Teacher Mary Ware said she accepted a large manila envelope from her testing coordinator at Usher-Collier Heights Elementary School in Atlanta, and corrected as many answers as she could in less than an hour.
Ware’s testimony Tuesday in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating trial was aimed squarely at Donald Bullock, one of the 12 defendants. He was testing coordinator at Usher in 2009, when widespread cheating is alleged. He also was the main target of prosecutors on the 50th day of testimony.
Ware, who was substitute teaching after retiring from nearly four decades with APS, said there was pressure to meet testing targets that did not exist prior to then-Superintendent Beverly Hall’s administration.
She said she accepted the tests from Bullock and corrected answers “because I was trying to help the children meet the targets that were given to us.”
Bullock’s lawyer, Hurl Taylor, sought to undermine her 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.
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