Teacher World

Recent reports out of Atlanta concerning the teachers and administrators found guilty in our nation’s biggest school cheating scandal ever hit the news yesterday. And while it was the news most of us were probably hoping to hear, it couldn’t have been worse news for those who were involved.

If you recall, it was The Atlanta Journal-Constitution which first drew attention to statistically improbable test scores by students who attend Atlanta Public Schools last year. Its claims led to the state releasing audits of test results after the newspaper published its own analysis. This launched an investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation which determined that at least 178 teachers and administrators were involved in this mammoth cheating scandal.

The GBI reported that under a cloud of “fear and intimidation” educators gave answers to students on their state achievement tests, changed the answers on tests, used nonverbal cues to get students to change wrong answers, and so on. Principals in these schools were usually the ones who encouraged and even orchestrated the cheating. Teachers who were not involved and tried to report the cheating faced retaliation and punishment. Some even lost their jobs.

Yesterday, a Georgia state commission voted to revoke the teaching licenses of eight of these teachers and three school administrators, implementing the first round of sanctions in what has been a horrific educational travesty.

The Georgia Professional Standards Commission voted on this, the first batch of cases that stem from the GBI probe which was released in July. This probe revealed that widespread cheating had occurred in almost half of the district’s 100 public schools dating back as far as 2001. By the end of the year, it is expected that the commission will rule on all 180 teachers and administrators who were involved in the cheating scandal.

The eight teachers who lost their licenses can reapply for licensure in two years, if they choose to do so, but the administrators’ revocations are permanent. The ruling can be appealed up through state administrative and the Fulton County Superior Courts in the Atlanta area, and some of these cases may take years to be finally resolved under the appeals process.

Kelly Henson, head of the licensing agency, said, “These are 11 cases we felt like had compelling evidence to give to the commission. Education is the most honorable profession, and part of our job is to protect not only the students, but the integrity of the institution.”

Names of the educators who were sanctioned were not released by the commission, as it was noted that they have 30 days to appeal the commission’s decision.

Educators who have been named by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation could also face criminal charges as investigations continue in Fulton and DeKalb counties in the greater Atlanta area.

The state probe led to an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General and the Georgia Department of Education. They say that the district may owe thousands in federal money for low-income schools that have high test scores.

And investigators for the state also concluded that the superintendent at the time of the cheating scandal, Beverly Hall, who just happened to retire right before the results of the probe were released (does anyone think that was a coincidence?) either knew that cheating was going on or at least should have known what was happening in the district she was hired to serve. From the start, Hall has denied any allegations of involvement and apologized for not doing more to prevent what was happening.

Finally, as if all of this isn’t bad enough, the district is awaiting a decision regarding the possibility that it may lose its accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and School over issues with its school board. The national agency had placed the district on probation in January due to these problems and is expected to rule on whether to revoke their accreditation completely in the coming weeks.

With all of the turmoil this district continues to face, I want to send out a heartfelt message to those who work in these shell-shocked schools to hang in there, and show a watching nation what truly dedicated teachers and administrators can do under extreme pressure.

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So much to do and so little time to do it! I’m sure that is what interim Superintendent Erroll Davis Jr. is feeling right now, along with all of the teachers and administrators, some returning and many just beginning in Atlanta Public Schools.

With school starting on August 8, there is so much yet to be done that the task must seem a little insurmountable, yet Atlanta Public Schools are valiantly working to get this school year off to a good start, in spite of the black cloud that hovers over the district in the wake of their system-wide cheating scandal.

First order of business was to deal with the approximately 137 educators who were implicated in the scandal and who didn’t retire or take Davis’ offer to resign rather than face termination. On Thursday, it was announced that notices were being sent out to these individuals stating that they have officially been placed on paid administrative leave until the district has time to go through each employee’s case. These educators have the option to ask for a hearing if they choose, and if they are found innocent of any wrongdoing at that hearing, they can return to work.

Davis, who has said from the beginning that these employees will not work with children in APS ever again, announced his plans to begin termination proceedings as quickly as possible. With so much to accomplish before the school year begins, this may take a little while.

Meanwhile, recently-hired Atlanta teachers spent all day Thursday in orientation meetings conducted at Maynard Jackson High School in southeast Atlanta. With the scandalous cloud of cheating still looming and the sheer numbers of newly-hired teachers and administrators, you would think the atmosphere would be virtually pulsing with tension and stress.  

But APS spokesman Keith Bromery reported, “I talked to the people over there, and they say morale is very high. Teachers are very excited.” 

And was the cheating scandal addressed at orientation? “I wouldn’t call it a pep talk,” Bromery said.  “It’s more like informing them as to where things stand right now and to tell them that hopefully our achievement is going to continue as we’ve experienced over the past 10 to 20 years in the district.”

With the first day of school just around the corner, there is still so much to be done at APS. First and foremost, there are still positions to be filled with precious little time in which to fill them, which can lead to hiring educators who are not highly qualified in the race to get teachers in classrooms. Davis expressed his concern to CBS Atlanta News of his fears that trying to fill these positions too quickly might lead to under qualified teachers slipping through the cracks. With the added pressure to undo the damage done to students over the last decade, this could be hugely problematic.

