Dozens of educators in 11 schools in south Georgia’s Dougherty County either cheated or failed to prevent cheating on state standardized tests in 2009, state investigators said Tuesday.

The state report describes the misconduct as “disgraceful,” pointing to one fifth-grade teacher who said her students could not read but still performed well on a Criterion-Referenced Competency Test. In all, 18 educators admitted to cheating, but investigators say 49 were involved in some way with misconduct in the district, which has about 15,000 students.

Investigators said there were likely “far more” educators involved in cheating.

“There are skilled, dedicated and well-meaning educators in this school system,” the investigators wrote. “But their work is often overshadowed by an acceptance of wrongdoing and a pattern of incompetence that is a blight on the community that will feel its effects for generations to come.”

District Superintendent Joshua Murfree said he wants all educators who cheated out of the school district, either through resignation or firing. Some of those teachers will not return to the classroom after Christmas break, he said.

“This won’t be a Band-aid approach,” he said in a phone interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday night. “This is system that has been broken, a system that has hurt children.”

Murfree said the schools will offer extra academic help to any student who could have been affected by the cheating. Investigators estimate that hundreds of children likely had their tests tampered with by educators.

Last month the district created a nine-member tribunal of people from outside the county to hold hearings for each educator named in the report.

“We are committed to removing anybody involved in cheating from Dougherty county school system,” said school board member David Maschke.

According to the investigation, teachers reported being ordered by principals to change answers from wrong to right after students handed tests in or pointing out correct answers to students during the exams. One teacher would call her students to her desk, show them correct answers in the test key and instruct them to change wrong answers on their sheet, investigators found.

The investigators said former Superintendent Sally Whatley, who left the district in 2010, did not know about the cheating but was ultimately responsible for it. In August, Whatley told reporters that any cheating is her responsibility because it happened on “my watch.”

A listed phone number for Whatley could not be found.

Gov. Nathan Deal called the investigators’ findings “alarming.”

“The findings out of Dougherty County are alarming as they paint a tragic picture of children passed through with no real or fair assessment of their abilities,” Deal said. “To cheat a child out of his or her ability to truly excel in the classroom shames the district and the state.”

The results of the investigation are being sent to the state Professional Standards Commission, which could revoke the teaching licenses of the educators involved. The probe will also be sent to Dougherty County District Attorney Greg Edwards for possible criminal charges.

Edwards could not immediately be reached for comment.

Georgia schools Superintendent John Barge called the state’s report “another sad case of adults putting personal interests above those of their students.” He said the state Department of Education would work with Dougherty County to provide extra support and academic help for the hundreds of students affected by the cheating.

The Albany Herald first reported the results of the state’s investigation Monday night. The probe has been ongoing for more than a year after then-Gov. Sonny Perdue launched investigations in both Dougherty County and Atlanta Public Schools.

He appointed former state Attorney General Mike Bowers, former DeKalb County District Attorney Bob Wilson and former Atlanta police investigator Richard Hyde.

The investigators found widespread cheating in more than half of Atlanta’s 100 schools, implicating nearly 200 educators. So far, no criminal charges have been filed in Atlanta against those educators, but eight teachers and three school administrators have lost their teaching licenses.

The testing problems in Atlanta schools first came to light after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that some scores were statistically improbable. The state released audits of test results after the newspaper published its analysis.

In Dougherty County, about 170 miles south of Atlanta, investigators conducted 650 interviews. In three interviews, school principals refused to answer questions after employees said they were told to cheat to improve students’ scores.

The standardized tests are used to determine whether schools met federal benchmarks under the No Child Left Behind law. Schools that consistently miss targets face sanctions, while those that perform well get additional federal funding.

———

Follow Dorie Turner at http://www.twitter.com/dorieturner.

For more on this story and other local news, subscribe to The Valdosta Daily Times e-Edition, or our print edition.