About the columnist
Gracie Bonds Staples is a senior enterprise writer for the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She joined the AJC in July 2000 after stints at the Fort Worth-Star Telegram, Sacramento Bee, Raleigh Times and two Mississippi dailies. Gracie graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi with a degree in journalism in 1979. She and her husband, Jimmy Staples, have two daughters, Jamila and Asha.
It’s next to impossible to think of Beverly Hall as part of our past but death leaves us no choice.
Until 2011, when she retired, Hall was superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools. She was National Superintendent of the Year. She was renowned as a school reformer. She was all these things except when we think of our children, the ones people say she cheated.
With her death on Monday, not even a jury of her peers will get to decide whether there was any truth to the criminal charges against her, whether she cared more about test scores than educating students.
Cancer saw to that.
All of it got me thinking about the case of the “salt mom” who was convicted of poisoning her 5-year-old son to death with sodium. You know the case. Prosecutors argued Lacey Spears, who for years blogged about her son’s constant health woes, craved the attention. They likened it to a disorder known as Munchausen by proxy in which caretakers secretly harm children to win sympathy.
The whole thing gives me the creeps. The APS case creeped me out, too.
For years, Beverly Hall and her principals told us APS students were breaking records when it came to the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, or CRCT. Hall even depicted doubters of the standardized test gains as cynics who believed poor minority children couldn’t learn.
Of course there was never any mention of cheating; but news reports indicated otherwise, offering statistical analyses that showed the district’s CRCT scores had increased at rates that were all but impossible. This newspaper also reported that school officials disregarded internal findings of testing irregularities and retaliated against whistleblowers who reported cheating. State officials later documented widespread test tampering, and a team of special investigators appointed by the governor concluded that Hall stood at the center of a culture of corruption.
Every teacher who has taken the stand since the trial began has testified they were under pressure by their principals to raise standardized test scores. They did it by cheating. And like Spears they did it knowing they were causing harm to our children.
Hall was quoted as saying she couldn’t make teachers cheat. I have to believe her because staring into the abyss - the erasures, the cheating parties, poor students - makes me dizzy.
No matter how many times I hear a teacher say I was afraid of losing my job, that I felt pressured to cheat, it sounds indefensible to me.
The very fact that it happened on Hall’s watch makes her responsible; but it doesn’t excuse the teachers and administrators who carried it out, who now seem to be saying ‘The devil made me do it.’ ”
It’s been more than 30 years since Flip Wilson had us in stitches with that line but let’s be honest. It’s an easy grab when we don’t want to own up to our failures. It’s true that the devil wants to have his way with us but what I know for sure and from experience is that God always provides us an off ramp — whether we take it or not.
Even though Hall and other educators gained bonuses when test scores skyrocketed, pointing the finger at Hall just never did it for me and it never will.
There’s been a lot of talk about Hall’s legacy and the impact the cheating scandal will have.
What I want to know is who will pay for having shortchanged our kids and how much?
We may never know the whole truth of what happened in those classrooms on test days but we do know this: our children were cheated.
Hall is gone God rest her soul but those who are left ought to be held accountable. And current APS educators and leaders ought be doing everything in their power to make things right because, whether Beverly Hall believed it or not, poor black children can learn.
I know because I was once one of them.