Tonya Jenkins, a parent of a fourth-grader, expressed her concerns regarding the race to fill these positions to CBS reporter  Rebekka Schramm, saying, “They’re doing it so fast, it just makes me wonder if they’re gonna prescreen, do a good prescreening of the teachers that’s coming in.”

Davis is also concerned about the caliber of administrators and principals they hire this year for the same reasons, therefore, principals will be appointed on an interim basis, which means that they have a year to prove that they are right for the job.

So the search continues for teachers and principals to fill the numerous holes left by those who will not be returning. “My biggest challenge right now is finding intellectual capital on the academic side,” Davis said. “The entire leadership structure in our academic shop has been decimated.”

Wow! The task is overwhelming and the odds aren’t stacked in Atlanta schools’ favor. But there is a desire here to prove that those who remain at APS, those who had nothing to do with the dark cloud that hovers over these schools, will do whatever they can to remove the cloud and let the sun shine on these schools once again.

A daunting task? Absolutely, and it’s not for the timid or irresolute. So I hope that those who remain and these who are newly hired are up for the challenge. They will definitely be under the microscope by their superiors, their students’ parents, and their students as they go about their business. My advice to them would be to try to ignore it all and just do your job everyday to the best of your ability, remembering that you are there to serve those children who have been placed in your care.

Tonya Jenkins is one of the many who will be watching. “I just hope that they do the right thing by the teachers that were not guilty, and they do the right thing by the children. It’s all about the kids.” 

I couldn’t have said it better myself! It is all about the kids, and I, for one, am rooting for Atlanta Public Schools. Best of luck in this brand new school year!

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I confess that sometimes I just don’t understand people and the choices they make. Take the recent news out of Atlanta Public Schools, for example.

Let me remind you that Erroll B. Davis Jr., Atlanta’s interim school superintendent, gave educators who were accused by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation of cheating on state tests till Wednesday, July 20, to resign voluntarily from their jobs rather than face termination.

Keith Bromery, spokesman for APS, explained, “All the superintendent wanted to do was give people the opportunity to resign or retire without having some sort of termination notice on their record.”

Now, this seems remarkably fair and even gracious of Davis, who knew that termination notices would include detailed information regarding each educator’s alleged involvement and participation in the cheating scandal. So, wouldn’t you expect that the majority of these heretofore unwise educators would wise up enough to see that they were being offered a more graceful departure, and quietly resign?

One would think, but the sad news is that by July 20, only seven of the 178 educators who were implicated in the most widespread cheating scandal ever took Davis up on his offer and resigned. Only seven? How could that be? It’s almost ludicrous, isn’t it? This leaves me wondering if the other 171 are just crazy!

They may be, but more than that, I feel they are or have been misguided. Misguided by a teacher advocacy group, the Georgia Association of Educators, who has advised these educators not to resign, claiming that the school system is taking action before all of the evidence has been revealed. 

As a result, the 171 remaining principals and teachers will be facing termination proceedings. Bromery stated that these educators are entitled to ask for hearings to dispute their firings.

At this time, there is no set time frame for these proceedings, and Bromery said, “It’s going to take a while.”

In the meantime, prosecutors from three Atlanta-area counties are trying to determine whether they will file criminal charges against those involved.

I understand that we have a natural inclination to protect ourselves from bad things like being fired or being prosecuted for committing a crime. So, I kind of understand why these educators were talked into waiting it out and seeing what happens after all of the dust settles from this investigation.

But, I cannot forget that these are teachers and principals who entered their professions to teach and serve children. And they blew it! Their actions harmed students and falsified their academic progress, costing many children the extra services they needed, thus putting them further behind. They lied, they cheated, and they caused damage to the students they were supposed to serve.

Isn’t it time to do the right thing? Isn’t it time to teach these students of Atlanta Public Schools a new lesson, one of humility and honesty? Isn’t it time to take the blame for what was done, to admit that it was wrong, and apologize for your dishonest actions? You are educators, after all, and your job is to teach kids the responsible way, the right way. What are you waiting for?

You, who are among the 171 who chose not to resign, the world is watching you. Remember those whose lives you touched before your fears overshadowed your good sense. Remember what motivated you to be an educator and the values and morals you have taught so many children throughout your career. You face the toughest lesson you will ever have to teach, but teach it, you must. Do precisely what you have probably asked countless students to do; own up to your mistakes and learn from them.

Be motivated by what you know is right, not by what advocates would tell you is right. A watching world will judge teachers and principals everywhere, not just in Atlanta, by what you do next. I implore you to do what you know is right now, and in the process, you will teach your former students a lesson they need to hear from you, a lesson you have probably taught them many times in the past, although somehow along the way, you forgot it yourself: honesty is always the best policy.

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I wanted to write a quick update on specific things that have been happening in Atlanta Public Schools as well as to address issues some employees of these schools are facing since the terrible news came out about widespread cheating in their district on their Criterion-Reference Competency Tests (CRCT) over the last ten years.

