Former Dunbar Elementary School testing coordinator Lera Middlebrooks testified she called teachers armed with pencils and erasers into a computer lab and another room after school to get them to change answers during testimony in the Atlanta schools cheating trial Thursday.
Her testimony under cross-examination focused on three defendants who taught at Dunbar: first-grade teachers Pamela Cleveland and Shani Robinson and second-grade teacher Diane Buckner-Webb. All face charges of racketeering and making false statements.
A statewide analysis found abnormally high wrong-to-right erasures on standardized tests taken by those teachers’ students in 2009.
Former Dunbar principal Betty Greene emerged from a 2008 meeting with regional supervisor Michael Pitts, who is also on trial, begging Middlebrooks to oversee state testing in 2009, Middlebrooks testified.
“Just do me this one favor. We have to make targets in 2009,” Middlebrooks said Greene told her.
If district and federal No Child Left Behind targets weren’t met, there would be “changes” at Dunbar, Middlebrooks said Greene told her, and people could lose their jobs.
Greene didn’t use the word “cheat” but that’s what Middlebrooks thought she meant.
Middlebrooks did not admit to changing answers herself. She said in earlier testimony she saw teachers making erasures, but could not tell if they changed answers because her view was blocked.
Middlebrooks testified she believed first and second-grade performance counted toward the federal goals.
However, the lower grades were not part of Georgia’s No Child Left Behind goals, according to the state Department of Education.
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