Four Educators Resign in Ga. Cheating Probe

State investigation leads to resignations of four educators

Two principals and two teachers in a Georgia district have resigned in the wake of a state investigation that showed widespread cheating on the 2009 administration of a state exam.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the same organization that examined cheating allegations in the Atlanta district, was in charge of the probe into the 16,000-student Dougherty school system. Both Atlanta and Dougherty had shown an unusual number of wrong-to-right erasures in an examination of the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, which the state uses to determine adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Then-Gov. Sonny Perdue, a Republican, ordered an investigation in August 2010, which has continued under the current Republican governor, Nathan Deal.

The report, which was released in two volumes last month, says investigators found evidence of cheating in at least 11 of 26 schools in the district, which serves a student population that is primarily low-income and African-American. Eighteen educators acknowledged in the report that they cheated, and several others were implicated by name. All the teachers who confessed to test tampering have been...