A former Atlanta Public Schools reading specialist testified Wednesday that former regional supervisor Tamara Cotman told her she was being involuntarily transferred because she “wasn’t playing for the right team.”
Asked what she took that to mean, Monica Hooker answered, “To cheat. To up those numbers. It was not about the child. It was about the numbers.”
Hooker was called as a prosecution witness in the trial against Cotman and 11 other former educators who are accused of engaging in a racketeering conspiracy to inflate test scores. Hooker worked at B.E.S.T. Academy middle school from 2007 to 2009.
She testified that Cotman called her into her office in June 2009 to tell her she was being transferred to Harper-Archer Middle School because Hooker’s students weren’t making enough academic progress, Hooker said.
Hooker said she told Cotman that all of her B.E.S.T. Academy seventh-grade students passed the reading test and that her sixth-grade students also did well on it. After that, Cotman made the comment about not “playing for the right team,” Hooker testified.
During cross-examination, Cotman’s lawyer, Benjamin Davis, questioned whether his client actually made this statement. He played a tape-recording taken by an APS Office of Internal Resolution official who interviewed Hooker about a subsequent complaint she lodged over her working conditions. During that internal affairs interview, Hooker never said Cotman mentioned “the right team.”
When Davis asked Hooker about that, Hooker said the internal affairs official “never asked me about cheating during that time.” Hooker said she had told the internal affairs official about test data before the tape recorder was turned on.
When Davis asked Hooker if Cotman ever told her to cheat, Hooker replied, “She has not ever directly asked me to cheat.”
Hooker testified that she previously had gotten crossways with Cotman because she used the lyrics of Tupac Shakur’s rap song “Dear Mama” to teach a poetry class. A model teacher leader who worked for Cotman emailed Hooker and said a song with lyrics about liquor and drugs was inappropriate for middle school children.
Cotman’s teacher leader suggested an alternative — “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” — that was laughable, Hooker said. Hooker added that she compared the Shakur song with the Loretta Lynn song “Coal Miner’s Daughter” to show that songs are poetry set to music.
Using “Dear Mama” was “very effective” and struck a chord with her students, most of whom came from the challenging Bankhead community, Hooker said. Students witnessed murders and robberies, and there were gangs inside the school and drugs outside the school. “Bankhead was a war zone,” she said.
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