The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s education team is reflecting on some stories it wrote in 2023. Here’s the latest in this series.
When Jeremy Noonan was teaching for the Paulding County School District, he stumbled upon something that shocked him.
The science teacher had somehow — he said he didn’t understand how — acquired access to digital records that suggested something incredible was happening in the west metro Atlanta school system: Students were learning a semester’s worth of material in fewer than 24 hours.
Maybe learning isn’t the right way to put it. Rather, they were quickly testing out of online courses that offered a second chance at passing a class.
Noonan would soon accuse his bosses of condoning cheating, allowing students to take the tests at home, with minimal if any proctoring.
Paulding officials denied it was a significant issue and downplayed the scope. Noonan quit his job there last summer and now works at a private school.
Before leaving, he made and circulated a video that illustrated what had alarmed him in those student records.
Many school districts in Georgia offer online credit recovery, typically through a third-party platform like in Paulding.
Absent more teachers with similar access to testing records and a similar inclination to share the information, the public cannot know how common this is. But a couple of news outlets have picked up Noonan’s story since The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published it last spring.
Others have looked into the issue nationally since a 2016 AJC article on the issue. That one also involved Noonan, when he was teaching in Douglas County.
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