Three elementary school teachers on trial in the Atlanta schools test cheating scandal sat together in their school’s computer lab and changed answers on state tests, a former colleague testified Monday.
Former Dunbar Elementary School second-grade teacher Rose Neal testified that she saw second-grade teacher Diane Buckner-Webb and first-grade teachers Pamela Cleveland and Shani Robinson cheat on Georgia’s Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests in the spring of 2009. Neal said she too cheated.
Buckner-Webb, Cleveland and Robinson all face charges of racketeering and making false statements. A statewide analysis found an abnormally high number of wrong-to-right erasures on standardized tests taken by their students in 2009.
No one in the room — including former Dunbar testing coordinator Lera Middlebrooks — suggested cheating was wrong or that they should stop, Neal said in response to a prosecutor's question.
“I wish they had, but no,” she said.
Middlebrooks testified earlier that she saw teachers making erasures, but could not tell if they changed answers because her view was blocked.
Neal said Monday she wasn’t told to cheat or to erase wrong answers.
But teachers were told that their students had to meet state test-performance targets that year. That meant “we need to do what we had to do” to meet those targets, Neal said.
Neal said she initially lied to investigators about the cheating but eventually came clean.
“I had felt enough pressure and I had been called a liar enough until I just broke,” she said.
About the Author
