

In other words, despite the cheating by teachers, Philadelphia students are failing in virtually every measurable way. Williams goes on to explain that things are even worse for black students, in particular, pointing to a systemic problem in the district that goes far beyond test cheating. Philadelphia school teachers and administrators are literally cheating students out of a proper education, and the impact is the worst on black students.

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Physically changing students’ test scores is only the latest and most obvious way teachers have cheated Philadelphia students. The district has awarded fraudulent diplomas to students for years, Williams wrote.

“When a student is given a high-school diploma, that attests that he can read, write and compute at a 12th grade level, and when he can’t do so at the eighth-grade level, that diploma is fraudulent.

“What makes it so tragic is that neither the student nor his parents are aware that he has a fraudulent diploma. When a black person is not admitted to college, flunks out of college, can’t pass a civil service test or doesn’t get job promotions, he is likelier to blame racial discrimination than his poor education.

“Politicians, civil rights organizations and the education establishment will do nothing about the fraud. In fact, they give their full allegiance to the perpetrators,” Williams wrote.