AJC files complaint with state over school cheating scandal

By Heather Vogell

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked the state attorney general Friday to investigate Atlanta Public Schools for withholding a critical report largely confirming the newspaper’s findings last year that test results in a dozen schools were highly suspicious.

The AJC asked Attorney General Thurbert Baker to determine whether the district’s denial in July of a request for the report was a criminal violation of the Georgia Open Records Act.

The newspaper’s complaint calls the district’s refusal to produce the report a “willful and premeditated violation.”

“The purpose of the Open Records Act is to prevent government officials from burying information in this way,” said Tom Clyde, an AJC attorney.

District spokesman Keith Bromery said Friday that officials were reviewing the complaint and would not comment.

The complaint comes amid federal and state probes into the falsification of hundreds of Atlanta students’ scores, with dozens of GBI agents questioning teachers and administrators at schools across the district.

Breaking the open records law is a misdemeanor and carries a $100 fine.

The statistical analysis by University of Pennsylvania researchers surfaced last week after Channel 2 Action News and the AJC obtained copies from a non-profit education advocacy group.

The report largely validated the newspaper’s October 2009 findings on statistically improbable gains or drops at a dozen Atlanta schools on that spring’s state Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests. The newspaper found the odds of such drastic changes were astronomical and could signal cheating.

In response, Atlanta Superintendent Beverly Hall announced that two independent experts would scrutinize the district’s test results.

In February, the district released a report by one of the experts, consultant Douglas Reeves, that concluded the gains were consistent with academic practices he observed at the schools — eight of which he visited on a single day during a whirlwind tour.

But the district made no announcement when the second expert, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education Dean Andrew Porter, completed his report in May.

At the time, the district was in the thick of a state-ordered investigation into additional revelations that high numbers of wrong answers had been erased and corrected on CRCTs given at 58 schools.

The AJC requested the Porter report July 19. District officials responded July 22, saying, “A copy of the Porter report does not exist in the district.”

Last week, however, district spokesman Bromery said Hall read the report in May. He said district officials gave it to investigators hired to scrutinize the erasure findings.

It would have been “inappropriate,” he said, to release the report once it became part of the investigation.

According to state law, public officials cannot turn over documents to private individuals to avoid disclosing them.

The AJC also argued that the investigation is not a valid reason to keep the Porter findings secret.

“The circumstances indicate the Porter report was withheld by APS at a time when Superintendent Hall did not want it to reach the light of day,” Clyde said.

“A public official should be very concerned by a possible criminal violation of the Open Records Act. If it is proven, it’s effectively a finding that the official is intentionally concealing information for the very citizens that they are supposed to serve.”