3:45 p.m.
A former Atlanta Public Schools teacher on Monday testified she donned plastic gloves while changing Deerwood Academy students’ answers on standardized tests.
“I just didn’t like the feeling that I had,” testified Margaret Merkerson, saying she knew it was wrong to cheat on the test.
Merkerson said she got the gloves from the school cafeteria and used them until her hands got too hot when changing answers. She said she changed Deerwood students’ answers during the taking of the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test in the summer of 2008 and in the spring of 2009.
Merkerson offered potentially damaging testimony against former Deerwood assistant principal Tabeeka Jordan, one of 12 defendants on trial in the racketeering case. Jordan suggested a way to more efficiently correct the students’ answers and said other APS schools had met their targets thanks to test-cheating, Merkerson said.
But Jordan’s lawyer, during cross-examination, pointed out that Merkerson, in prior interviews and testimony, gave contradictory versions of what had happened and whether she had direct knowledge of who directed the test-cheating.
During a May 2012 tribunal hearing, for example, Merkerson testified that she “knew there had to be somebody in the background at the school” orchestrating the test-cheating. She did not say Jordan who was doing it.
Merkerson, who worked for APS almost four decades, said she was asked by Deerwood testing coordinator Lavonia Ferrell to help prepare the CRCT tests for students attending summer school in 2008. But after the tests were turned in, Ferrell asked her to change students’ answers in a conference room next to the principal’s office, Merkerson said.
“Did Ms. Ferrell say who’s idea it was?” Fulton County prosecutor Brett Pinion asked.
“Yeah, Ms. Jordan,” Merkerson answered.
Jordan had said there was pressure on Deerwood because it failed to meet test targets in 2008 and did not make Adequate Yearly Progress, a key goal, Merkerson testified.
Merkerson said she changed answers against her better judgment. “I was a little nervous about it, but I did change some,” she said.
During the 2009 CRCT, Jordan told her that Deerwood again needed to make Adequate Yearly Progress, Merkerson said.
What did that mean? Pinion asked. “In other words: cheating, erasing needs to be done,” Merkerson said.
Merkerson said when she and Ferrell struggled changing answers, Jordan got a list of students who had previously tested well.
Pull their tests and make the corrections using their answers on the CRCT, Jordan told them, Merkerson testified. “You won’t have to sit here and solve these problems.”
Merkerson changed answers over several days after the 2009 CRCT and it was during this time she put on plastic gloves.
Merkerson acknowledged she lied about her involvement in the cheating scandal on a number of occasions until GBI agents appeared unannounced at her door one day and offered her immunity from prosecution if she told the truth.
“I confessed the first day,” she testified. “I had had a lot of problems sleeping. … I knew these were the big boys.”
11:30 a.m.
At the start of summer school at Deerwood Academy, many of the fifth graders in Roxanne King’s class were at “whoa, we have a problem,” level, she testified Monday in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating trial.
The average Deerwood fifth grader in her class was at perhaps a third-grade level, King said, “and that’s me being nice.”
“I need you to work a miracle for me,” Tabeeka Jordan, Deerwood’s assistant principal and one of the 12 defendants on trial in the Atlanta cheating trial, told King early on, King said.
King took the comment as a compliment, she said in response to a question from Jordan’s attorney Akil Secret, not a suggestion that she cheat on state tests.
On the day students re-took the fifth grade state math test, Jordan took a group of about six students and their test materials from the classroom, King said. King said she didn’t know why Jordan took the students or where they took their tests.
But in response to questions from Secret, she said removing disruptive students from the classroom could make it easier for the remaining students to do well on the test. King also said she didn’t see cheating at Deerwood or cheat herself and was not told to cheat.
Schools that failed had a “walk of shame” - 7:03 a.m.
Educators at Atlanta’s Deerwood Academy got bonuses when the school met testing targets, but in 2008 the school missed the mark.
As a result, teachers there felt like they were on a “walk of shame” at the next districtwide convocation, according to testimony in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating trial last week. They were consigned to the bleacher seats while the schools that tested well were near the stage.
The next year, Deerwood made sure to nail the tests. Alarmingly, though, almost 48 percent of the school’s classrooms were flagged for abnormally high numbers of wrong-to-right erasure marks on student answer sheets.
Tabitha Martin, who was a reading instructional specialist at Deerwood, testified about intense pressure under the administration of then-superintendent Beverly Hall to turn in high-flying performances on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests. The problem, she told jurors: students at Deerwood were often several grades behind.
Her testimony, which is to continue Monday, is laying the foundation for allegations to come about cheating on the tests. How were fifth grade students who could barely read managing to pass the state-mandated tests in such numbers?
Tabeeka Jordan, Deerwood’s assistant principal at the time, is among the dozen defendants charged with conspiring to inflate scores on the CRCT. Another defendant, Sharon Davis Williams, was a regional director over the school.
Later this week, prosecutors will shift their focus to allegations of cheating against other educators at two other schools: Kennedy Middle and Venetian Hills Elementary.
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