By Victor Skinner
EAGnews.org

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – It’s like an epidemic.

Teachers and administrators in Atlanta schools were the first to get caught manipulating student test scores to make themselves look better. Since that scandal broke in 2011, EAGnews has covered similar problems in Oklahoma City, Pennsylvania, Texas, Ohio and other areas.

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Now, this disgusting plague is creeping up in Montgomery, Alabama.

“Data entry specialists working at two Montgomery high schools said they witnessed school administrators routinely violating system policy in order to help students achieve higher grades with little or no work, and both specialists said they reported the actions to their superiors within Montgomery Public Schools,” the Montgomery Advertiser reports.

“I was told to change grades or I would be considered insubordinate. I was written up when I refused to break the rules,” Edwina Riddlespringer, a data entry specialist, told the Advertiser. “When I went to report what was happening, I was threatened with job abandonment.”

Riddlespringer said she reported the incidents to the district’s assistant superintendent Lewis Washington and human resources director Ann Sippial. Tina Fleming, the other data specialist making similar claims of cheating administrators, complained to her supervisor in computer services, the newspaper reports.

After repeatedly trying to raise red flags and being told to essentially keep their mouths shut, the women are providing the Advertiser with documentation and other evidence to back up their stories. Other students and teachers in Montgomery schools are substantiating their claims.

The school district, meanwhile, won’t respond to the allegations.

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“MPS board counsel James ‘Spud’ Seale has advised that the board, superintendent and staff should refrain from discussing the grade-changing allegations and allow the investigative process to take its course,” Superintendent Barbara Thompson told the Advertiser.

In some other districts where cheating allegations have surfaced, some teachers union officials and public school administrators have attempted to blame the problem on the pressures of standardized testing, which can determine funding and other resources for schools. They need to cheat to make the progress that’s expected of them, some have argued.

But we think it’s a load of baloney. School employees in Atlanta, Texas, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma City, Ohio and Alabama know it’s wrong. They know it’s hurting students. But they do it anyway; to make themselves look good because it’s much easier than putting in the hard work necessary for real gains.

As we’ve said many times before, the cheaters must be fired and never allowed in classrooms again.