First update: Erroll B. Davis Jr., who was appointed interim superintendent after Superintendent Hall resigned, will be staying a little longer than first anticipated. The APS board of education extended Davis’s superintendent’s contract through June 2012, in order to bring stability to the district and to receive full reaccreditation. 

Second update: This past Thursday, Interim Superintendent Davis sent letters out to all of the educators who had been accused of participating in improprieties in testing procedures. The letters ordered the 178 who were implicated in the scandal to resign by Wednesday, July 20, or face termination. And this past Monday, at a school board meeting, he also replaced a school principal and four superintendents.

Davis received approval from the school board to provide mandatory ethics training for employees of the school district and to provide the necessary remediation for the students who might have been improperly allowed to advance. It is estimated that changing students’ scores may have affected thousands of students over the last several years.

Davis spoke to CNN about the children who had been failed by this scandal and said, “We can’t allow that to happen, and we can’t allow anyone who was involved with that to remain in our system. We will identify those children, and we will make the requisite investments to remediate the wrongs that were done against them.”

Third update: When Dr. Hall resigned her position as superintendent of APS, she wrote a letter of apology for the testing scandal, at the same time denying any knowledge or participation in it personally. The GBI report claims, however, that at the very least, Hall should have been aware of what was going on, and is either guilty of negligence in monitoring her school system or compliance in the scandal.

Courtney English, a member of the APS school board who attended Atlanta Public schools and a former social studies teacher for the district is speaking out demanding more than an apology from their former superintendent. Dr. Hall was the recipient of more than $78,000 in bonus pay in the 2006-2007 school year, and English says she needs to make restitution by paying it back.

English told Fox 5 News, “You take accountability for what happens on your watch. If she wants to begin to pay back this city and truly demonstrate that she accepts full responsibility for everything that happened under her watch, she will…gladly repay some of the moneys that may have been earned based on fraudulent test scores.”

Although many in the community are demanding the same thing, Courtney is the only board member who has publicly advocated for Dr. Hall to make monetary restitution for her part in this scandal.

Fourth Update: Even Texas is facing the fallout from the APS scandal, as the Desoto Independent School District recently hired Kathy Augustine as their new superintendent. Augustine worked for Dr. Hall as the Deputy Superintendent until recently, and she has been implicated in the GBI report which called her the “god mother” of APS and named her as one of those administrators who were suspected of giving false information during the investigation.

The GBI report said of Augustine, “She told us she should not be held accountable for cheating that took place in APS classrooms under her authority. While this may be an appropriate defense to criminal charges, it is an absurd leadership concept.”

Augustine was honest with Desoto’s school board about the ongoing investigation at APS when she was being considered for the position in their schools, but with the full report out, the school board met to discuss how this report could impact their schools. They are seeking legal advice regarding Augustine’s contract and what their options are including terminating her contract and the possibility of appointing an interim superintendent in the meantime.

Fifth update: Parents met with APS School Board members and Superintendent Davis at a town meeting Thursday night to find out how the scandal would affect their kids as they return to school in a few weeks.

Lakisha Wimby, one of these concerned parents said, “My concern is the kids. Nobody, even through all this CRCT cheating, nobody is thinking about the kids — what they know, what they don’t which kid was cheating for.”

In an attempt to calm their fears, Davis reassured them that no one who had been implicated in the scandal would be working in the schools when school resumed on August 8. “It is not an overnight process to get rid of them; it certainly is an overnight process to tell them not to show up,” Davis said.

They also assured parents they would have no problem filling the vacancies, in spite of the number of positions that need to be filled. With districts all around them who had to lay off teachers due to budget cuts, there are many qualified teachers looking for jobs. Another option they are considering is to call back retired teachers who are willing to return to their jobs.

Finally, I wanted to end this blog on a positive note, so let me tell you about some of the teachers who were not involved in this scandal in any way. Nebrina Anderson, Katrina Reed, and Ronnie Thomas are teachers from Parkside Elementary, one of the schools named in the investigation when three other teachers at Parkside admitted prompting students to change incorrect answers without giving them the correct answers.

Katrina, Nebrina, and Ronnie are worried about the impact this scandal will have on the students that they teach, so they are starting a back-to-school campaign to spread the message that APS is not in shambles, and they want the public to know that the majority of their colleagues are dedicated to teaching the right way.

Katrina Reed told Fox 5 News, “It’s been hard for me to think that my students are questioning their hard work. It’s been hard for me to hear that the students at APS are being labeled as trapped when I know that there are talented people at APS.”

When asked about the culture of fear and intimidation that led to the cheating, Katrina said, “The targets are set in May for the entire district, and there are thousands of teachers like myself who did not fall victim to that pressure. There are thousands of teachers who put in the hard work instead of taking the easy route.”

These teachers want the public to know that the teachers who show up on the first day of school will be focused on making sure their students excel. Ronnie Thomas said, “Good teaching and learning still exists within APS.”

And Nebrina Anderson said, “No doubt, this is a hurtful thing, it is extremely disturbing, but now how do we move forward to be stronger and better?”

