ATLANTA – A former Atlanta school teacher caught up in the district’s massive test cheating scandal in 2009 recently told prosecutors she essentially didn’t know cheating on student tests was bad.

Rose Neal, a former teacher at Dunbar Elementary School, testified against former colleagues Diane Buckner-Webb, Pamela Cleveland and Shani Robinson, who sat with Neal at the school’s computer lab and changed students’ answers to state tests in 2009.

Neal told prosecutors Monday that nobody, including test coordinator Lera Middlebrooks, told the teachers what they were doing was wrong or ordered them to stop, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

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“I wish they had, but no,” Neal said.

“Buckner-Webb, Cleveland and Robinson all face charges of racketeering and making false statements. A statewide analysis found an abnormally high number of wrong-to-right erasures on standardized tests taken by their students in 2009,” according to the news site.

Neal, who initially lied about her own involvement, said she “felt enough pressure and I had been called a liar enough until I just broke.”

Atlanta teachers were not explicitly told to cheat on the student tests, but were under the gun to ensure students met state performance goals.

“That meant ‘we need to do what we had to do’ to meet those targets,” the AJC reports.

Neal’s inference that teachers didn’t know what they were doing was wrong created a firestorm from the public online.

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“Someone had to tell her that cheating was wrong?” poster DownInAlbany wrote. “Geez, we are in worse trouble than I thought.”

“She is ‘supposedly’ a college educated adult. Do you really need to have someone tell you that cheating is wrong?” TEXAS DAWG posted. “Once again … it’s someone else’s fault.”

“Wow … that’s why it’s called ‘cheating’ … do we also need to explain to these teachers that stealing and murder are wrong too?” parbogey questioned.

“Stupid can’t be fixed!” Verylucrative wrote.

Neal’s comments to prosecutors follow testimony last week from Middlebrooks that she called teachers to the computer lab and another room to change answers after the school’s principal Betty Greene attended a regional meeting with supervisor Michael Pitts in 2008 and begged her to take over testing the following year, the AJC reports.

“Just do me this one favor. We have to make targets in 2009,” Middlebrooks told prosecutors Greene said.

Middlebrooks said she did not change answers, and didn’t actually witness teachers do the deed because her view was blocked.

The irony is Middlebrooks was under the impression that first and second-grade student performance counted toward No Child Left Behind federal goals the district was under pressure to meet, when in actuality it does not, according to the news site.