Crushed by a $1 billion education budget deficit, Chicago is closing 54 public schools, school district officials announced Thursday.

The official list of closings isn't due to be published until March 31, but parents were learning whether their schools were on the list in letters that were already being sent home with students.

The school district's chief executive, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, said the district is 20 percent under capacity — almost 100,000 students —  leaving many schools half-empty. The district will save $500 million to $800 million for each school that is closed, she has said in community forums and news interviews leading up to Thursday's announcement.

"We've got at least two decades of decay, of children not being able to receive the kind of education that they should," Byrd-Bennett told NBC 5 of Chicago.

Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, which has been protesting the coming cuts for weeks, said the closings would mean "utter chaos."

"This city cannot destroy that many schools," Lewis said in a statement. "These actions will put our students' safety and academics at risk and will further destabilize our neighborhoods."

Lewis blamed Mayor Rahm Emanuel for the schools' disarray, calling him "the murder mayor."

"He is murdering public services (and) murdering our ability to maintain public sector jobs, and now he has set his sights on our public schools," she said.

"But we have news for him: We don't intend to die. This is not Detroit."

The union has scheduled a citywide save-the-schools rally for Wednesday.

Emanuel said in a statement that Chicago couldn't afford to put off difficult decisions any longer.

"By consolidating these schools, CPS can focus on safely getting every child into a better performing school. Like school systems in New York and Philadelphia where schools are being closed, Chicago must make tough choices," he said. "Our children's futures are bright and consolidating schools is the best way to make sure all of our city's students get the resources they need to learn and succeed."

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A former Triton High School teacher pleaded guilty Thursday in relation to a sex-with-students scandal at the school in Camden County, N.J.

Former Triton High School Nick Martinelli, 28, of Cherry Hill, pleaded guilty Thursday to a fourth-degree count of hindering apprehension. In court he admitted to impeding the progress of investigators looking into an improper relationship he later admitted to having with a Triton student, according to a press release from Camden County Prosecutor's Office spokesman Jason Laughlin.

As part of his plea Martinelli isn't allowed to have contact with the former student and must forfeit his teaching certificate. He will receive a year of probation when he is sentenced on April 12, according to Laughlin.

Two other former teachers, Jeff Logandro, 32, of Blackwood, N.J. and Daniel Michielli, 27, also of Blackwood, both pleaded guilty in February to third-degree conspiracy to commit official misconduct after they carried on improper physical relationships with students that they held authority over, Camden County Prosecutor Warren Faulk announced in a press release at the time.

Both Logandro and Michielli will be sentenced Friday, prosecutors said.

Former Triton principal Catherine DePaul, 55, of Woodbury also pleaded guilty in February to a disorderly person charge of failure to report a crime, after she didn't report the teachers' alleged abuses to law enforcement, prosecutors said.

"It's obvious there existed a culture at Triton High School whereby teachers thought they could get away with improper relationships with their students and administrators turned a blind eye," Faulk said after the educators were arrested last year.

Prosecutors say that in April 2012 that a Triton student alerted a substitute teacher that teachers were having sex with students. In turn, that teacher told DePaul but prosecutors say that the principal failed to report the allegations to law enforcement.

As part of her plea, DePaul agreed to forfeit her job, never hold a public job in New Jersey again and serve one year of probation, prosecutors said.

The school’s vice principal, Jernee Kollock, still face charges.

Stephen Smith / American Public Media

Jennifer Larsen guides her third-grade class through a story-telling exercise at Edison Elementary School in Long Beach, Calif. She's one of three teachers at the school who coach other teachers on teaching writing.

Jandella Faulkner crouches beside a table of busy third-graders in Jennifer Larsen’s class at Edison Elementary School. The students have pencils in hand, outlines spread around them, and a story about penguins and otters in progress.

Faulkner stands to call across the room: “Loving how this group is already talking, Ms. Larsen.”  Then she swoops down on another table of young authors.

Jandella Faulkner is a teaching coach in the Long Beach, Calif., school district. Her job is to train a select group of teachers at Edison Elementary, including Jennifer Larsen, in a new literacy curriculum called Write From The Beginning.  It’s part of a district-wide training system that relies on teachers working with each other to improve classroom practices. So, with Faulkner’s help, Larsen and the other site coaches at Edison train their colleagues at the school how to use Write From The Beginning in their own classrooms.

