Cheating in schools was in the news this week. But it was not students cheating, it was administrators and teachers.

In Atlanta, a former superintendent was among 35 educators indicted following a grand jury investigation that looked into suspicious results on standardized state tests in the Atlanta Public Schools.

The investigation, triggered by reports in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about unusual peformance jumps in standardized tests, found extensive cheating by administrators, teachers and testing coordinators. The grand jury learned that pizza parties were held while teachers changed wrong answers to right answers. In some cases, teachers changed answers in the classrooms, other times they falsified the tests outside the classroom.

Former Atlanta superintendent, Beverly Hall, who retired in 2011, is the highest raking official charged in the cheating scandal. Hall reportedly put pressure on administrators and teachers throughout the distrit to boost test scores by any means. The dramatic improvements in student test scores earned Hall about $500,000 performance bonuses. The remarkable turnround story of the schools in her district, populated by mostly poor, inner-city, African-American children, earned Hall the superintendent of the year award from the American Association of School Adminstrators. Her turnaround story also earned her a trip to the White House.

On Tuesday, 35 indicted school officials turned themselves in at the Fulton County Jail to face charges.

In Philadelphia this week, two former city school principals turned in their professional certifications for their part in a cheating scandal revealed after a two-year investigation by the state Education Department. In the Philadelphia case, an unusually high rate of wrong-to-right erasures on the standardized test knows as the PSSA, prompted the investigation.

State investigators found evidence of tampering on PSSA tests in 15 district or charter schools. And the clues were not subtle; one school saw third-grade math scores jump from 26 percent proficiency one year to 73 percent proficiency the next year.

There are good reasons to continue the debate over the best way to evaluate student progress and about the role of standardized tests in rating teachers. But the national teachers’ union is wrong in blaming standardized tests for these cheating scandals.

Reacting to the Atlanta cheating scandal, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, first said that cheating cannot be condoned, but added that the cheating scandal “crystallizes the unintended consequences of our test-crazed policies.”

That attitude will not sit well with most Americans who do not accept that standarized tests force teachers and administrators to cheat.

Testing is necessary to measure student progress as well as to gauge teacher effectiveness. There are many factors to consider in rating teachers and standardized tests should not be the only measure of a teacher’s capabilities. In addition, it might be true that today’s children are required to take too many standardized tests and duplicate testing should be eliminated.

Regardless of the alleged shortcomings of any test’s design or the number of standardized tests, there can be no excuse for administrators or teachers cheating. It cheats taxpayers who expect schools to educate children — and not fudge test results. It also cheats the children, who are not learning.