A learning disability made school hard for Chantel Cox. But she always stayed on grade level and looked forward to earning a high school diploma. She actually was excited about taking the state graduation tests.
After school every day, Chantel and her mother, Deirdre, logged onto test preparation websites. At Carver High School of Technology in Atlanta, where Chantel was a junior, teachers helped her get ready. They believed, Deirdre Cox said, that Chantel could pass.
But the morning of the high school writing test, in September 2009, school administrators pulled Chantel and several other Carver juniors aside. All stood a good chance of failing — and of lowering the school’s odds of meeting its do-or-die performance targets. While the rest of the 11th grade took the test required for all juniors, Chantel and the others worked puzzles in a special-education classroom.
Their absences could be excused, because the school had placed them in a grade all their own: 10 1/2.
The episode reflects the pattern of academic irregularities that emerges in a new investigation of Atlanta’s high schools by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The newspaper reviewed thousands of pages of reports from the school district’s internal investigations, along with other public records, and interviewed educators, parents and students.
The questionable activities in high schools appear to be less systemic than the cheating that has roiled Atlanta’s elementary and middle schools, where attention focused on a single exam: the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test. Nevertheless, the improprieties seem no less insidious: cheating on standardized tests, falsifying attendance records and changing grades, all to award undeserved diplomas that helped administrators meet performance targets.
At one Atlanta high school, failure literally was not an option; the minimum grade for all students was 70. At another, the principal allowed no more than 10 percent of seniors to fail, regardless of their grades. Another principal allegedly ordered teachers to change grades and ignore absences so students could receive diplomas. Teachers at several schools apparently obtained advance copies of state tests and gave students the actual questions during practice exams.
Such transgressions call into question the validity of the high school “transformation” that Beverly Hall, the former superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, touted for half a decade. The district spent millions of dollars and staked a piece of Hall’s reputation on restructuring high schools to reduce absenteeism and increase student performance.
Superintendent Erroll Davis, who took over last summer after Hall’s retirement, said Friday he has ordered audits of standardized test scores in the district’s 23 high schools and of graduation rates and grading procedures. He also is commissioning a review of the costs and benefits of the high school restructuring.
“One of the first thoughts I had when I came here was if you had discovered testing irregularities in the k-8 system, why should you assume it would automatically stop at the high school system?” Davis said in an interview. “I have no reason to believe there’s any systematic or pervasive cheating going on, although I have taken the appropriate risk-management steps to give me the assurance these things are not going on. I don’t want to leave it to good will or assumptions.”
Efforts to reach Hall were not successful.
The AJC’s examination suggests the high stakes of Hall’s high school initiative drove some educators to achieve their mandated goals through illicit means or, at the least, poor judgment. Producing the desired results — or failing to — carried enormous implications for many an educator’s career.
For students, too, the consequences could be monumental.
Chantel Cox was devastated when, despite her intense preparation, she wasn’t allowed to take the writing exam or other graduation tests.
“She was so upset,” her mother said. “I’ll never forget that look on her face. She said, ‘Mama, Mama, they pulled me out and put me in a classroom and gave me a crossword puzzle.’”
Deirdre Cox was Carver’s PTSA president at the time. Still, she had heard nothing about the school’s reclassifying Chantel or other students into grade 10 1/2. She immediately suspected ulterior motives by officials concerned with meeting “adequate yearly progress” and other education benchmarks.
“It’s about the numbers,” Cox said in an interview. “You haven’t made AYP the last two years and you’re pulling my child out and other children out, thinking it would help you. You interfered with my child’s education, and that’s against the law.”
‘Incredible results’?
Atlanta launched its High School Transformation Initiative in 2005. The main idea involved dividing the city’s comprehensive high schools into multiple “small learning communities” or “academies,” each with just a few hundred students, and each focused on certain core topics: technology, the arts and communications, among others.
The district retained the old campuses, but a school such as South Atlanta High went from an 845-student comprehensive school in 2007 to three specialized institutions today: the Law and Social Justice School, the School of Computer Animation and Design and the School of Health and Medical Science, each with about 300 students.