Even with good teachers, involved administrators, and an excellent interim superintendent, Atlanta Public Schools have their work cut out for them, but I think the desire to prove that they can rise above the scandal will power great things. I look forward to hearing positive reports from these schools this year through a lot of tough, dedicated work.

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This will be my last blog specifically addressing the widespread cheating that occurred over the last ten years in Atlanta Public Schools. In order to avoid more of these scandals in the future, it is important to understand why this one occurred. This blog will delve into the GBI report and its conclusions as to the motivation behind the madness and what it may foreshadow.

First, it is clear that things began to change in 1999, when Dr. Beverly Hall became the superintendent of APS. How could one person be blamed for jump-starting the madness? Well, Hall was all about data and reaching targets. And she set up a “target” program which held principals and teachers responsible for their students’ achievement. According to the report, “These targets were used to quantify expectations so that academic progress was measurable, based primarily on the prior year’s CRCT results.”

According to the report, “The unreasonable pressure to meet annual ‘targets’ was the primary motivation for teachers and administration to cheat on the CRCT in 2009 and previous years. Virtually every teacher who confessed to cheating spoke of the inordinate stress the district placed on meeting targets and the dire consequences for failure. Dr. Hall articulated it as: ‘No exceptions. No excuses.’ If principals did not meet targets within three years, she declared, they will be replaced and ‘I will find someone who will meet targets.’ Dr. Hall replaced 90% of the principals during her tenure. Principals told teachers that failure to improve CRCT scores would result in negative evaluations or job termination. The unambiguous message was to meet targets by any means necessary.”

Under the target program used in APS, schools were expected to move students test scores in two ways: from the bottom to the middle, and from the middle to the top, which means focusing on both the lower and higher performing students.

Targets were set each year by the administration working with outside consultants, which were then approved by the Board of Education. These targets were set for the district, for each school, and for each grade based on percentages of expected improvement, which were naturally higher for low-performing schools.

Keep in mind that as schools met their targets, those targets would increase each year. And the new targets weren’t based upon the new students coming into a grade level, but the scores achieved by the previous year’s students.

If you are a teacher, you know that each year’s students have their own strengths and weaknesses and have different levels of motivation. This target program makes no accommodations for those differences; instead the expectation is that each year there is a certain percent increase in student progress no matter what each group’s strengths or weaknesses might be.

Teachers and administrators at APS told investigators that “this element of targets, combined with the fact that the targets increase every year, makes them unreasonable. For instance, if last year’s fourth graders were mostly high-performing students, but the fourth grade class this year contains more low performers, the fourth grade targets are still set based on last year’s high performing students’ scores.” As teachers reported to investigators, it was like comparing apples to oranges.

As targets continued to increase each year, teachers reported that it was harder to attain the required results, and many resorted to cheating rather than risk disciplinary action or termination. It became that proverbially snowball effect; each year it required more cheating in order to go beyond the level of cheating the previous year in order to meet the new unreasonable target. And “the gap between where the students were academically and the targets they were trying to reach grew larger.” The cheating, once started, took on a life of its own.

While some of those who cheated were motivated by bonuses (schools that met 70% of their targeted goals received bonuses for all of their employees ranging anywhere from $50 to $2000 per employee) most of them seemed to be more motivated by their fear of recrimination if they were unsuccessful in meeting their targets. (A little sidebar from the GBI report that you might find interesting: Dr. Hall received tens of thousands of dollars based on her district’s doctored CRCT results.)

And to sweeten the pot a little more to motivate staffs, the district held a celebration annually at the Georgia Dome to honor and recognize those schools which had made their targets. At the Convocation, attendance from all schools was mandatory, and those who were being recognized for a job well-done got to “make the floor,” that is, they got to sit in a prominent place on the floor of the Dome, while those who did not reach their targets were forced to sit in the uppermost sections.

The report noted that for many it became very important to “make the floor,” especially for principals. For these individuals, the means by which this was accomplished became unimportant; the recognition, even if it was a fabricated sham, was so much better than the humiliation of sitting in the nose-bleed section.

Those schools who failed to meet their targets were usually placed on PDP’s, professional development plans. The original purpose of a professional development plan was to provide a tool for helping a staff to improve areas of weakness, in other words, to provide a low-performing school some strategies and professional development which would enable it to turn around and achieve success.

However, under Dr. Hall’s leadership, a PDP brought negative performance evaluations, threats of termination, and for some, outright termination. She made it clear that if these low-performing schools did not reach their targets in three years, she would replace the principal with someone who would find a way to meet those targets. (Her poster boy, Principal Waller, is a fine example of the kind of principal she hired to replace those principals who couldn’t make the grade.)

It comes as no surprise that those principals who feared that they would lose their jobs reciprocated in kind, putting that same negative pressure with its unreasonable expectations and demands on their teachers. And the pattern of threats and humiliation and termination became acceptable at all levels of this school district, which operated more like the mafia than a school system.

It is hard to say how any of us, placed in this hostile and vicious work environment would have reacted. I would like to think that the majority of us would have stood our ground and refused to be a part of this criminal behavior against children. But in this educational environment in which test scores have become more important than the children we teach, should we be so surprised when it creates a monster?

What is wrong with education? The scandal in Atlanta makes it very clear, and they are not the only school district to resort to cheating to improve test scores. No Child Left Behind has done more damage to our public schools than any doctrine or educational reform I have ever seen as a veteran teacher. If Congress doesn’t wake up and heed Arne Duncan’s warnings to rewrite NCLB legislation, than what we have seen here over the past week is just the tip of the iceberg.

If nothing else, APS has proven what can happen when you are sailing in troubled waters. The 2014 iceberg is looming, and unless Congress reroutes this ship, we will all be witnesses to the tragic sinking of our public education system. 

S-O-S!

Bullying, low-performing schools, No Child Left Behind, state achievement tests, Teacher-World's Blog Atlanta Public Schools, Dr. Beverly Hall, Georgia Bureau of Investigations, NCLB, state achievement tests

I’ve given a lot of information in the last two blogs concerning the terrible scandal reported by the Georgia Bureau of Investigations of widespread cheating in Atlanta Public Schools on the CRCT. The purpose of this blog is to discuss two related items: the reaction of the community to this damaging report and who pays the highest price for the actions of so many.

For a community whose schools have been under suspicion for cheating on state tests, the reaction to the confirmation of involvement, far exceeding anyone’s expectations, has ranged from anger to relief because they finally have some answers, as shocking as those answers have been.

The ordering of the investigation into possible cheating in APS by former Governor Sonny Perdue a year ago, after he rejected the district’s own investigation, was poorly received by many in the community. Many felt that for a school system where three-quarters of its student population are black and poor, such an investigation would only further hurt the city’s schools.

And many questioned Perdue’s motives. Bert Brantley, Perdue’s former spokesman said, “There were a lot of people who thought this was a witch hunt, that Governor Perdue was doing this because he didn’t believe poor African-American children could learn. But his point was that it’s the people who were doing the cheating who don’t believe kids can achieve, because they’re not letting them do it on their own, they’re changing answers because they don’t believe it’s possible.”

“Everybody wanted to believe that the kids in Atlanta were really turning a corner after a long period of not succeeding, so there’s the real tragedy,” says Mr. Brantley. “Those kids have been cheated and they’ve been robbed.”

Parent activist Shawnna Hayes-Tavares had this to say about those 178 individuals who were involved in the rampant cheating, “178 of them should be lined up right now, marching in shame out of Atlanta Public Schools.”

Shawnna, the mother of 3 children in APS, believes that one of her children is the victim of the cheating conspiracy, and she has been pushing the district to take action for more than two years. “I believe that this is the worst travesty that could ever happen, where teachers, administrators, and even superintendents of schools, and including board members have all been a part of a cover-up.”

“We know that the majority of the leaders in Atlanta Public Schools and the majority of the students in Atlanta Public Schools are African American. And so, this is the worst case of Black on Black crime because we are doing it to the innocent,” Shawnna told Atlanta AP.

Another parent, Valerie Irvin, told Channel 2 News, “A lot of people need to be arrested. Not fines. I think people need to go to jail. I think people need some pain for what they’ve done to these poor kids and parents who think they’ve done well on their test scores.” 

But other parents, like Phyllis Brown, a parent of two children who attend schools in southwest Atlanta, were more forgiving of the teachers who were involved after reading the reports of the use of fear, intimidation, and retaliation by principals and administrators to force them to comply. “It’s the people over them, that threatened them, that should be punished,” Brown said. “The ones from the building downtown, they should lose their jobs, they should lose their pensions. They are the ones who started this.”

Even though she didn’t feel teachers should be punished, she expressed her anger that the children who were victims of this scandal will face embarrassment if they are promoted to the next grade before they are ready to do the more challenging work.

And what about the students, the ones who will pay the biggest price for this scandal? Armoni Howard, a 4th grader from Gideons Elementary, where the character word flashing in its lighted sign is ironically “truthfulness” said, “At Gideons, it made all the students feel sad. We lost our principal, Mr. Salters. Everybody liked him.” (Principal Salters confessed to the cheating that was going on at Gideon Elementary.)

These innocent children were pawns in this tragic game where the adults, who should have known better, lost sight of their primary, honorable goal: to educate, serve, and protect the students in their care. In the process, students who should not have advanced were pushed forward due to inflated scores and, according to the GBI report, “children were denied special-educational assistance because their falsely reported CRCT scores were too high.”

The academic damage that has been done here is potentially catastrophic. With huge turnover in staff at these 44 schools, and huge gaps to fill in student achievement, the APS certainly have their work cut off for them.

But there is hopeful news. The day after the scandal hit the news, the 2011 CRCT results hit the schools. The good news: student results were up in almost every grade and content area. There was a one-year improvement on 23 of the 30 content-area tests. Five tests did not show one-year progress, and only two tests showed a decrease.

