Justina Collins could tell something wasn’t right when her third-grade daughter excelled on standardized tests after posting the lowest scores in her class on other tests. Another parent, Rhoda Spence, never suspected her third-grader’s test scores were inflated until years afterward.
When both mothers later learned that Atlanta educators had falsified test results, their children’s abnormal scores finally made sense: Their families were victimized by the nation’s largest cheating scandal.
Their daughters are among the thousands of students who may have been harmed when educators faked test scores to meet their goals instead of reporting accurate results.
Thirty-five former Atlanta Public Schools employees, including Superintendent Beverly Hall and 13 teachers, were criminally charged on March 29 with accusations that they conspired to change wrong answers to right answers and artificially boost school performance since 2005. Hall, who was named national superintendent of the year in 2009, faces up to 45 years in prison.
While new leadership in Atlanta schools instituted tutoring for all students who had fallen behind, experts say many of those students may never catch up.
Collins’ and Spence’s daughters missed out on additional help to grasp the fundamentals of reading and math after school administrators pointed to their exceptional standardized test scores. Their children’s learning problems — both were later diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — weren’t discovered for years. Both students are now in high school, but they’re reading far behind grade level.
Collins, who did not want her daughter named or interviewed for this article, wanted more for her children because she’d learned the value of an education the hard way. Collins, a single mother and self-employed house cleaner, earned her GED at age 30 and expects to graduate from college in December with a criminal justice degree.
In 2006, she sought answers from teachers, the principal at Cascade Elementary, the Atlanta Board of Education and Hall herself, who listened to Collins’ questions and then told her that her daughter simply tested well and there was nothing more they could do, Collins said.
“They blew me off. I don’t think they took me seriously. Maybe they felt like I was on to something,” Collins said. “I wasn’t trying to find criminal activity. I was trying to get my daughter help and get an understanding of how she did so well.”
Her daughter didn’t get help, and Collins made her repeat fourth grade at Cascade. Now in the ninth grade, her daughter reads on a fifth-grade level.
Collins’ account supports allegations in the indictment that Hall ignored suspicious test score gains.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis first detected statistically improbable increases in test scores at one Atlanta school in 2008. The following year, the AJC published another analysis that found suspicious score changes on the 2009 CRCT at a dozen Atlanta schools.
A subsequent AJC investigation raised questions about the validity of test scores in school districts across the country. The APS scandal has stoked concerns about high-stakes testing across the nation.
A state investigation found cheating on the state-mandated Criterion-Referenced Competency Test in 2009 in 44 Atlanta public schools, with 178 educators implicated.
After the state’s report was completed in 2011, an investigation by prosecutors culminated in criminal charges of racketeering, making false statements and theft.
Collins became a reluctant spokeswoman for parents when she spoke to news media last week, her voice cracking as she expressed her disappointment in Hall.
An investigator for the Fulton County district attorney’s office tracked Collins down after finding records of her complaints about scoring irregularities on the CRCT, she said. She didn’t want to get involved, but prosecutors issued a subpoena compelling her to testify to the grand jury, and then District Attorney Paul Howard asked her to appear at a press conference announcing the indictment.
“Children aren’t being taught anymore. They’re just being pushed through the system,” Collins said. “This has not only affected my daughter, but hundreds of others. Some teachers made choices without thinking of the children.”
The cheating affected many students who were already vulnerable — about 90 percent of lunches served in Atlanta public schools last school year were offered for free or at a reduced price for children from low-income families.
Three years later, Collins’ daughter was accepted into an individualized education program created for students with learning disabilities. But Collins said damage was done by not getting her daughter, now a student at Marietta High School, help sooner.
Many other parents, such as Spence, didn’t doubt their children’s achievements. Spence said she was proud that her daughter had excelled after studying hard and didn’t question her child’s third-grade CRCT results until she failed the test in sixth grade.
“The worst thing it did for us was that it gave us a false impression,” said Spence, whose daughter attended Boyd Elementary at the time. “I didn’t realize that she couldn’t read.”
Spence’s daughter, Adonica, is now a junior at Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy High School, but she probably won’t graduate on time, and she still doesn’t read well, stumbling over words like “recommendation” and “reprimand.”
“I feel a little bit of guilt for not being more diligent. If I had done more, maybe she would have gotten more help and tutoring,” Spence said.
Adonica Spence said she struggled with reading throughout elementary school. It wasn’t until middle school that she felt more confident about it. Despite this, Adonica still isn’t sure whether teachers should get in trouble for cheating.
The state report said the school district pressured Alfonso Jessie, the principal at Cascade Elementary, to meet academic targets, but no witnesses admitted prompting students or changing answers. At Boyd Elementary, the report said former Principal Emalyn Foreman was responsible for failing to supervise testing, and she should have known about “widespread cheating” at the school. No one from either school was named in the indictment.
The Atlanta school system attempted to correct some of the effects that test tampering had on students by providing tutoring to an estimated 5,500 students struggling in either math or reading.
Because it was difficult to pinpoint which students were harmed by grade changes, remedial help was extended to all students who were falling behind, said Atlanta Board of Education Chairman Reuben McDaniel. That help includes before school, after school, during school and limited Saturday school programs.
“Our view is that we’re going to provide remediation opportunities for all students who are performing below our grade expectations for them,” said Superintendent Erroll Davis.
The school district also instituted safeguards to prevent future cheating, including mandatory ethics training for all employees, test security measures and automatic investigations when test scores fluctuate.
Students who aren’t able to self-teach through reading — a process called “reading to learn” — by fourth grade are more likely to have long-lasting educational problems, said Richard Long, director of government relations for the International Reading Association.
Schools need to intervene to help struggling students when they aren’t making progress with reading, he said.
If more parents, teachers and administrators had spoken up, cheating could have been stopped long before it spread across the school district, Collins said. “It could have been prevented if they had heard my cries of trying to find an answer for what had taken place.”
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