A grand jury indicted 35 staff members from Atlanta Public Schools March 29, including former national superintendent of the year Beverly Hall, according to CNN. The staff members are charged with racketeering, theft by taking and making false statements.

The scandal occurred after the state examined mysterious increases in test scores, which were allegedly due to cheating. 

James Martin, chemistry professor and Board of Education member, said he thinks scandals like these are due to programs like Race to the Top. Funded by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Race to the Top asks states to compete for funding by improving scholastic achievement and creating plans for reform.  President Barack Obama approved the program.

Making education a race increases the chance schools will try to use shortcuts to show improvement, Martin said. 

“Anything in education if you tell me it’s a race where you are going to get it done quickly, I’m going to look you in your face and tell you, ‘No, we’re not,’ or ‘It’s not going to be good education,’” Martin said. “You don’t race to education. Education is a slow, painfully slow process.”

Kenneth Bernstein, Daily Kos education contributor and a Washington Post Agnes Meyer Outstanding Teacher, said he’s not happy with RTT either.

“People with no experience in education are driving policy and they cannot understand what teaching and learning are,” Bernstein said.

Educators can’t reach an agreement on how RTT will affect education or how students will fare by the time they reach college. 

“Everything comes down to how it is implemented because policies don’t teach,” said Natasha Ushomirsky, K-12 Senior Policy and Data Analyst for Education Trust.

RTT must remain in compliance with No Child Left Behind, the most recent reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The 2001 act established national standardized testing and higher teacher credentials.

Supporters of the act expected 100 percent of students to reach proficiency in the areas of reading and math by 2014, but that goal will not likely be met.

Eighty-two percent of schools would fail under those standards, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told CNN in 2011. 

Bernstein said that “NCLB was based on a false premise” and that Race to the Top is NCLB “on steroids,” worsening the problem.

 Ushomirsky said schools under NCLB failed to meet standards if they missed one criterion for adequate yearly progress.  As a result, the government treated the lowest performing schools just the same as it would treat schools failing by a narrow margin.

“There was no differentiation,” Ushomirsky said.

Many also criticize No Child Left Behind for its emphasis on standardized tests.  Virginia, for example, lowered the number of correct responses needed for students to pass their middle school history examination, giving off an appearance of improvement, Bernstein said.  The exam, though, was not included in the adequate yearly progress calculation.

Other tactics to defy the system include not adding students—held back students or those who intended to acquire a GED after dropping out of high school—to the overall dropout rate, Bernstein said.  This contributed to the “Texas Miracle,” which formed the basis for NCLB after scores on Texas state tests rose, while dropouts decreased, according to CBS.

Scores rose because they were preventing certain students from taking the tests, Bernstein said.

“There needs to be [assessment] in education, but with the NCLB you needed to put a number to everything and so hence you get your standardized tests,” Martin said.

The focus on standardized tests created recognition-based learners rather than critical thinkers, Martin said.

 “In principal, we want NCLB absolutely in that we want to pay attention to the learning of all children, but narrowly defined basics-based education is not the way to improve learning,” Martin said. “The two-fold curse of NCLB was the mythology of the standardization – assign a number to everything and that tells you quality – and then secondly that you could do all this with existing resources, neither of which were true.”

NCLB was still a “big step forward” for students, according to Ushomirsky. The law required the nation to pay attention to outcomes and emphasized education for all groups of students for the first time. The act also made more data available for comparisons with other parts of the world.

The problem is NCLB sets different standards for each of the 50 states, Ushomirsky said.

“Now the conversation is shifting with the Common Core State Standards,” Ushomirsky said.

CCSS, developed by the National Governor’s Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, asks states to adopt the same standards across the nation. Forty-five states have followed suit. 

If implemented correctly, these standards could improve the rigor of school curriculums and increase college readiness.