INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. – A lot of state governments have started to demand accountability from public schools in recent years.

They want to see kids in class, getting passing grades and graduating on time.

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But how do state officials know when a school is cheating to meet state expectations and avoid the penalties that come with failure?

Perhaps when embarrassed teachers are leaving in droves, because they aren’t allowed to serve students in the manner they were trained to do.

A good case study may be John Marshall Community High School in the Indianapolis Public Schools district.

The Indianapolis Star recently reported that the teacher turnover rate at the high school – more than 25 percent of the staff each of the past two years –  is three times the average of Indiana high schools.

The newspaper interviewed three teachers who left the school and learned they departed because they said they were told to pass a large number of failing students on a regular basis.

The former teachers also said school officials regularly inflate attendance figures to make it appear as though they are meeting state standards.

In the end many teachers are simply turned off by the constant failure, and the pressure to lie about it, according to the teachers.

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“To feel that level of guilt — to go into a school where you want to teach and onto be and tell your students they shouldn’t be there — it’s not fair as a teacher, because you want the education you’re giving a student to be enough,” McClain Musson, who taught at Marshall for two years before resigning, told the newspaper. “What we were doing as teachers was never going to be enough.

“When I left, I said to some of the kids, ‘You need to leave. If you want the things you want out of your life, you have to leave here.’”

Why would such things be happening at Marshall High School?

“John Marshall Community High School, a chronically failing school that was nearly taken over by the state in 2012, raised its state-awarded letter grade from an F to a D in 2012-13 and has maintained a D since that time,” the Star said.

The obvious goal is to remain above an F and avoid state takeover.

Schools could pursue that goal the honest way, by encouraging students to attend class more regularly, and helping them master their academic challenges.

Or they can do what the three teachers accuse Marshall administrators of doing – making the situation appear better than what it is.

Victoria Huber, a Marshall teacher who resigned after six years, said Principal Ashuana Short, made it clear that only 10 percent of any class could get a failing grade, even though many more were sometimes actually failing.

“We were directed as teachers that our fail rate couldn’t be a certain height. I can’t fail more than 10 percent of my class,” Huber told the Star. “It was clear if you fail a student there had to be a lot of documented evidence as to why. We were actively discouraged from failing students.”

Musson, who taught at the school for two years before resigning, told a similar tale.

“She called in teachers who had meetings with her and said, ‘If you can’t get to this percentage, you’re gone,’ ” Musson said. “She said, ‘What you’re going to do is make-up work for all of the kids. I don’t care what they come back to you looking like. They could be done, they could be correct, they could not be correct, you’re going to give them credit and pass them.’ ”

The teachers say the district is also guilty of inflating attendance figures to please the state. They say the 90.4 percent average attendance rate reported to the state in 2014 is far higher than reality.

“One of the ways schools are graded and you get money is the attendance of the students that are there,” former teacher Greg Scott told the Star. “I know I’ve never been close to that, and as a math teacher, people skip my class all the time. I don’t know anybody that had 90 percent attendance for their classes.”

Gianna Shelton, a sophomore at Marshall, told the Star that attendance is a problem in most classes.

“This year, it started off on the first day that a lot of kids didn’t come to class,” Shelton told the Star. “They were all in lunch or the library or walking around in the bathroom somewhere.”

The school district denied the allegations, but would not agree to make IPS Superintendent Lewis Ferebee or Short available to answer more questions about the high school, according to the newspaper.