This summer the New Yorker magazine carried a major article on cheating in US schools. Rachel Aviv’s 9,000-word story is a masterpiece of long-form reporting. 

I’d encourage anyone to read the piece on the New Yorker website. It’s important in itself, but also has a serious lesson for Britain. 

Aviv tells the story of teachers in one school in Atlanta, Georgia, who ended up cheating to meet the targets set in the US’s No Child Left Behind act. They meant well, but did wrong. 

Aviv shows the Atlanta case is part of a wave of fake results created by No Child Left Behind. The bad news is British school reforms are modelled on No Child Left Behind. 

Our laws imitate theirs, which means we too are very likely to be sitting on similar educational fraud. School reform has created a fake “improvement” in the US, involving both good-hearted and bad-minded teachers and officials. We might be building the same fool’s paradise in our schools.

The New Yorker story focuses on one secondary school in Atlanta. Teachers were improving a weak school in a tough neighbourhood but not enough to stave off the threat of the US equivalent of special measures. 

They slowly slipped into ever more cheating until a group of teachers were systematically changing pupils’ exams, breaking into offices and altering papers, erasing wrong answers and pencilling in the right ones. 

One teacher recalls: “I couldn’t believe what we’d been reduced to.”

The context was the No Child Left Behind Act which applies “a series of escalating sanctions, including state monitoring, a revised curriculum, replacement of staff and restructuring or closure of the school” to schools who don’t get ever -improving results. 

The local authority was run by one of the “reformers who believed that the values of the marketplace could resuscitate public education. She approached the job like a business executive: she courted philanthropists, set accountability measures and created performance objectives.” 

The headmaster was obsessed with the stats. The teachers were making improvements. But not enough to meet the bureaucratic demands for results. Cheating spread through the system like an infection. 

Children arrived from junior schools with strong results that didn’t match their performance. Secondary teachers assumed the primaries had artificially improved their results. 

So to show enough “improvement” for these children, they began cheating at the edges. First they started “teaching to the test,” bending their lessons to what was likely to appear in the many exams. 

Soon they were getting illicit early copies of the test papers and exclusively teaching the necessary answers. But to show annual improvement on the fixed tests, they had to fix even more, until slowly they were actually physically altering test papers with rubber and pencil. 

Along the way some whistleblowing teachers and secretaries, and even a guilty head, tried to tell officials what was happening. 

But local authority managers who were getting bonuses and being celebrated at events throughout the state did not want to know. They turned a deaf ear to the whistleblowers. 

Finally, in 2009, the local newspaper, the Atlanta Journal, showed that school test improvements throughout the state were statistically improbable. The improvements and patterns in the Criterion Referenced Competency Tests —their version of Sats tests — strongly indicated fakery. 

A subsequent state investigation found the cheating was taking place at 44 out of 56 secondary schools in the state. Investigators found a “culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation has infested the district, allowing cheating — at all levels — to go unchecked for years.”

All the obsession with numbers and improvement had just erected a vast illusion, a stage set, displaying schools that returned better results without actually improving. 

The testing hadn’t been matched by new investment in schools. Nor was there any investment in welfare services for children from poor communities. 

The number-crunching “reformers”  just created a “feedback loop” based on an epidemic of lying and bullying. 

The children did no better and many teachers were ruined. School administrators and heads are currently being charged with fraud and racketeering.

Atlanta is far from the only schools scandal of this kind in the US. Similar reports are found in dozens of cities and most of the 52 states, which is worrying because No Child Left Behind is the model for our school reforms. 

Instead of real investment in schools or child welfare, or real concern for education, there is just a ratchet of tests and “special measures” and takeovers and academisation and “executive heads” helicoptered in to drive more tests.

And already we hear reports of this fake “reform” creating phoney “results.” 

The fake “Trojan horse” letter says that Tina Ireland, headteacher of a Birmingham junior school, had been sacked as part of the Islamist conspiracy. 

But this July Ireland admitted widespread faking of Year 6 maths Sats results to boost the schools league table position. She resigned from the school after a probe into these fake Sats results. 

She is far from the only schoolteacher driven to faking results by the testing regime.  

The British government’s standard and testing agency has actually reported increasing faked Sats and other results. The number of “maladministration” cases where schools tests were tampered with went up by 26 per cent to 370 cases in the latest annual figures.

Fraud began to flow through the US system when kids with artificially high results arrived from primary in secondary schools, causing a kind of ratchet of cheating, with inflated grades in junior schools pumping up yet more grade inflation in high schools.

We can see the spread of questionable techniques into British secondary system too. Last month the Observer reported that academy schools run by a Michael Gove-backed “superhead” got advance notice of supposedly surprise Ofsted inspections. 

They used the advance notice to create a false impression of “improvement.” 

In one case, at Ormiston Victory School in Norwich, the Observer reported the school had drafted in teachers who did not previously work at the school to do example lessons for Ofsted inspectors. 

The very real danger here is that the testing regime has erected a number of “Potemkin villages” — schools that look good on paper, but are not really improved at all. 

Instead of improving education, the testing regime has just improved the art of forgery.