Many American school districts rely heavily on outside experts, professional conferences and traveling consultants to conduct on-the-job training (also known as professional development). New York City, the nation’s largest school district, spent about $100 million last year on professional development consultants. In most cases, there’s little evidence to show whether the outside groups are helping schools improve, says Pamela Grossman, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.

“There is a lot of money spent on professional development that does not really support teachers in learning how to improve,” Grossman says.

Long Beach creates its own training teams. For years, the Long Beach Unified School District has had one of the nation's best-regarded professional development programs for new and veteran teachers, according to Stephanie Hirsh, executive director of Learning Forward, a national nonprofit organization focused on teacher education.

“Our system is really invested in building internal capacity,” says Jill Baker, the district’s assistant superintendent for elementary and K-8, and chief academic officer. “What that means is teachers become leaders and trainers. We’re not bringing someone in from the outside. We’re teaching teachers within to go back to their school sites to train others.”

'Ahead of the curve'
Professional development is seen as a critical component of many education reform initiatives. National studies show that good training programs are especially important in high-poverty districts like Long Beach, according to Learning Forward. With some 84,000 students, Long Beach is California’s third-largest district. Most of the students are from families of color. Some 70 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch, an indication that families live at or below the poverty level.

Education experts say that good, independent research on what constitutes professional development for teachers is relatively scarce. Even so, more than $1 billion is spent on teachers’ on-the-job training each year in the United States, according to an analysis of data collected by the U.S. Department of Education.

The Long Beach district is “ahead of the curve,” Pamela Grossman says. “Professional development that’s embedded in teaching and embedded in practice is likely to have more impact on what teachers do,” Grossman says. “A model where coaches are familiar with the schools, the districts and the curriculum ― and are therefore able to offer fairly tailored coaching ― has a better chance of moving practice along.”

Long Beach administrators credit the Write From The Beginning curriculum ― and the teacher training that accompanies it ― with turning around dismal test scores at many of the participating schools. District figures show that schools scoring at or below 20 percent proficiency in state writing tests have boosted their numbers above 50 percent since 2007. Some once-struggling schools have posted writing test results above 80 percent.

Long Beach administrators say there have been no independent, peer-reviewed studies of its professional development program. But the district has been a winner, and a five-time finalist, of the prestigious Broad Prize, given by the California-based Broad Foundation to recognize urban school districts that improve student academic performance and narrow achievement gaps between poor and more affluent students. The Broad Foundation cited the district’s professional development program as an essential element in Long Beach’s ability to outperform other high-poverty school districts in student achievement.  (Disclaimer: the Broad Foundation is among the funders of The Hechinger Report.)

Stephen Smith / American Public Media

Third graders at Signal Hill Elementary work on a writing assignment.

Writing 'so difficult to teach'
At Signal Hill Elementary, another Long Beach school, Principal Lauren Price points out that elementary school teachers must master a range of subjects, while middle and high school teachers specialize in single subject areas. Professional development is “essential” to keep teachers up to speed, she says. “Every year, researchers are learning more about the way kids learn and grow and develop,” Price says. “There are new and different ways to do things.”

The principal at Edison Elementary enlisted Jennifer Larsen and her colleagues, Kevin Quinn and Ruby Gaytan, to be the Edison site coaches for writing. They’re veteran teachers; all have been in the classroom 15 years or more. Each member gets 48 hours of training in the curriculum, starting with a summer workshop. Faulkner visits their classrooms about once a month. The Write From The Beginning curriculum was developed by Thinking Maps, a North Carolina education company.

“Writing was something that had been neglected for so many years because it was so difficult to teach,” Larsen says. “I saw this as something the kids really need.” Long Beach writing teachers are being trained to use graphical organizers ― the so-called “thinking maps” ― to help students organize their thoughts, describe characters, marshal evidence, come up with key words and plot other writing elements.

Fourth-grade teacher Ruby Gaytan points to a thinking map projected on her classroom wall with a list of qualities that describe Ivan, a character her students are writing about.  He wants to sell salt but is thwarted by a greedy king.  How to describe Ivan?  

