Report: APS cheating scandal had ‘moderate’ impact on children, disproportionately hurt black students

• Joeff Davis/CL File
• APS Superintendent Meria Carstarphen

It’s widely believed that Atlanta Public Schools’ historic cheating scandal hurt thousands of students whose test scores were inflated. It forced one of the nation’s most revered superintendents to resign, led to convictions of educators found guilty of racketeering, and turned the school system into a textbook case on the perils of high-stakes testing. A new academic report offers greater insight into how much inflated test scores hurt APS students.

APS Superintendent Meria Carstarphen, who commissioned a study from Georgia State University Professor Timothy Sass, last night released a report titled “The Long-Run Effects of Teacher Cheating on Student Outcomes.” Carstarphen briefly discussed the report at this week’s Atlanta Board of Education meeting. She said the study, which tracked a total of approximately 3,800 students who had five or more answers changed from wrong to right on tests, was designed to gather data on students to help the district “restore credibility” following the cheating scandal.

“We continue to address the impacted students’ needs and ensure they are supported through graduation,” Carstarphen said in a statement. “This administration, from day one, has supported a student-centered agenda and is focused on our mission to create a caring culture of trust and collaboration, where every student will graduate ready for college and career.”

According to the study, students affected by cheating experienced “negative consequences” for their subsequent reading and english/language arts CRCT scores. How much? A “moderate” amount, the report says. Sass says children on average were set back between “one‐fourth to one‐half of the average annual achievement gain” of a middle school student. In other words, the cheating had the same negative impact as a student being taught by a first-year teacher compared to a teacher with five or more years of experience. The findings were mixed for math scores, the study says.

“There is little evidence that teacher cheating had any deleterious effects on subsequent student attendance or student behavior,” Sass writes. “Any impacts that may have occurred were very small.”

The study also found that cheating “disproportionately impacted black students” in the classroom. More than 97 percent of the APS students affected by cheating were black — 21 percentage points higher than the overall percentage of black students in the school district. Most of those students are now attending high school, with some falling behind in school.

In a statement, Carstarphen notes APS has already offered students affected by cheating an accelerated academic recovery program, after-school tutoring, weekend academies, parent workshops, and other opportunities. Some of those programs are still in effect today.

“We need time to get this right,” Carstarphen told the Atlanta Board of Education at its meeting on May 4. “We are indeed looking at every child.”

We’ve included a copy of the GSU report after the jump: