Tutoring expands but doesn’t target Atlanta students cheated

In-depth coverage

The cheating scandal in Atlanta Public Schools has been unfolding for years since The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2008 investigated suspect scores on the state Criterion-Referenced Competency Test.

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As the criminal case against educators allegedly involved moves toward trial, the AJC wants to tell the stories of those most directly affected — the students. Do you believe your child was harmed by test tampering in Atlanta public schools? If so, the AJC would like to hear from you. Please contact Mark Niesse at 404-526-2848 or mark.niesse@ajc.com.

Tutoring programs aimed at raising academic achievement in the wake of Atlanta’s cheating scandal have assisted thousands of students — though not necessarily the students whose tests were tampered with.

As 13 former Atlanta teachers and administrators await trial for their alleged crimes, the students they are accused of cheating have never been singled out for additional assistance.

Instead, Atlanta Public Schools bolstered in-school, after-school, weekend and online tutoring for all students at risk of falling behind.

When Erroll Davis took the superintendent’s job in July 2011, he initially intended to identify and provide instructional support to students whose results on the 2009 state-mandated Criterion-Referenced Competency Test deceived them into thinking they were performing well in school. But when he learned the difficulty of tracking students from the 44 schools where state investigators said cheating occurred, he opted to extend help to any student who needed it, whether they were impacted by cheating or not.

“Every student who’s not performing at grade level is getting attention,” he said. “We’re hopeful with that philosophy that we’re going to move the needle very quickly.”

School officials say they don’t know how many of the district’s 49,000 students have participated in the programs. Nor have they tracked the combined progress of students getting this extra help, although individual student achievement is evaluated through unit and benchmark tests.

Much of the funding for remediation flows from federal Title I money for disadvantaged students — worth $32 million to the school system in 2013 — that individual principals have flexibility over how to spend. The school system’s budget shows general funding for remediation, which is separate from Title I money, more than doubled over the last three years, from $1.6 million in 2011-2012 to $3.5 million in 2013-2014.

Jacqueline Brown, a Deerwood Academy third-grade teacher who retired last year, said she was skeptical of Davis’ broad tutoring strategy. She said she didn’t see or participate in cheating at the school, which a state investigation flagged for suspiciously high numbers of answer sheet erasures.

“To this day, I don’t know who those children are, and their parents don’t know who they are. The main concern should be helping those children,” Brown said. “They’re still under the impression their children passed the test.”

Kasteraisa Smith is among a number of parents who question the effectiveness of the tutoring programs. One of her sons, an eighth-grader at Kennedy Middle, attended Wednesday after-school sessions in 2012. Smith doesn’t think her child was a victim of test tampering while in elementary school. But she also doesn’t think he learned much from tutoring.

“It didn’t really help. There was no consistency in it. I didn’t see any difference with my child,” she said.

Beefed-up tutoring programs take different forms in different schools, and they are designed to be adjustable based on student and school needs.

Students struggling in reading and math are assigned to smaller classes with specialist teachers until they catch up. Teachers can send students to after-school programs on Mondays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays, open tutoring is available to all students. Some schools host optional sessions on Saturdays.

At Venetian Hills Elementary, Principal Diamond Jack said tutoring programs have helped turn the southwest Atlanta school around after a 2011 state investigation concluded cheating occurred there from 2004 to 2009.

Teacher Marie Hall worked with a group of seven fifth-grade students who had been pulled out of their regular math class so they could get extra help plotting coordinates on an x and y axis, likening the concept to finding your house on a map. She then paired up the students in a modified game of tic-tac-toe where they tried to be the first to connect four coordinates in a row.

These students stay in her class for weeks or months and rejoin the general population once they make up ground.

“We would hope they’re at grade level by the end of the year,” said Hall, Venetian Hills’ teacher of the year in 2013. “But we know, realistically, they may not be.”

The hope is that multi-layered tutoring will show results with higher graduation rates and test scores, Davis said. Graduation rates jumped nearly 8 percentage points to about 59 percent last year, and fourth-grade math scores jumped last year on tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Atlanta Public Schools would have had a hard time finding and giving specific help to each of the students who were cheated over the years, said Michael Bowers, a former Georgia attorney general and one of the writers of the 2011 state cheating investigative report.

That kind of effort could have taken years and a lot of money, he said. In addition, Atlanta Public Schools said in a statement that it’s difficult to track students because 30 percent of them change schools at least once each school year.

“Goodness gracious, it would involve an enormous amount of work,” Bowers said. “I don’t know how you could get through it.”

The 44 schools where his report said cheating occurred included at least 1,366 classrooms flagged for abnormal amounts of answers changed from wrong to right, according to a count by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Doug Fuchs, a special education professor at Vanderbilt University who specializes in remediation and reading and math disabilities, said Atlanta Public Schools’ variety of tutoring goes against a public education trend of moving more instruction into general classrooms.

“Atlanta’s remedial effort is pretty unusual in its comprehensiveness,” Fuchs said. “There are many students who need an intensity of instruction or an intensity of intervention that the general classroom doesn’t provide.”

Davis, who plans to retire from his superintendent job this summer, said he hopes expanded tutoring opportunities live on long after he’s gone, increasing academic achievement among children who suffered at the hands of adults who cheated.

“I’m angry that the school system over time has allowed itself to be so distracted by adult issues,” Davis said. “I don’t like injustice, and I get particularly angry when that injustice has been visited upon children.”