“Broke, no money!” one student calls out.

“Determined!” another declares.

Gaytan directs her students to use their freshly minted list of adjectives in Ivan’s story of struggle. “If you can think it ...,” Gaytan prompts.

“You can say it,” the class responds in unison.

Gaytan says the off-hours training she gets with the writing curriculum keeps her fresh in the classroom. “The majority of teachers love to learn, that’s why we teach. It keeps me motivated,” Gaytan says.

Eye on Common Core standards
Kevin Quinn, also a fourth-grade teacher, says the training will help teachers stay “ahead of the game,” as Common Core State Standards are adopted by California schools in 2014.  The Common Core curriculum puts a heavy emphasis on student achievement in writing.

Larsen says the curriculum and the coaching have made her both a better writer, and a better writing teacher.  “I’m more aware when I’m reading aloud to the kids of all the great descriptions and the vivid language in every text,” Larsen says. “When I model writing for them, I express myself better.”

Coaches and teachers get paid for the time they spend on professional development, but Quinn and others describe it as “minimal compensation.” Meanwhile, the budget woes and accompanying teacher layoffs of recent years mean that Larsen, Gaytan and Quinn face classrooms of 30 children every day instead of 20.

“Whereas the majority of our staff wants to participate in the professional development, there is a lot of burnout,” Quinn says. “My workload has increased, my accountability has increased, but my discretionary time has not increased. So it becomes very difficult.”

Lisa Worsham, the head of English curriculum for K-5 schools in Long Beach, acknowledges that teachers are under stress. But she says professional development can help overcome the sense of isolation a busy teacher can feel. “There are a lot of us in the building, but we show up for work, we close our door, we teach all day, we’re exhausted, we leave the classroom and go home,” Worsham says. Without signing up for training, “there’s not a lot of opportunity to sit down with five other teachers and collaborate,” she says.

In addition to the in-class training, local site coaches meet four times a year with Jandella Faulkner at the district’s training center. Faulkner’s classroom is stocked with flip charts, baskets of colorful markers and a small mountain of sticky notes ― the raw materials of professional development workshops. A tall and magnetic figure, Faulkner encourages a group of nine site coaches to swap stories about what is working ― and what’s floundering ― back in their respective schools.

Faulkner holds up a training notebook. “When do you have the time to open up this binder and say, ‘what does my site need?’ This is your time to do it,” she declares.

Coaches as politicians
Coaching one’s colleagues can be a politically tricky enterprise. “It’s about having a rapport, really forming a relationship with each individual teacher,” says Jeff Lamperts of Willard Elementary.

Cheryl Hubert of Starr King Elementary, another site coach, says being a teacher in the local trenches gives her more credibility with her peers than some outside consultant who parachutes in. “They know who I am,” Hubert says. “They feel more comfortable with me than someone from a business [where they] think, what are they selling?”

Faulkner says many Long Beach teachers are eager to take up the new writing techniques that she’s helping to spread across the district. But not all. “We have teachers at the end of their careers say, ‘I’m not trying anything new.’ And convincing them to try something is a huge challenge,” Faulkner says.

At Lindsey Middle School, the language arts staff is using a similar literacy curriculum called Write For The Future And Beyond. The local site coaches at Lindsey get released from class nine days during a year for training. The district also sends teaching coaches to the school for in-class visits once a month or more, depending on how well the writing program takes hold, according to Stacy Casanave, a middle school literacy coach.

Lindsey teacher Shauna Hutchinson says the fat curriculum binder looked overwhelming at first. “But once you went to training they broke it down for you,” she says.

Another facet of the Long Beach professional development program is a close, long-standing relationship with the College of Education at California State University, Long Beach. School personnel help with teaching and research at Cal State. Students at Cal State do their student-teaching in Long Beach schools.

Historically, most of the district’s beginning teachers have been Cal State graduates, according to Jill Baker, the district’s assistant superintendent. The district requires newly minted teachers to go through a prescribed on-the-job training program in their first years. But California’s fiscal crisis and the Great Recession have caused the Long Beach school district to slash hundreds of millions of dollars from its budget, laying off hundreds of teachers and cutting programs. Newer teachers were the first to go. Few beginners get hired.

