The Clarence Mumford case broke thirteen years ago; I was one of the few people who wrote about the arrest, which didn’t leave a splash. The indictments sparked two days of Twitter snark about ‘dumb’ teachers cheating on credential tests. Then uncomfortable details emerge and discussion stops. Few follow-ups other than dry recitations of judicial outcomes. Reporters, quick to Google a subject’s history, conveniently skip these details when the story resurfaces. So, for example, when Cedrick Wilson Sr, ex-NFL wide-receiver, was hired as a high school coach just five years later, the reports didn’t mention that he’d paid Clarence for someone else to take a credential test for him.

In October 2024, just a year ago, the Texas teacher cheating arrests hit the news. I only learned about it not through Twitter or Real Clear Education, but when my phone mentioned it in between zucchini recipe innovations, Southwest policy change outrages, and updates on major 70s rock bands. As with the Mumford case, local coverage was thorough—one outlet had a detailed explanation of the cheating process before October ended. The list of offending teachers and their district employers has been continually updated since December, with another burst of stories in February when 60 more teachers were identified. The NYTimes, CNN and NBC covered it briefly, but it’s not like cheating American teachers are a missing plane from Malaysia.

When I first read about the Texas fraud ring, I checked Grok for Mumford updates (there weren’t any). In responding, Grok mentioned almost offhandedly (OK, not really, but it *felt* kind of “by the way”) yet another criminal collaboration on teacher credential tests from the late 90s. Long before online testing, prospective Arkansas teachers were allowed to leave the Praxis testing center and take the test in a kitchen with a helper. This story received almost no coverage. Catherine Gewertz’s 1998 Edweek article remains the best overview of the Arkansas test scam available online, as follow-ups were nonexistent. Democrat-Gazette archives, locked behind a paywall, offer more details on the teachers and ringleader Linda Easter.

Arkansas, Mumford, Texas—three scams. Each a decade apart. Each went unnoticed for years.

There may be others escaping detection. Still, there’s reason to believe the Arkansas case might be the earliest. Credential tests for elementary school teachers only became required in the 90s, so the timing tracks.

On the other hand, ETS didn’t report cases of cheating so the legal system would never have been involved in earlier cases. A NY Times exposé on ETS’s failure to investigate an unrelated cheating case likely forced the company to tighten oversight.

These cheating rings all have several common aspects:

• The scandals went on for a long time unnoticed.

• A public school administrator, usually a vice principal, was involved, either running the program or finding candidates willing to pay.

• All the known cheating rings took place in the southern US.

• All relied on either impersonation (someone else took the test) or, in the earliest case, taking the testers to another location where the designated “smart man” just provided the answers.

• In two of the three cases, the testing-site administrator was part of the cheating ring. In the 2012 case, Mumford created fake ids, removing the need for a complicit administrator.

The discovery of the fraud varied. In the 1998 case, the ETS noticed that very similar wrong answers appeared on tests taken the same day at Philander Smith College. They notified the FBI, which arrested and then “flipped” Linda Easter, the test administrator and professor, to get evidence on everyone else. In the Mumford case, it was the test-site staff who uncovered the scheme, when James Bowen showed up twice in one day—impersonating a male tester in the morning, then returning in the afternoon with the driver’s license of a female tester. (Presumably, he wasn’t pretending to be a woman.) ETS investigated for a year, then turned it over to the FBI.

Since Texas writes its own credential tests, the fraud, discovery, and prosecution all remained local. All the teachers were from Texas. The Texas Education Agency was tipped off to the fraud, identified the process, and caught the imposter tester (and assistant principal) Nick Newton in the act. The overworked impersonator was taking two tests simultaneously on two different workstations.

The Mumford fraud broke very early in my personal blogging history. But I was already so thoroughly steeped in credential test knowledge that I could instantly spot the collaborators’ connection. That common thread wasn’t addressed in the Mumford story. Nor was it discussed in the recent Texas conspiracy. The connection explaining the partnerships and their cause goes so thoroughly unnoticed that I can’t affirmatively state the pattern as fact, even though it is oh-so-obviously true. The news reports don’t state directly what is screamingly obvious. To accept the reality, people rely on cultural tendencies, common sense, and what I’ll call psychological credibility:

The three cheating rings were almost certainly run by and for the benefit of black Americans.

None of the stories on any of these cheating rings mention this….well, I can’t really call it a fact because the media doesn’t even mention race. Still, consider the various aspects.

Look at the names: Jeryl Shaw, Darcel Gardner, Jadice Moore from the Mumford case. Altermease Brown and Orlando Gales from Arkansas. Shavodrick Beaver, Devonta Burns, TyQuandrick Conner, and Taisha Holt from Texas. Not all have distinctively African American names, but even this partial list shows the pattern is clear

White pass rates on the Praxis Multiple Subjects test run 75-82%. Black pass rates? Much, much lower. Statistically, “failing the elementary teacher credential test” and “black college graduate” are highly correlated.

The ringleaders ran operations at majority-black schools: Washington B.T. (50% black, 50% Hispanic), the disaster that was L.C. Humes Junior High, and Philander Smith College, an HBCU. The paid impersonators who got photographed? Black.