“I am encouraged that the CRCT results show many more of our students mastering a more rigorous curriculum,” said State School Superintendent Dr. John Barge. “The credit for these tremendous results goes back to the local level, where they have raised the bar for all students.” Under the circumstances, these results rather than raising suspicions, reflect a more expected raising of the bar.

The parents, students, teachers, principals, and administrators of the Atlanta Public Schools have much work to do. It won’t be easy. In a district which faces economic issues and has had a history of low-performance even before this terrible scandal, and will now see an influx of new staff members, it looks to be an uphill battle. But with honest, hard-working, child-driven rather than data-driven people at the helm, anything is possible. Choose your administrators and teachers wisely, APS. This is your chance to clear house and get back to what so many of you were doing all along; educating and inspiring children to be all that they can be.

Many children will come back to you less trusting; some may be angry. It is up to those of you who remain and those of you who will be newly hired to lead by example and to regain the trust and faith of your students and your community. We wish you success in your endeavors and real, not doctored, achievement of your educational goals.

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Okay, so I thought letting the disappointment over the scandal in Atlanta simmer a little overnight would help, but I am truly so disgusted today that this blog will be just as difficult to write. I have spent the better part of the morning reading over the evidence in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s report regarding the schools that were involved in the massive cheating, and it is chilling.

The basic pattern these schools followed is pretty consistent. In almost all cases the order started at the top with full participation and encouragement from the principal. In a few rare cases, direct participation by the principal was not proven but there was evidence of implicit knowledge of what was taking place. Often, the test coordinator was also involved.

It saddens me to admit that, in most cases, the teachers who were involved were veteran teachers, but that is not to say that all veteran teachers participated. The pattern seemed to be that newer teachers were let into the cheating circle if they seemed “trustworthy.” (I know that is more than a little ironic!)

The most common cheating technique employed was the changing of answers by erasing wrong answers and replacing them with correct ones. This took place before, during, and after school often with the principal present or right outside the door. Sometimes, it occurred during the administration of the tests. And at times, tests were even removed from the school and changed at teachers’ homes.

                                             Parks Middle School’s Principal Waller

At Parks Middle School, the test booklets were kept in the testing coordinators office, Dr. Alfred Kiel. The principal of this school, Principal Waller, would routinely find excuses to get him out of his office so that the teachers were free to do their thing. Once, upon returning to his office, he noticed that things had been moved around on his desk and reported it. After that, Damany Lewis, the teacher’s ringleader would take a picture of his desk before anything was moved and use the photograph to return everything exactly as they found it when they were done.

At this same school, before the tests were administered, Waller asked Lewis, “Do you think you could get into something undetected?” When he said he thought he could, Waller gave Lewis a key to the room where the test documents were stored and Lewis used a razor blade to open the plastic wrap encasing the test booklets. He then copied the tests for each grade and used a lighter to heat and reseal the plastic. The tests were distributed to teachers in the cheating circle to preview before they were administered.

Many other techniques were used to falsely raise test scores. Teachers often gave answers, posted answers, reviewed the answers before the test, walked around the room during the tests pointing to the right answers, or used nonverbal signals to indicate wrong answers. Some students who were not as likely to pass were tested in smaller rooms or individually, even though they had no such testing accommodations, and then their answers were changed. On writing tests, some teachers gave the prompt ahead of the test and would not let their students write in their test booklet until the rough copy had been proofread and corrected by them first.  And in some cases, teacher were instructed to make sure that students were strategically placed in the classroom so that struggling students could cheat off of more proficient students’ test booklets while taking the test.

What a despicable mess! My first thought when I began reading about this travesty was why would teachers go along with this? What about those who were not involved? Why didn’t they speak up? Well, let me address some of these questions, but I warn you, it just gets worse.

The GBI report referred to it as a “culture of fear” and said the following:

“Dr. Hall and her top staff created a culture of fear, intimidation, and retaliation, which was usually enforced on principals and teachers by some of the SRT (School Reform Team) executive directors. Many witnesses said that after reporting cheating, or some other misconduct, they became the subject of an investigation and disciplined.

This culture of fear, intimidation, and retaliation has infested the district, allowing cheating-at all levels-to go unchecked for years. Those who dared to report misconduct in the district were held in contempt and punished.”

Let me give you just one of so many horrific examples of the mob mentality of those involved and the ramifications of threatening the status quo.

The principal at Harper Archer Middle School from 2006-2009, Michael Milstead, became concerned over the huge discrepancy over many students high scores on the CRCT in elementary school and their low academic performance. Since many were several grades behind were they should have been academically, he became suspicious that their test scores had been inflated.

At a meeting in 2008, Milstead brought up the issue and suggested that the elementary and middle school principals might consider working together to resolve the problem. After the meeting, Executive Director Tamara Cotman berated him for bringing up these issues at the meeting and claimed that many of the principals had been upset over his comments regarding the CRCT results. Milstead resigned in 2009, when Cotman informed him that his services were no longer needed in the district.