Long Beach spends $5.4 million a year on professional development, less than 1 percent of the district’s $691 million budget. Professional development was cut nearly in half during and after the recession. In fiscal year 2006-07, 4,546 employees attended 11,763 training sessions. In fiscal 2011-12, 1,945 employees attended 6,982 sessions. Baker says the district has focused teacher training on areas that can have the most impact on how students learn. These include writing, mathematics and school behavior programs. There is less opportunity for individual teachers to select workshops or training programs in other areas such as creative arts and social studies.

“We’ve had to take a lot of things that we liked to do in the past and really narrow it down to what your students are showing us they need,” Baker says. “Professional development for teachers, and for principals as well, has been at the core of the work that we’ve done that has garnered results. “It’s part of the district culture, and it continues to work over time.”

This story was reported by Stephen Smith of American RadioWorks, in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a non-profit, foundation-funded education news site based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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DUNBLANE, Scotland — Thousands of miles from Newtown, Conn., a lone gunman walked into the elementary school of this Scottish town and murdered 16 children aged 5 and 6 along with their teacher.

That was 17 years ago, but memories of the incident, which led to a total ban on the private ownership of handguns in the U.K., are still raw in Dunblane.

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"Any shooting is tragic, but this one because of the age and because of the place is a painful reminder. I can picture myself waiting for the news and I can remember how I reacted."

When there are so many victims, so young, parents find comfort in each other, he said.  

Keir Simmons / NBC News

A memorial to the children of Dunblane.

"I can also remember the strength that we gained by meeting with the families," North added. "We found that we could say things in front of the other families that we could not say even to our closest friends, even to our relatives."

For teachers, school security jumps to forefront after Newtown shootings

Steve Birnie's son was injured in the shooting.  For him the challenge was to bring up his child amid such heartache.

"All we could do with our kids was be open and answer their questions as honestly as possible," Birnie said.

What happened was hard to comprehend, never mind explain: In March 1996, 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton entered Dunblane Primary School and shot more than a dozen children and a teacher.  After the murders, Hamilton killed himself. Tennis star Andy Murray, who won two Olympic medals and the U.S. Open this year, was among the children at school that day.  

The country reacted with revulsion and in 1997 laws were passed that essentially made private handgun ownership illegal throughout the United Kingdom. 

'The dreadful void'
Birnie now runs a young people's center, set up with money donated after the shooting. It was intended to provide some normality for children who had seen their community ripped apart. 

This week, members of the community lit candles at the center for the Newtown victims.  A condolence book is filling up with messages. 

Colin McIntosh, minister of Dunblane Cathedral, said he would never forget the week of funerals. He found himself burying children he had baptized.

Fierce debate after Newtown school shootings: Where was God?

"The week of funerals comes to an end and then the dreadful void," he told NBC News. "What happens now? What are we supposed to do? No one has an answer to that question."

One thing the families did was campaign for more restrictions on guns. 

David Moir / Reuters

A memorial plate with the names of the 1996 Dunblane Primary School shooting victims.

"It wasn't difficult in the U.K. because there were so many people who felt similar," North said. "When families built up enough strength we organised the campaign."

"Had it not been for the parents, handguns would still be legal," ex-police officer Munn added.  "It was the parents that changed it. It was people power."

But it's important not to lose focus on the families and the shock and pain they are feeling, McIntosh said.

"I hesitate at this very early stage for people who are going through traumatic experience to say, 'Yes, you will recover; yes, you will get over this.' But they will, there will be a future, there is hope."

Nervous parents send kids back to school in Newtown 

In a message to Newtown, posted on the cathedral website, he said: "We do not understand a world in which such things can happen. All we can say from experience is that God is not absent in those moments when the worst happens.

"Words themselves seem so inadequate, but we in Dunblane will continue to remember you in our prayers. "

Even after all these years, talking about what happened is difficult for many in Dunblane. But they spoke this week in the hope that it might help those going through the same in Newtown.

"I want to send my sympathy and love," North said.  "Our lives have changed forever, but I want to reassure you that there will be positive things that will come eventually. I can't and will never forget what happened, and it takes time, but strength can come from various places."

Every community is different and will find it's own ways of coping they say.

