A teacher cheats and a girl spends years recovering


What Atlanta Public Schools did to ameliorate the effects of cheating

•APS developed a 12-week plan in 58 schools that the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement identified as being affected.

•It identified students who did not pass the spring 2009-10 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test and who did not attend summer school or,

•Students who did not pass, attended summer school and failed the retest, or

•Students who did not have summer school.

•APS added extra instruction and help during the 12-week program that included 5,423 students in reading and math.

•According to APS, the students were tested afterward and

•75 percent showed growth in math

•41 percent mastered the concepts in math

•72 percent showed growth in reading.

•APS implemented monitoring, tutoring and early intervention for students who did not meet goals.

Vantricia Haynes kept her secret for five years, even from her mother, but her eyewitness account of schoolhouse cheating finally spilled out in December, with life-changing consequences for at least one teacher.

She was among more than a dozen children who testified about an Atlanta Public Schools conspiracy that attracted national attention.

Before that, she went to the courthouse for a hearing related to the case. In a moment that speaks to the bond between children and their teachers, the woman she would testify against spotted her and enveloped her in an embrace that endured so long Vantricia’s mother felt obliged to pry them apart.

Vanessa Haynes said her daughter looked up to her teacher, even loved her.

Vantricia is just one of the thousands of students said to be harmed by cheating. Prosecutors said educators falsified test scores so they could get bonuses and raises or at least keep their jobs — at the expense of the children entrusted to them. Inflated test scores masked academic failure that went unaddressed as students were pushed from one grade to the next, and then out into the community.

Later, after that hug, Vantricia would tell jurors how Angela Williamson helped students cheat on the tests, perhaps sealing her former teacher’s fate.

Like 10 co-defendants, Williamson was convicted of racketeering. The jury also found her guilty of four other felony counts, more than any of the other defendants.

She was whisked from Fulton County Superior Court to a women's detention center in Alpharetta after the jury reached its verdict Wednesday, transformed in an instant from citizen to convict.

She could spend decades in prison.

Vantricia’s mother believes the cheating hid her daughter’s academic struggles. Despite her anger, even she is uncertain that prison is the right punishment, though.

Her daughter didn’t want her face photographed, but agreed to an interview at her mother’s encouragement. The laconic 16-year-old with a round face and tight braids seems an unlikely whistleblower.

She answered questions reluctantly, typically with single words — “correct,” “no.”

Her testimony about what she saw and heard at Dobbs Elementary School was damning.

She told jurors that Williamson gave her and other students in the fourth-grade class answers on the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests.

"I knew it was wrong," Vantricia said during the interview at her southeast Atlanta home Thursday. She said Williamson instructed her and about two dozen other students to erase and correct answers on the tests.

Her mother, Vanessa, said she suspected something was amiss when APS tried to enroll the girl in the gifted program after she scored well on the tests. Vantricia had been born with a condition that required surgeries, and doctors had told her it would affect her ability to learn. She was held back in second grade when she was enrolled in neighboring DeKalb County.

Vantricia, who feared the stigma of being held back again, was relieved when she learned she had passed the tests in Williamson’s class in Atlanta.

“I said, wait a minute, hold on, you’re talking about my daughter? … In order for her to excel to that level in such a short time, she would have needed brain surgery,” Haynes said. She said she declined to enroll Vantricia in the gifted program. By that time the damage was done, she added.

Vantricia struggled mightily after Williamson’s class. She played catch-up the rest of her elementary school career and in middle school, she and her mother said. She would study at night, sometimes in tears over assignments she didn’t understand, and then wake up at 6 a.m. for more.

Now a sophomore at South Atlanta High, Vantricia feels like she’s more or less caught up, though her mother is dubious. Vantricia loves basketball, but left the school team to devote more time to her studies.

She hopes to go to college and yearns to be a journalist.

She is clearly conflicted about Williamson.

In the years before the trial, as Vanessa Haynes learned about the reports of widespread cheating, she began to suspect Williamson. But Vantricia always denied any cheating took place.

She only admitted it, Vanessa Haynes said, when she was interviewed by authorities. Mom, who was in the room at the time, was floored. She was also angry, but reminded herself that she had told her girl to trust her teacher. And her teacher had said to tell no one.

“When did you finally tell me all of it, the real truth of it,” Vanessa Haynes asked her daughter Thursday, taking over the interview.

No answer.

Vantricia was wringing her hands.

“It’s still not something she can really speak on,” Haynes said. “I have to pull a lot of things out of her.”

She kept tugging.

She told her daughter it was wrong for Williamson to tell her to withhold information from her, and pushed her to repeat what Williamson had said.