The psychology tracks as well. Would desperate white teacher candidates really seek out black impersonators? Would black administrators risk felony charges to help white candidates pass—even for money? I couldn’t determine whether Stanley White, the 41-year-old machinist from Leland, Mississippi who served as the “smart man” for the Arkansas ring, was black. But a black man without a degree taking pride in helping others succeed and, by extension, help black children? That seems credible. A white guy doing the same, especially for very little money? Not so much.

And then, of course, there’s the dog that didn’t bark. Call it the Ann Coulter Variant. If white teachers were paying to pass the credential tests, there wouldn’t be media silence.

The silence would be irritating evidence of media gatekeeping even if there weren’t clear policy implications in these stories. But in context, the refusal to engage with these cheating rings is damaging, because an open discussion of the motivations in play would connect to many other factors under regular discussion in teacher qualification considerations.

In no way am I advocating an end to the teacher credential tests. We must have a basement set on teacher ability.

Texas doesn’t agree, though.

For the past decade, Texas has allowed districts to employ “uncredentialed teachers” through its District of Innovation loophole. Uncredentialed teachers either haven’t taken a sequence of education classes or haven’t passed the required credential exam for their subject. Looping these two requirements together with an either/or is much the same as a doctor saying “well, either it’s a hangnail or it’s cancer.”

Ed school classes aren’t a meaningful restriction on subject matter knowledge, to put it mildly. The credential tests are. It’s one thing to hire welding instructors who haven’t taken Adolescent Development. Quite another to hire academic teachers who haven’t passed the subject matter test.

But that’s exactly what Texas has been doing. Haven’t passed the test? No problem—get hired at a District of Innovation. Of the 30,000 teachers hired in 2024-25, fewer than half were certified. In most cases, the failure was tests, not training. Over a thousand Texas districts of the roughly 1,500 are Districts of Innovation.1

Hundreds of teachers are being prosecuted or fired for cheating when many could have simply been hired by districts that don’t require the test scores they were paying for. It’s reminiscent of the Atlanta scandal, where hundreds of teachers were prosecuted for creating fraudulent student test results to save their jobs—only to see the “high expectations” driving those demands evaporate a few years later.

And they’re all, or mostly, black.

I share these details not to criticize or defend cheating teachers—I don’t condone their actions—but to highlight the lack of reported context in each of these stories.

The initial coverage feeds the reformer propaganda machine who hoot about how stupid teachers are that can’t pass simple tests without cheating. Interest fades as it becomes clear that the implication is really “Black people are dumb.” To the extent the national media covers the stories at all, they treat them as isolated scandals, never as recurring rings that pop up every decade, never as evidence of a deeper pattern. One or two quick hits, then back to lamenting the shortage of teachers of color and the cycle of states raising credential standards only to lower them again. Left unmentioned in these stories are those very cheating scandals as well as the abysmally low black pass rates on the credential tests, or the uncomfortable fact that affirmative action pushes many of the most academically capable black college graduates into fields other than teaching, shrinking the available pool for black teachers even further.

The final unpleasant reality to toss into the mix: research consistently fails to find any meaningfully large correlations between teacher ability and student outcomes, while consistently succeeding in finding meaningful positive impacts when black students have black teachers.

When the Mumford story first broke, I suggested that researchers explore the student outcomes of those fraudulent teachers to see if they are noticeably different from teachers who did pass the tests. No one has taken up that suggestion yet. But then, no one is acknowledging that the test cheaters are all black.

Cheating is bad. I don’t approve. But a paragraph from Wrong Answer, a New Yorker article about that widespread Atlanta school testing fraud, in which teachers and principals spent hours changing all the student answers to meet absurd test score requirements, has always stayed with me:

“Righton Johnson, a lawyer with Balch & Bingham who sat in on interviews, told me that it became clear that most teachers thought they were committing a victimless crime. “They didn’t see the value in the test, so they didn’t see that they were devaluing the kids by cheating,” she said. …those who cheated at Parks were never convinced of the importance of the tests; they viewed the cheating as a door they had to pass through in order to focus on issues that seemed more relevant to their students’ lives.”

Those teacher candidates who committed fraud to get their credentials wanted to work at a demanding, often soul-crushing job. They wanted to teach in some of the country’s most desperately poor schools, helping students who often spent the year with rotating substitutes because so few people who could pass the tests were interested in teaching in these schools. I find the constant of black school administrators serving as ringleaders very significant. Sure, they made money. But they almost certainly saw themselves as helping their schools.

Just as the Atlanta teachers didn’t see value in the tests they so thoroughly laundered, so too does it seem credible that black administrators and desperate black teacher candidates would see the test as a meaningless obstacle, “a door they just had to pass through to focus on issues that seemed more relevant”—helping black kids learn, staffing schools that many teachers who don’t struggle to pass the test also don’t want to teach at, and making communities stronger.

It’s easy to romanticize this too far. It’s not easy, at least for me, to dismiss their motives entirely.