"We offer our support," Birnie added. "Dunblane has come through it and I hope Newtown will, too."

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Children return to school in Newtown, Conn., on Tuesday.

When Monday morning came — the first day back after a gunman killed 20 first-graders in Connecticut — Texas school teacher Kelly Froemming found herself looking at her classroom for its prospects as a bunker.

There was perhaps enough room for kids to hide under her desk and under a table. Her classroom door can be locked from the inside and she has an oversized filing cabinet that she could use as an additional barricade.

"We do have intruder drills," said Froemming, who teaches gifted students at a grade school in Plano, Texas. The mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary on Friday "makes it more real. It makes it scarier. You think about the logistics of what might happen and how you could protect the kids."

If the emotional toll for teachers was not enough, many are also reviewing security — racking their brains for ways to safeguard students, wondering whether the school is doing enough to deter intruders, pondering whether carrying weapons could help, hoping they would be heroic in the face of a threat, and wondering if any of it would make any difference in the face of a perpetrator determined to cause bloodshed.

"I've had some pretty dark thoughts as I’m standing there" in the classroom, said Benno Lyon, a sixth-grade science teacher at a school in Portland.

Fierce debate after Newtown school shootings: Where was God?

In the past four to five days, he says, he’s thought through everything on the safety spectrum — from "just hoping that it’s not us next time," to arming the whole staff. "What is in between those two extremes that might make sense?" he muses.

Many U.S. schools, public and private, have "lock-down" drills — like the intruder drills that Froemming mentioned — just as they have fire drills, and drills for natural disasters such as earthquakes and tornadoes. In general, this means classroom doors are locked, kids shelter in place — preferably away from windows, and if possible, out of sight — in storage rooms, closets, bathrooms.

After Friday’s devastating shootings, a national discussion board for teachers lit up with grief -- and discussions of "what if" the worst-case scenario unfolded in their own schools.

Like 'fish in an aquarium'
One telling thread started with a "safety survey" of four questions: "Do you have only one entry way to your campus? Can you close your classroom curtains and completely cover your windows? Does your classroom door have an inside locking mechanism? When was the last time you practiced a lockdown drill?"

"Wide open back campus with a fence anyone could jump," wrote one participant. "A gate in back fence, often left just open with a chain on it that small person could squeeze through. Houses on one side where people could hide, use something to climb on to jump the fence."

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"No way to cover many huge, low windows," wrote another. "My room is in the middle of a quad so we would be trapped and it would be like shooting fish in an aquarium."

"I keep (my door) locked and shut during the day, but the teacher in the room next to me, never locks his door or refuses to shut it," one teacher complained. "We share a hallway with bathrooms so, anyone going into his room has complete access to mine via the connecting bathrooms. The doors going to the bathrooms cannot be locked."

"No, my door doesn't have an inside locking mechanism, it can only be locked from the outside," wrote another. "We practice lockdowns regularly but … Nothing would have prepared us for what happened in Conn. There are 32 kids in my small room — no place to hide children."

Missy Dodds, a teacher in Maplewood, Minn., survived a school shooting in 2005 and has ever since been urging school officials to replace glass in and near classroom doors. A gunman entered her classroom by breaking the glass panel next to her locked door, then killed five of her students and a teacher. According to a report from NBC station KARE of Minneapolis, Dodds was horrified to learn that Adam Lanza, the gunman in the Connecticut school had reportedly used the same means to gain entrance to Sandy Hook Elementary.

Allow guns in schools?
There are some teachers — though none of those who spoke to NBC News for this report — who believe that teachers should be allowed to carry weapons to deter or halt school intruders.

"I am all for it," wrote a participant on the Texas section of the national teachers discussion forum. "That is, teachers with a concealed carry license to be able to exercise the same right to protect themselves and their charges that they do anywhere else. The reason mass killers target schools is because they know full well no one will be able to stop them … I hope Texas leads the way in recognizing reality and implementing common sense."

In Texas, a state representative-elect has proposed legislation that would allow Texas public schools to appoint trained and certified faculty members to carry a concealed firearm and to use the weapon in the event of an attack, according to a report from the Dallas Morning News. Similar legislation is being considered in Michigan.