The report tells of multiple teachers and staff members whose jobs were threatened if they didn’t mind their own business. Some teachers wrote letters or filled out forms regarding improper testing procedures which were at the least, ignored. At the worst, some of these teachers were called into their principal’s office and told to stop. Some teachers were bullied into compliance or being silent by threats of being placed on a professional development plan (PDP) which could lead to termination. And some teachers found themselves, like Milstead, without a job after trying to voice their concerns to administrators.

Superintendent Beverly Hall was informed on a number of occasions about concerns, suspicions, and outright instances of improper test procedures and conduct. She refused to follow up on these reports. For example, several teachers from Parks Middle School reported Principal Waller’s misconduct in 2005 and 2006, yet the Atlanta Public Schools did nothing to discipline him. “In fact, SRT-2 Director Michael Pitts held a meeting at Parks and told the teachers to ‘stop writing letters about Waller because he is not going anywhere.’”

Pitts dismissed the investigation calling it racist, and Superintendent Hall declared Waller a “model principal.”

After reading this report, I can’t help but feel that this cheating scandal started right from the top and was condoned, either tacitly or openly from the superintendent on down. Too many warnings were raised, too much progress was made too swiftly by too many schools, and too many complaints were lodged and ignored for it to be otherwise. This was fueled by a superintendent who wanted to make a name for herself by finding the miracle cure that would save a crippled district. And the pressure she put on others and the lengths to which she expected her staff to go to accomplish her dream trickled down to administrators, test coordinators, teachers, and paraprofessionals.

Too many in this school district lost sight of the reason they were there; to educate and serve children so that they can one day be productive members of society.

For some, the desire for acclaim and publicity overtook their desire to serve. I wonder how that publicity feels know.

For some, fear of termination or disciplinary action made them compliant. As they face the anger of the public they swore to serve and the possibility of termination and loss of licensure, I wonder if they wish they had taken a firmer stand at the beginning so they could respect the face they see in the mirror every day.

For some, fear of termination or disciplinary action made them silent. I wonder if they wish that their outrage over what they witnessed had outweighed their fear and loosened their lips until someone was willing to hear them.

For some, the fear and intimidation was not enough to gag their mouths or stop their hands from reporting misconduct. I wonder if they aren’t walking taller since this report became public and feeling like the weight of the world has finally been lifted from their shoulders.

So many lives have been shattered over misguided goals and corrupt behavior. In my next blog, I will look at the community that has been critically wounded in this ugly story.

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In February of this year, I blogged about the Atlanta Public Schools which were being investigated by the Georgia Bureau of Investigations for possible cheating on their state tests. Well, the news is in, and it isn’t pretty!

On Tuesday, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal released a statement from his office revealing the report from the GBI: 178 teachers and principals were involved in undoubtedly the biggest test-cheating scandal in our country’s history. Would it surprise you to learn that 38 of the 178 who were involved were principals, which tells you how high up this operation went, and 6 of them would not answer investigators’ questions? The report also indicated that 82 of the 178 have confessed to cheating.

Atlanta Public Schools earned national prominence over the last ten years (and, yes, that is about how long this has been going on) due to the steady improvements they were making on their test scores. Because of these improvements, they received both notice and funding from the Gates and Broad Foundations. Sadly, this report makes it clear that those gains were made due to 44 of the 56 schools which were under investigation in this school district erasing and changing test answers. In a district with 100 schools, that means almost half of the APS were involved in this scandal!

Scathing news, but there’s more! The report states that the district repeatedly refused to investigate or take responsibility for the cheating, and the central office actually told some of the principals to be uncooperative when the investigators talked to them. One administrator went so far as to tell their employees to tell GBI investigators to “go to hell!” Teachers who tried to report what was happening were referred to as “disgruntled” in order to discredit their warnings, and one principal went so far as to open an ethics investigation against someone who was trying to report the truth.

The house of cards crumbled earlier this year when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and state investigators discovered a pattern which has become consistent in other incidences of cheating on state tests. In each case, there has been  a dramatic increase at one critical grade level which drops drastically the next. In all of these comparable situations, there was also a high incidence of erasure of wrong to right answers.

Superintendent Beverly Hall, who has been the head of the school system for twelve years and was named U.S. Superintendent of the Year in 2009, mainly due to the amazing gains that had been made by an inner-city school system, has resigned from her position under a cloud of suspicion. Although she admitted to wrongdoing, she did not take any blame herself. In fact, she blamed the scandal on other administrators. But while investigators say she hasn’t been directly tied to any of the wrongdoing, they maintain that she probably was aware of what was happening, or at the very least, she should have been aware.

One article I read gave examples from the 800 page report by GBI of the pervasiveness of the cheating. At Parks Middle School, one of the worst examples, the percentage of eighth-graders who exceeded expectations rose from 1% to 46%. Audits of the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) reveal that 89% of the classrooms at this school were flagged by the state for possible cheating, and several of the school’s teachers have already admitted that they provided answers to their students or changed test scores.

The report further states that once Christopher Waller became the principal at Parks “the school immediately made dramatic gains on the CRCT and other tests.” It states that Superintendent Hall should have realized something was not right, but instead Waller and Parks Middle School were publicly praised for the achievements they had made.

