Stacey Moskowitz began teaching third grade at Community Elementary School 90 in the Bronx, N.Y. in 1990.  "I like children," she says. "I enjoy watching them learn the things you need to do to succeed in life." She learned how to succeed on the school's terms. She says the principal's assistants gave her a list of students along with the order "to make sure they passed" standardized reading exams. On the morning of the exams, they gave her a cheat sheet. The students put their answers first on loose-leaf paper, and she could check them before they filled in the bubble sheets. "It was kind of like the Mafia, once you were in, you were in." she said, explaining why she went along with the school's cheat system. Ms. Moskowitz found her way out of the "Mafia" by going undercover and taking part in a 17-month probe that has exposed a shameful side of New York City's public school system. "It's important for them to do what the teacher wants; they need to think the teacher is looking out for their best interests," says Moskowitz. "At that age, in the third grade, I don't think they had any clue." Edward Stancik, a special investigator, says that two principals and 50 other educators at 32 elementary and middle schools helped students cheat on standardized tests. He says some teachers hinted broadly at correct answers while students were taking the test, some used the scrap-paper to avoid the multiple erasures that often indicate cheating; a few even changed answers after their students turned in the exams. Some teachers, particularly in the early grades, are increasingly being measured by the test scores of their students and can lose their jobs if student performance is too low and shows no sign of improvement. I did my research and I found out that this isn't only happening in New York but in Georgia, Texas and Illinois as well. 

 A schoolteacher in Atlanta was caught distributing advance copies of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, and another in northern Georgia was cited when seven of his special-ed students scored a perfect 600 on the language portion of the test. Dan Erling is a respected sixth-grade math instructor in Atlanta he resigned in disappointment over what he felt was "rampant cheating". Last year 40 cases of educator cheating were brought before Georgia's standards commission, compared with only three the previous year. The state of Texas is currently investigating 38 schools because of a high number of erasures on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. That crackdown follows the indictment last spring of an Austin school district for tampering with the results of the state test. And in Chicago, a high school English teacher was fired this year after he published six newly designed tests in an underground newspaper to protest high-stakes testing. Educators who help their students cheat are a tiny minority. The teacher's union leaders argued the cheating charges in New York City last week, claiming they were based on the unproved allegations of children. Still, the temptation to cheat seems to be growing among teachers, who are being held accountable if their students don't measure up. "Anytime you have this kind of mounting pressure about getting children to a standard," says New York City's school chancellor, Rudy Crew, "it shouldn't come as any wonder that there are going to be people who will find a creative way of cheating." Crew argues that such incidents do not mean the tests should be abandoned, though others disagree. "The country has gone test crazy," says Robert Schaeffer, a director at FairTest, an organization that monitors standardized testing. "The more you ratchet up the pressure on these Trivial Pursuit types of exams, the more cheating you will see." Many of the kids did not even know they were cheating. They were just following the teacher's orders.