Nervous parents send kids back to school in Newtown 

"In today's world, I'm a firm believer in an armed and properly trained teacher," wrote another forum participant who said their job was as a special education advocate. "It's unfortunate to say, but had there been an armed teacher in that building today, some of those people may have been saved."

But the teachers who agreed to interviews were adamant that teachers should not be armed, though some thought the idea of armed and trained security personnel in schools would be acceptable. The threat of accidental shootings or guns getting into a student's hands was too great, several said. Others said that wearing a gun sends the wrong message from people whose job is to educate and nurture students.

Slideshow: Newtown school massacre

David Friedman / NBC News

A nation mourns after the second deadliest school shooting in U.S. history at Sandy Hook Elementary, which left 20 children and six staff members dead.

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"How many teachers would shield their children with their bodies?" said Lyon of his fellow teachers. "All of them. How many would keep teaching if they had to carry a weapon?" He would not, he said, nor, he guessed, would many — if any — of his fellow teachers at the school.

"There is no reason whatsoever that a teacher should ever, ever bring a gun into school," said Joni Schultheiss, who teaches 11th grade in a New York City public school. "We are already acting as psychologists and counselors and teaching manners ... Please don’t make us soldiers also."

Video: Mental health bigger issue than guns, says congressman

"The (New York City) school district does a good job with security. But really, to protect everybody at all times, it would be like a prison," she said. "You can lock down the school, put bars on the windows. But you have to be realistic about what the school is for in the first place, and strike a balance."

Lyon warns of an "arms race" in school security and wonders what would happen "if you took all the resources it would take to lock down schools, and redirected that to comprehensive effort on handling people with mental health issues, and some reasonable gun regulations."

In Michigan, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder on Tuesday vetoed a bill that would have let some gun owners to bring concealed weapons to schools and day care centers, among other places, his office said. The bill passed the legislature the day before the Newton shootings, Reuters reported.

'Hyper-vigilant around the kids'
Noble Monyei, who works with a K-5 after-school program in Seattle, also questions whether there is a security approach that could really address the problem of a determined assailant and said the Connecticut tragedy will not change his outlook day-to-day.

"I think for me I’m always hyper-vigilant around the kids. I want to get them back to their parents in one piece," he said.

He thinks studying broader issues — like easy access to weapons, and gaps in mental health care — could lead to solutions. Short of that, and reasonable security precautions, Monyei says, it seems to be a matter of chance.

"I think there’s something out there, and it can happen anywhere. If that kind of craziness chooses you, there’s not much you can do."

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It was a brazen and surprisingly long-lived scheme, authorities said, to help aspiring public school teachers cheat on the tests they must pass to prove they are qualified to lead their classrooms.

For 15 years, teachers in three Southern states paid Clarence Mumford Sr. — himself a longtime educator — to send someone else to take the tests in their place, authorities said. Each time, Mumford received a fee of between $1,500 and $3,000 to send one of his test ringers with fake identification to the Praxis exam. In return, his customers got a passing grade and began their careers as cheaters, according to federal prosecutors in Memphis.

Authorities say the scheme affected hundreds — if not thousands — of public school students who ended up being taught by unqualified instructors.

Mel Evans / AP

Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Services writes and administers Praxis teacher certification examinations.

Mumford faces more than 60 fraud and conspiracy charges that claim he created fake driver's licenses with the information of a teacher or an aspiring teacher and attached the photograph of a test-taker. Prospective teachers are accused of giving Mumford their Social Security numbers for him to make the fake identities.

The hired-test takers went to testing centers, showed the proctor the fake license, and passed the certification exam, prosecutors say. Then, the aspiring teacher used the test score to secure a job with a public school district, the indictment alleges. Fourteen people have been charged with mail and Social Security fraud, and four people have pleaded guilty to charges associated with the scheme.

Mumford "obtained tens of thousands of dollars" during the alleged conspiracy, which prosecutors say lasted from 1995 to 2010 in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee.

Among those charged is former University of Tennessee and NFL wide receiver Cedrick Wilson, who is accused of employing a test-taker for a Praxis physical education exam. He was charged in late October with four counts of Social Security and mail fraud. He has pleaded not guilty and is out of jail on a $10,000 bond. He has been suspended by the Memphis City Schools system.