Also in the report was the fact that four educators from Gideons Elementary confessed that they met at a home in Douglas County one week to change students’ answers from wrong to right. They called it a “changing party.”

Investigators found evidence of intimidation of teachers to get them to comply with what was happening around them. For example, the principal at Fain Elementary forced a teacher to crawl under a table in the middle of a faculty meeting to humiliate the individual because the teacher’s students’ test scores were so low!

And a teacher from Perkerson Elementary told the investigators that a student who sat under a table randomly filling in answers on the CRCT somehow had passed. And the report indicated that although several of this school’s first grade students passed the reading test, they were having great difficulty reading in third grade.

On Wednesday, Mayor Kasim Reed responded to the devastating report from the GBI, saying, “Yesterday morning was really the hardest day I have had as mayor of Atlanta or anytime. Just to hear all of it laid out in a fashion, that is almost irrefutable, by a serious person (Gov. Deal) is really, very hard.”

Reed admits that city leaders should have recognized that something wasn’t right. He said, “We all have a part of the blame here. The statistical differences certainly should have shocked people within the profession, and I think we should have looked harder as well. I think that we will turn this into something positive. We are going to stop the harm. There were children being moved and advanced that shouldn’t have. We are going to let everyone know, it is all hands on deck. But, we are going to recover and we are going to get through it and have a better system. Because the things that occurred here simply will not be allowed to occur again, and that is what we have to take from this.”

Maureen Downey, the education columnist for Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote, “The [Atlanta] teachers, principals and administrators wanted to prove that the faith of the Broad and Gates Foundations and the Chamber of Commerce in the district was not misplaced and that APS could rewrite the script of urban education in America and provide a happy, or at least a happier, ending for its students. And that’s what ought to alarm us, that these professionals ultimately felt their students could not even pass basic competency tests, despite targeted school improvement plans, proven reforms, and state-of-the-art teacher training.”

This has been a difficult blog for me to write because it will unfortunately reinforce some of those negative opinions out there concerning public schools and its teachers. But these are the facts, and I am presenting them to you without any comment for today. Tomorrow I will voice some thoughts and feelings regarding this horrific scandal. For now, I just have to let this all percolate for awhile in the hope that it may lose some of its bitterness.

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I felt that it would be informative to follow up Monday’s blog about Atlanta Public Schools with a fuller explanation regarding the investigation underway regarding the possibility of cheating on state tests by schools in this district. It’s a pretty suspicious story but perhaps it also points out the stress school systems feel to deliver high test scores each year. I’ll let you decide.

Last fall the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that there were statistically unlikely gains in test scores on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test in 2008 and 2009 at some Atlanta Schools. When an erasure analysis of the 2009 CRCTs was commissioned by the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, suspicious erasure marks were discovered on thousands of tests from classrooms across the state. Particularly targeted were tests administered to first through eighth-graders in language arts, reading, and math. As a result of this analysis, 58 Atlanta schools were flagged by the commission which was higher than any other district in the state.

At that point, Atlanta named a blue ribbon commission to review the suspicious erasures, and the commission hired consultants to analyze these suspicious tests. But critics accused this commission of redoing the state’s analysis tipping it in favor of the school system. In their report, these consultants determined that only 12 of the 58 schools under investigation had serious problems, but they did little or no investigation of 33 of these schools under suspicion. Critics felt that the consultant did not try to determine if cheating was involved and how it had occurred.

Beverly Hall, Atlanta’s Superintendent, reassigned the principals of the 12 schools targeted in this report and referred 108 teachers to the state Professional Standards Commission. Mike Bowers, a former state attorney general, and Bob Wilson, a former district attorney, were appointed in mid-August to examine possible cheating in Atlanta.

In October, Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents began their investigation by paying visits to Atlanta public schools and questioning teachers and administrators about the possibility of test tampering. Bert Brantley, a spokesman for Governor Sonny Perdue explained, “We want as little disruption in the schools as possible. The goal is not necessarily to criminally prosecute people who are found out to have changed some test scores. The goal is to find out what happened.”

However, this is clearly a serious situation. A GBI spokesman explained that if anyone lies to state agents or investigators, that would be a felony and could be punished with a $1,000 fine and up to five years in prison. As if that isn’t sobering enough, the destruction or altering of public documents is a felony as well and can result in up to 10 years in prison.

Along with the state investigation, a parallel federal investigation of possible tampering with CRCT results is proceeding to determine whether Atlantic Public Schools committed fraud by illegally boosting scores on their standardized test.

Given the serious consequences of tampering with state tests, why would any teacher or principal even consider the possibility? One need only look at those schools which have been deemed low-performing to understand the pressure school systems who are not measuring up might feel. When a district’s low test scores are met with threats and reprisals, is it that surprising that cheating might seem like a better alternative than losing your job in an economy where jobs are so hard to find? I have claimed from the beginning that these tests create the likelihood of cheating. And if I didn’t feel sorry for the Atlanta Public Schools, and it wasn’t such a serious situation, I would be tempted to say I told you so.

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