Atlanta schools trial takes a break

The final two witnesses of 2014 took the stand Thursday in the Atlanta Public Schools test-cheating trial, as the court takes a break for more than two weeks.

Testimony from a school librarian and a testing expert offered no new clear evidence of cheating.

Oreta Hinamon Taylor, an APS librarian who was working at Dunbar Elementary School when cheating was alleged there, said she had suspicions that she did not report. She said she feared retribution.

Taylor saw Dunbar testing coordinator Lera Middlebrooks in the computer lab with two or three other teachers who had pencils and paper, and said Middlebrooks told her to go away. Taylor also said she told Middlebrooks that she didn’t want to proctor a teacher’s test because she had suspicions about that teacher. She said she didn’t believe some of the students could be scoring the way they were on state tests.

“Their reading was not; they can’t have done it,” she said.

Next, Marc Julian, a testing expert who conducted the erasure analysis that flagged classrooms at Dunbar and other schools for possible cheating, testified about statistics and the process of detecting unusually large numbers of wrong-to-right erasures.

Julian managed the 2008-09 analysis for CTB/McGraw-Hill, which had a state contract.

He said classrooms were flagged if they had three or more “standard deviations” from the state average for such erasures.

Classrooms at Dunbar had far more than that, including one taught by defendant Pamela Cleveland.

It had 17.

“These are extremely different from the state average,” Julian said.

Moments later, Judge Jerry Baxter released him from the witness stand and bade the jurors farewell, until court resumes Jan. 5.