Charlie Riedel / AP

In this photo taken Friday, Nov. 23, Neal Kingston, director of the Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation at the University of Kansas, talks about testing fraud in his Lawrence, Kan., office.

If convicted, Mumford could face between two and 20 years in prison on each count. The teachers face between two and 20 years in prison on each count if convicted.

Lawyers for Mumford and Wilson did not return calls for comment.

Prosecutors and standardized test experts say students were hurt the most by the scheme because they were being taught by unqualified teachers. It also sheds some light on the nature of cheating and the lengths people go to in order to get ahead.

"As technology keeps advancing, there are more and more ways to cheat on tests of this kind," said Neal Kingston, director of the Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation at the University of Kansas. "There's a never-ending war between those who try to maintain standards and those who are looking out for their own interests."

Cheating on standardized tests is not new, and it can be as simple as looking at the other person's test sheet. The Internet and cell phones have made it easier for students to cheat in a variety of ways. In the past few years, investigations into cheating on standardized tests for K-12 students have surfaced in Atlanta, New York and El Paso, Texas.

Still, most of the recent test-taking scandals involved students taking tests, not people taking teacher certification exams. Cheating scams involving teacher certification tests are more unusual, said Robert Schaeffer, public education director for the National Center for Fair & Open Testing.

Schaeffer notes that a large-scale scandal involving teacher certification tests was discovered in 2000, also in the South. In that case, 52 teachers were charged with paying up to $1,000 apiece to a former Educational Testing Services proctor to ensure a passing grade on teacher certification tests.

Teachers from Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee and Mississippi took tests through Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark., in 1998. The college was not accused of wrongdoing.

Educational Testing Services also writes and administers the Praxis examinations involved in the Memphis case. ETS spokesman Tom Ewing said the company discovered the cheating in June 2009, conducted an investigation and canceled scores. The company began meeting with authorities to turn over the information in late 2009, Ewing said.

"These cases are rare, but we consider them to be very serious and something we have to guard against happening for all the honest test-takers, students and teachers," Ewing said.

Ewing said ETS observes test-takers and reviews test scores to try to root out cheaters. ETS also has received anonymous tips that have led them to cheaters, Ewing said.

Prosecutors in the Mumford case say he, the teachers and test-takers used the Internet and the U.S. Postal Service to register and pay for the tests, and to receive payment. The indictment does not say how much he allegedly paid the test-takers.

An experienced educator, Mumford was working for Memphis City Schools when the alleged scam took place. Authorities say Mumford defrauded the three states by making the fake driver's licenses.

"What happens at many testing centers is that a whole bunch of test-takers show up simultaneously, early on a Saturday morning, and the proctors give only a cursory look to the identification," Schaeffer said. "It's not like going through airport security where a guy holds up a magnifying glass and puts our license under ultraviolet light to make sure it has not been tampered with."

Mumford was fired after news of the investigation came out, and others, like Wilson, have been suspended. But at least three teachers implicated in the scandal remain employed with their school district.

Kingston, the university professor, said prospective teachers may not be confident in their knowledge base to pass the test. Or, the cheaters may believe they are smart enough to pass on their own but also know they are poor test takers.

Kingston said his research has shown that cheating on exams is getting more prevalent.

"The propensity to cheat on exams both through college and for licensure and certification exams seems to be increasing over time," said Kingston. "People often don't see it as something wrong."

The pressure of passing the test could make people do things they normally would not do. And it could take a while for authorities and test-taking services to catch up with the cheaters.

"When people come up with a new method for cheating, it takes some time for folks to figure it out, partly because this has been an understudied area in the field of assessment," Kingston said.

Nina Monfredo, a 23-year-old history teacher at Power Center Academy in Memphis, has taken Praxis exams for history, geography, middle school content, and secondary teaching and learning.

Monfredo, who passed all her tests and is not involved in the fraud case, said the exams she took were relatively easy for someone who has a high school education. She said some people use study aids to prepare, but she didn't. And she didn't feel much pressure because it was her understanding that she could take the test again if she did not pass.

"If you feel like you can't pass and you hire someone it means you really didn't know what you were doing," she said. "I think it would be easier to just learn what's on the test."