A retired teacher took the stand on Day 50 of the Atlanta Public Schools cheating trial and delivered testimony aimed squarely at Donald Bullock, one of 12 defendants fighting charges of engaging in a racketeering conspiracy to inflate test scores.
Mary Ware testified Tuesday that in 2009, while at Usher-Collier Heights Elementary School in Atlanta, she accepted a large manila envelope from Bullock and corrected as many answers on standardized tests as she could in less than an hour.
At the time, Bullock was a testing coordinator at Usher and Ware was a substitute teacher after retiring from nearly four decades with APS. Ware testified there was pressure to meet testing targets that did not exist prior to then-Superintendent Beverly Hall’s administration.
Ware said she accepted the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests from Bullock and corrected answers because she was “trying to help the children meet the targets.”
At some point, though, her conscience got the best of her and she no longer felt comfortable changing answers because “it was wrong,” she told jurors.
“Did you tell the police about it?” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter asked.
“No, I did not,” Ware said.
Bullock’s lawyer, Hurl Taylor, sought to undermine Ware’s credibility, questioning whether she would have had enough time to make the large number of test changes that were discovered in a state investigation. He put a sample test passage on the projector and asked her to read it. After some moments, he asked how far she’d progressed. She told him, and he shot back: “So all that time that’s as far as you got?”
Ware said there was another instance when Bullock left tests with her — for only about 20 minutes this time.
“So how do you explain the high number of erasures?” Taylor asked.
“I did not do them all,” she responded.
Ware’s testimony followed that of Ameerah Malcolm-Hill, who still teaches at APS and testified about details such as the floor plan of the school. The day started with the continued testimony of Melissa Fincher, a Georgia Department of Education official who talked about testing rules.
Tuesday’s testimony about the role Hall is alleged to have played in the cheating scandal continues a pattern in the APS trial. While Hall has been charged, she is not on trial at this time because she is battling Stage IV breast cancer. An update on Hall’s health has been requested by Baxter, however, who said Thursday that the former APS superintendent needs to be tried.
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