By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
A newly released investigative report is alleging that Atlanta Public School (APS) Superintendent Beverly Hall was so intent on protecting her image as a “miracle worker” that she oversaw a vast network of teachers who routinely altered student test scores to make their schools appear to be performing better while silencing uncooperative employees with threats.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) is reporting on the huge scandal that is right now erupting in the city of Atlanta after the release yesterday of a special report by Georgia Governor Nathan Deal. Investigators uncovered a decade’s worth of secret cheating by teachers and principals who erased and corrected answers on student answer sheets on the part of teachers throughout the school district.
The investigation began when former Gov. Sonny Perdue ordered the inquiry last year after the AJC raised questions about some school’s test scores and suspicious erasures on tests in 58 schools. When the school district returned an unsatisfactory response to the governor’s questions, the investigation began in earnest.
Investigators describe a mob-like enterprise of cheating that began at the top with Hall and her aides who spent the last decade ignoring, burying, destroying or altering complaints about misconduct. During this time, the Atlanta school district produced soaring gains on state curriculum tests that brought national acclaim to Hall and the district.
However, lurking behind the glowing scores were 178 educators, including 38 principals, who participated in a vast cheating network. Investigators confirmed cheating in 44 of the 56 schools they examined. Eighty of those named in the report have since confessed.
“In some schools, the report said, cheating became a routine part of administering the annual state Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests,” the AJC reports. “The investigators describe highly organized, coordinated efforts to falsify tests when children could not score high enough to meet the district’s self-imposed goals.”
For instance, at Gideons Elementary, teachers held weekend “changing parties” at a teacher’s home to change answers. Apparently, cheating was an “open secret” at the school with the testing coordinator actually handing out answer-key transparencies to lay over the tests to make the corrections easier.
At Venetian Hills, a group of teachers and administrators who dubbed themselves “the chosen ones” convened to change answers in the afternoons or during makeup testing days, the AJC reports. A testing coordinator said the school’s principal, Clarietta Davis, actually wore gloves while erasing answers so as not to leave any fingerprints on the answer sheets.
At East Lake Elementary, principal Gwendolyn Benton and the school’s testing coordinator instructed teachers to arrange students’ seats so that the lower-performing children would receive easier versions of the Fifth Grade Writing Tests.
Benton, who has since left the school, tried to obstruct the investigation, reportedly threatening teachers that she would “sue them out the ass” if they “slandered” her to the GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation).
The special investigators’ report describes years of misconduct that took place as far up the chain of command as the superintendent’s office. The report accuses Hall and her aides of repeatedly tampering with or hiding records that cast an unflattering light on the district.
In addition, employees in the school system suffered intense stress while working in an environment where supervisors kept them from reporting wrongdoing out of fear of losing their jobs.
“Area superintendents, who oversee clusters of schools, enforced a code of silence,” the AJC reports. “One made a whistle-blower alter his reports of cheating and placed a reprimand in his file — and not the cheater’s. Another told a teacher who saw tampering that if she did not ‘keep her mouth shut,’ she would ‘be gone’.”
“In sum, a culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation permeated the APS system from the highest ranks down,” the investigators wrote. “Cheating was allowed to proliferate until, in the words of one former APS principal, ‘it became intertwined in Atlanta Public Schools … a part of what the culture is all about.’ ”
Investigators, who conducted 2,100 interviews and reviewed more than 800,000 documents, cited three reasons for the widespread cheating that took place in Atlanta; the setting of unrealistic test-score goals, allowing a culture of pressure and retaliation to spread throughout the district, and Hall’s imposed emphasis on test results and public praise rather than on ethics.
“Once cheating started, it became a house of cards that collapsed on itself,” the investigators wrote.
Hall was also blamed for what investigators called an aloof leadership style in which she isolated herself from rank-and-file employees. She seemed more interested in spending her time networking with philanthropic and business leaders rather than walking the halls of her schools, the investigators found.
“Hall became a subject of adoration and made herself the focus rather than the children,” the investigators wrote. “Her image became more important than reality.”
Through her lawyer, Hall has issued a statement denying the allegations, saying she and her staff had nothing to do with the scandal.
Governor Deal warned yesterday that there will be consequences for educators who cheated. “The report’s findings are troubling,” he said, “but I am encouraged this investigation will bring closure to problems that existed.”
Interim Atlanta Superintendent Erroll Davis promised that the educators found to have cheated “are not going to be put in front of children again.”
The investigation is considered to be the most wide-ranging investigation into test-cheating in a public school district ever conducted in the U.S.
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Photo is by Paul Sakuma of the Associated Press and shows Beverly Hall receiving the 2009 Superintendent of the Year award.