Vantricia held her head in her hands, like she had a headache. She squinted, like a teenager who wants to throttle her mom.

“She just said not to talk about it. Don’t tell and don’t talk about it,” she said finally.

Her mom asked: And that’s why you didn’t tell me?

Said Vantricia: “I mean, we all just really forgot about it.”

State investigators documented cheating at 44 schools and got confessions from educators at 30 of them. Later, a grand jury indicted 35 educators, including then-Superintendent Beverly Hall, who, along with another defendant, died before trial. After 21 pleaded guilty, only a dozen remained. The jury convicted all but one of them on racketeering and other charges. The racketeering conviction alone could bring 20 years in prison.

They came from Dobbs and four other schools — Deerwood Academy and Benteen, Dunbar and Usher-Collier Heights elementary schools. All are in high-poverty areas in south or west Atlanta. Three regional administrators also were convicted in connection with events at those and other nearby schools.

In 2010, the school system reacted to the growing scandal with a 12-week program that served 5,400 students. It provided additional instruction time, based on a U.S. Department of Education model, with ongoing monitoring. A report from that time said 74.5 percent of students in the program showed growth in math, and 72.1 percent in reading.

In later years, the system expanded the program, but was unable to provide numbers of students affected, despite repeat requests by the AJC. Many of the affected students are out of high school by now. The school system said it had no information about them.

Many likely came from unstable families, with teachers sometimes the only positive role model. (There was testimony of children enduring gang violence, drugs and prostitution.)

Despite the thousands affected, it is difficult to find victims. Some parents may not know or care. Others have moved. And some, like Diamond Davis’ father, were afraid to come forward.

Like Vantricia, Diamond testified against Williamson. But she is a senior at South Atlanta High now, and has her pick of colleges, said her father, Derek Jones, who also testified.

“That’s why I don’t mind her name in the paper,” he said. “They can’t retaliate now.”

Jones, a single father, said his daughter withheld little from him. When she was in Williamson’s class, Diamond came home from school one day with a disturbing story.

“She said, Ms. Williamson had us cheating on some tests today,” he recalled in an interview Thursday. “I said, did you cheat? She said, ‘No, I didn’t need to.”

Jones said he believed her because her report was so spontaneous. He didn’t think the cheating affected her, at least not academically, but he did worry about the effect on other children who did participate.

He said he kept silent because he feared that school officials might lower her grades or otherwise inhibit her progress.

Then there are parents who know and like the teachers, and don’t believe they committed a major crime.

Kaneesia Lopez’s daughter also testified at the trial. (Lopez didn’t want her child’s name published.)

Lopez often visited Dobbs Elementary, and came to know and trust Williamson. “She always seemed like a teacher that cared about the students,” Lopez said.

She said the results in the high-stakes tests were meaningless, a distraction from the task of education. “This did not affect my daughter even a little bit,” Lopez said, adding, “I just don’t see how this has impacted other children.”

She said the important thing was that her daughter, a sophomore at South Atlanta High, was getting an education, and got one from Williamson. “It would be different if they were just passing them along without teaching them anything,” she said.

Lopez thinks the potential prison sentences are out of proportion to the crimes. She said a few months or maybe a year would send the right message.

Even Jones, who kept silent fearing retribution, agrees. “I would think a year would be appropriate,” he said.

The elder Haynes is a harder case. She is dissatisfied with APS, saying school officials have not done enough to repair the damage. She said some of her calls are not returned and that the only tutoring available has been after-school programs open to all students.

Young Vantricia said she was not hurt by the cheating, but her mother disagreed, “because I’ve seen her struggle.”

Their modest house, in a neighborhood of tiny brick bungalows, some with windows covered by plywood or metal bars, was once burgled and cleaned out. There were no arrests, but her neighborhood grapevine had teens from South Atlanta High committing the crime.

The elder Haynes blames APS. Kids with a poor education have few options in life, and are readily drawn to crime, she observed. And the lesson from the cheating scandal — with authority figures saying it is OK to break the rules — didn’t help, she said.

“What I want to know is, what is APS going to do for these children?”

Even so, she said a long prison term for Williamson would be a waste.

“I don’t see how her rotting in jail is going to benefit anybody’s children,” she said. A better punishment would be restitution to her daughter, she said, “that she would have to come out and tutor this child for the next six years of her life. That would be vindication for me.”

She added that she would want a state monitor to watch Williamson’s performance and make sure she cut no corners.

Here too, the younger Haynes was conflicted. “If you do something wrong, you should get punished,” she said, wringing her hands. “Maybe it will give you time to think about what you did.”

Asked if she was hurt by her teacher, Vantricia twisted her hands so tightly that her knuckles cracked.

“You mean, as of now? No. But kind of yes.”