From the start, this was an expensive proposition.
The district paid many of its initial expenses with $10.5 million in grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has advocated for the small-schools concept across the country. But most of the grant money went to a corps of consultants. For instance, the district paid the consulting firm First Things First of Toms River, N.J., $198,040 for “constituency building.” It paid Cambridge, Mass.-based Educators for Social Responsibility $479,800 for “professional development” related to a student advisory board.
As the schools shrank, administrative costs swelled.
The district’s high schools office, which oversaw the restructuring, had a two-person staff and a $200,000 budget in 2007. The next year, it employed 20 people and spent $5 million.
High schools that had one principal now have as many as four, along with assistant principals, academy leaders, deans, academic coaches, instructional coaches, business managers and other administrators. At Carver, for example, salaries for four principals, two assistants and an academic coach totaled $746,207 last year — $526 per student. The state’s largest school, Mill Creek High in Gwinnett County, spent $210 per student on the salaries of nine administrators. Schools in DeKalb and Clayton counties with enrollments comparable to Carver’s spent $223 to $291 per student.
Despite the costs, Atlanta’s high school restructuring has produced mixed results. Atlanta still trails Georgia as a whole in every measurable academic category, such as the percentage of graduates requiring remedial instruction in college and average SAT scores. The city has a few notable exceptions — magnet programs such as Carver Early College High School, which enroll only high-achieving students, and Grady and North Atlanta high schools — but the overall performance remains dismal.
The prominence of the restructuring program, however, created pressure for results.
In a chapter she recently contributed to a book on education leadership, Beverly Hall cited “incredible results” from the high school restructuring: “higher attendance, increased graduation rates, and college scholarships.”
But she wrote: “High school reform presented its own unique challenge. I found that high school teachers were the most resistant to change. I had to hire outside consultants to ensure that the staff implemented the changes with fidelity and didn’t fall back into familiar habits.”
She didn’t mention another enforcement tool: performance targets for each high school. For administrators and teachers alike, bonuses, promotions and, in some cases, continued employment depend on whether their schools meet the district-set goals.
At Carver’s School of Technology, the district expected 93 percent of juniors to pass the high school writing test during the 2009-10 school year. The actual pass rate: 93 percent.
But that was with Chantel Cox and eight others removed from the pool of test-takers. If even one of them had taken the test and failed, the school’s pass rate would have slipped below the target. Failures by all nine would have driven the pass rate down to 82 percent — 11 points lower than the previous year.
‘Ten-point-fivers’
Carver was the first Atlanta school to complete its restructuring, and Hall and other district officials boasted of its almost overnight success in producing better performance and higher graduation rates.
Such gains, however, came in large part through weeding out “the disruptive, the disabled and the low-performing,” said Craig Goodmark, an attorney with Atlanta Legal Aid who represents clients who have filed complaints against the school district.
“They went through the rolls,” Goodmark said, “and anybody who they thought wasn’t going to be a performer, they put an ‘X’ on their backs.”
The morning of Sept. 30, 2009, half a dozen such students — Chantel Cox among them — showed up in Milton Mack’s classroom at Carver. None was assigned to Mack’s special education classes. All, Mack would later tell investigators assigned to an internal inquiry by the school district, said they had been pulled out of their 11th-grade homerooms while their peers took the high school writing test.
“The students were upset and trying to walk out,” Mack told investigators. “They said they were told they weren’t juniors [but] they were told by somebody that they were juniors until that morning.”
Shortly, according to Mack’s account, principal Rodney Ray arrived to try to calm the students. Ray didn’t say so, but Mack told investigators he assumed the principal had pulled out the students so they wouldn’t hurt the school’s overall test score.
Investigators eventually learned that the school had excluded nine students from the writing test: the six who went to Mack’s room and three others who were absent that day. Three administrators separately described the students as “ten-point-fivers,” enrolled in the educational purgatory of grade 10 ½.
