A ‘Cheating Ring’ Of Educators Has Been Busted

Led by their ring leader, the school’s principal, a ‘cheating ring’ of teachers at a school in Richmond, Virginia has been busted.

In 2016, George W. Carver Elementary School in Richmond, Virginia received the prestigious National Blue Ribbon Award from the U.S. Department of Education.

Now, however, that prestige is being called into question after a group of teachers–led by their principal–has been caught helping students left their test scores.

Led by the school’s principal, Kiwana Yates, a select group of teachers administered state accountability tests and provided “inappropriate assistance” to students, according to the findings of a two-month Virginia Department of Education investigation released Monday.

The results cast a shadow over a high-poverty school once seen as a bright spot in an underperforming system, where less than half of schools meet the state’s full standards for accreditation.

“It presents abundant evidence of what amounts to cheating by a small group of adults on the SOL examinations for the past several years at Carver,” Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras said in a letter. “To be clear: our students did nothing wrong; they merely followed the instructions of the adults responsible for them.”

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