An Atlanta Public Schools tribunal recommended Thursday that a former test coordinator at Toomer Elementary School be fired by the school board for his role in the far-ranging cheating scandal in which 180 educators have been implicated.
The former test coordinator, Hezekiah Wardlow, had taken the stand and told the tribunal he did his job “to the letter” in ensuring nobody cheated or tampered with the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests. And not only did he himself not cheat, he said, no witness testified that he did.
But after two days of hearings it made no difference.
Two witnesses testified that an analysis of CRCT tests at Toomer showed that 21.4 percent of the tests were flagged for a greater number of erasures of wrong answers changed to right answers than is statistically probable, and that the only known explanation for such an aberration is cheating.
A state investigation released last year accused Wardlow of telling a teacher to cheat on a fifth-grade writing test. But no witness testified to that in the two-day tribunal. Nor did any testify that Wardlow was aware of cheating on the tests.
The three-person tribunal said it decided to recommend Wardlow be fired because the Professional Standards Commission, which polices state educators, recommended last May that Wardlow’s teaching license be revoked because of the charges against him in the state investigative report.
Wardlow has asked for a hearing to appeal the commission recommendation, but there’s such a backlog of cases his appeal may not be heard for years, his attorney, Torin Togut, told the tribunal. Togut compared his client’s plight with three Duke University students falsely accused of rape a few years ago in a case that got national attention.
“These were empty allegations, they were unsupported, these three men were totally innocent of doing anything wrong,” Togut said. “There was a rush to judgment … and this is a rush to judgment.”
APS attorney Nina Gupta told the panel in her closing argument that the standards commission had conducted its own investigation and “ultimately recommended the harshest punishment available to them, to revoke his license.”
Wardlow was “responsible for conducting the tests with integrity,” she said. “He was the administrator in the building, he was in charge, and that did not happen.”
Allowing cheating to “happen on your watch is every bit as culpable” as if you cheated yourself, Gupta said. The tribunal agreed.
Togut said if the Atlanta School Board follows through and fires Wardlow, he plans to appeal to the state board of education.
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