Atlanta Public Schools said a grateful goodbye in 2015 to a long-running embarrassment that turned the system into a national example of what’s wrong with American schools. Five years ago, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution first questioned the APS system's surprising test results. Subsequent stories shed further light on wrongdoing, and led to a state investigation. This spring, the trial of a dozen educators who refused to plead guilty to charges of helping students cheat on standardized tests ended with 11 being found guilty. Twenty-one educators had already pleaded guilty before the trial’s start. Presently, all of the convicted educators are free while their cases are being appealed.
After considering nearly five months of testimony, a Fulton County jury convicted all but one of the dozen former Atlanta teachers and administrators on trial in the largest test-cheating scandal in the nation.
On Wednesday afternoon, 10 former teachers and school administrators were handcuffed and taken to jail, where they will await sentencing, perhaps to decades in prison. The 11th was at home, waiting to give birth.
Only Dessa Curb, a former teacher, walked out of the courthouse a free woman.
“I knew God had my back,” she said.
In total, 32 former educators were convicted, counting the 21 who pleaded guilty to lesser charges before the trial's start last year. Two others, including former Superintendent Beverly Hall, died of cancer before they could be tried.
The case capped what began in 2008, when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke the first of several stories highlighting suspect test scores in Atlanta Public Schools and other Georgia districts. As the AJC kept digging, special investigators were eventually appointed by the governor.
Wednesday’s convictions confirmed what those investigators and prosecutors have said for years: teachers, principals and their bosses cheated so that inflated scores on standardized tests would earn them bonuses and pay raises, or at least allow them to keep their jobs, as Hall increased testing expectations beyond and above federal mandates.
Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard, who was criticized for bringing racketeering charges against teachers, said he hoped the outcome would lead to a re-examination of Atlanta's education system and help the community "understand this was not some fantasy created by the DA's office."
The cheating robbed students, who often were passed on to the next grade though they couldn’t read, write or do basic math. Inflated test scores papered over these failures, causing schools to miss out on federal grants — the prosecution tallied the loss at $8 million in 2009 alone — that could have paid for tutoring or other remedial programs.
It took years to expose the scandal.
After the AJC broke the news of questionable test scores in 2008, the articles prompted a state review of test answer sheets from 2009. The review found statistically unlikely numbers of wrong answers erased and replaced with correct answers.
Students in a fourth-grade class at Dobbs Elementary School in southeast Atlanta had a 1 in 288 septillion chance of doing as well as they purportedly did.
The erasure analysis prompted an investigation by the governor’s office. Special investigators aided by scores of GBI agents interviewed hundreds of Atlanta Public Schools employees and obtained admissions of cheating. The investigative report released in July 2011 concluded that cheating was pervasive and that thousands of schoolchildren were deprived of the education they deserved.
The report criticized the “business community” for defending Hall and the district after the erasures were exposed. “Image was more important than truth,” it said. “Somewhere in this process, the truth got lost, and so did the children.”
The report also prompted Howard to investigate and bring charges.
Prosecutors said Hall’s rigorous accountability measures — stronger than federal objectives under the No Child Left Behind Act — demanded ever-increasing and unrealistic test scores. As scores rose, she garnered national accolades, but the governor’s report says teachers suffered under her administration. The report said the system was primed for cheating by the severe consequences meted out for failure, including firings, demotions and public humiliation.
Well before the trial, the scandal led to an overhaul of the Atlanta school board and the hiring eventually of a new superintendent, Meria Carstarphen.
“I have always felt the whole thing was tragic,” said Erroll Davis, who was interim superintendent between Hall and Carstarphen.
“I think every teacher understands now the downsides of bad integrity,” he said. “That’s abundantly clear to all.”
The mayor, school officials and some parents saw the verdicts as a final page in a story that has run on too long, while others saw the outcome as a footnote in the lives of students denied an education.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said he hoped the verdict would allow his city to “finally close this chapter and move forward with the education and development of our young people.”
But Richard Quartarone, a father of two kids in an Atlanta school, said the verdict brings his city no closer to absolution. Prosecutors focused on 2009 but said cheating had gone on for years, denying thousands of an education.
“Closure,” Quartarone said, “is figuring out how to educate the kids who are in the system now and how to support the kids who were denied the opportunity to learn.”
The 11 convicted former educators face up to 20 years in prison on one count alone, violating Georgia’s Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO.
The eight convicted on additional counts could get more time. Angela Williamson, a former teacher at Dobbs Elementary School in southeast Atlanta who was convicted of prompting kids with correct test answers, could spend the most time in prison. She was convicted on racketeering and four other counts, more than any of her co-defendants, with the other charges carrying incarceration sentences of five years or more.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter has indicated he will show little sympathy. He has noted that the defendants were given ample opportunity to accept plea bargains offered by the prosecution. Twenty-one others accepted pleas, and many of them testified at trial.
Defense attorneys tried to use that fact, saying repeatedly throughout the trial that the prosecution’s case was based on the words of admitted cheaters and liars.
George Lawson, who represented one of the three former regional administrators on trial, said outside the courthouse that he still has faith in the jury system but “not in the prosecutorial manner this was done.” He said that upon hearing the verdict, his client, Michael Pitts, turned to him and said: “Am I in America?”
During the eight days of jury deliberation, the courtroom remained filled with prosecutors, defense attorneys, defendants and their spouses. There was boredom punctuated by raucous laughter as people told jokes and stories to pass the time.
Then, around 1:45 p.m. Wednesday, a dozen deputies quietly entered, and the murmuring started, ending abruptly with the deputy’s now familiar call: “All rise.”
The jury of six men and six women entered.
Baxter broke the silence, thanking the jury and then reading off the verdicts.
The educators took it stoically, but there was an outburst when Baxter ordered them to jail.
Bob Rubin, who represented former Dobbs Elementary principal Dana Evans, said there was no reason to lock up the ex-educators before sentencing.
“There is a reason. They have been convicted,” Baxter retorted.
Teresa Mann, who represented former regional director Sharon Davis Williams, joined the protest.
“They have been convicted of felonies, serious felonies,” Baxter said. “They have made this decision (to go to trial) and they have not fared well. I don’t like to send anybody to jail … but they have made their bed and they have to lie in it.”
Then came the metal clicks as deputies pulled out their handcuffs. Their lawyers left the courtroom with their clients’ belongings — bags filled with jewelry, cellphones and computers.
Those with family members present got hugs before they were led out a side door.
Gerald Griggs said his client, Williamson, the former teacher, whispered to him that she could not believe she had been convicted on all five counts against her.
“My thought was, ‘What case were they listening to?’” Griggs said. “I respect this verdict, but how do you send teachers to prison?”
The Atlanta school system released a statement calling the case a “sad and tragic chapter” that is now over and said Carstarphen and the school board are collaborating to “create a new culture.”
Joseph Adkins, a 79-year-old raising his grandson, a sophomore at South Atlanta High, blamed the cheating on the relentless focus on tests, a focus that remains.
“Across the nation, schools have had to cheat in order to get their money. I think it was unfair,” he said. “Hall came up with some innovative ways to get black children to graduate. I know it wasn’t perfect, but Georgia was at the bottom anyway.”
But Shannon Williams, whose daughter is a sophomore at Carver Early College in south Atlanta, said the trial was necessary to expose, and hopefully to end, cheating.
“The only way that this would have been stopped was for them to be caught like this. It’s a good decision in my eyes,” she said. “It’s kind of an embarrassing thing, but it needed to happen so now maybe they won’t do it anymore. Let’s hope they don’t.”
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