“These are students who have filled almost all of their requirements,” counselor Adrienne Doanes told investigators. “They didn’t complete their requirements to be in the 11th grade because they may have failed a subject, but they have too many credits to be in the 10th grade.”
Actually, according to school records, all nine had enough credits to be juniors. One had enough to be a senior.
In statements to school investigators, Ray gave evolving accounts of the writing test.
At first, he said he was certain none of the students had been eligible for the exam. When investigators recited each student’s actual academic standing, Ray responded, “That is new knowledge to me.”
Failing to test the nine students, he said later, amounted to “a grave error on our part, if it is true. It was not done intentionally, if it was done.”
“It has always been our policy to test all of our kids, and we do not disallow kids to test because of their performance,” he said. “We don’t believe in that.”
Three weeks later, investigators confronted Ray with more details: A review of the students’ computerized transcripts showed each had been downgraded from grade 11 — and Ray himself had altered at least four of the transcripts.
In an email last week, Ray said, “I did not make any changes to student records specifically to exclude any students from taking the writing exam.”
“This matter was reported, investigated and resolved,” he wrote. “We have revised our processes since then and will continue to do so until we are perfect.”
‘Should have known’
The district often cited improvement in its high schools as proof of Hall’s success. The high school initiative became a major component of the campaign that led to her recognition as national Superintendent of the Year in 2009.
That year, many Atlanta elementary and middle schools posted gains on state achievement tests so large that they defied statistical probabilities — gains that prompted investigations that found widespread wrongdoing.
Also that year, a teacher at Crim High reported that the grades and attendance records of students in her advanced math classes had been changed; one student’s failing grade was erased, she said, despite 25 unexcused absences.
Eleven months later the district demoted Angelisa Cummings, Crim’s principal. Hall wrote to Cummings: “It appears that you may have pressured teachers to pass students who had excessive absences from school, missed assignments, and who did not grasp the subject matter in an effort to increase the number of seniors graduating from Crim High.”
Another principal, Darian Jones of Carver’s School of Health, Science and Research, was suspended for 10 days in January 2010 for trying to change grades so a student could graduate.
“You should have known,” Hall wrote to Jones, “that altering the student’s transcript was impermissible.”
Neither Cummings nor Jones responded to requests for interviews.
In 15 other recent cases that raised questions about academic integrity in high schools, district investigators said they found no irregularities, but often after minimal inquiry.
Five of those cases involved Tyronne Smith, the longtime principal of Mays High, now a set of “academies” that emphasize entrepreneurship, leadership, communications and technology. The most recent allegation, in 2010, contended that Smith let favored students take graduation tests alone, after school hours, and that he distributed advance copies of the exams.
“Find out the truth about why Mays High School test scores are always high,” a teacher wrote to the state agency that licenses educators. “The answer is the practice tests are real test items.”
In a recent interview at Mays, Smith denied the allegations. Manipulating test results would be “almost impossible,” he said. “Why would we take that chance?”
He derives practice exams from material on the state Department of Education’s website, Smith said. “Georgia publishes copies of old tests. From time to time I’m sure you’ll see a repeat question.”
In fact, the department never publishes old tests or even specific questions, spokesman Matt Cardoza said. Sample questions on the agency’s website don’t mirror those on the real test, he said.
“There should not be the same question on a practice exam that’s going to appear on the actual test form,” Cardoza said. “That raises red flags.”
Regardless, the district’s investigators said they could prove none of the allegations against Smith. They dismissed some as “personal attacks” that were “subjective and nonspecific.”
A missed year
At Carver’s School of Technology, district investigators seemed most intent on building a case against Milton Mack, the teacher who reported the curious incident surrounding the state writing test.
Investigators wrote a lengthy analysis of Mack’s job performance and speculated that he expected to be fired. They suggested he fabricated details of the incident as pre-emptive retaliation against Ray, the principal. More seriously, investigators said Mack “intentionally exaggerated the complaint” by claiming as many as 15 students came to his classroom during the writing test.
Mack did not respond to requests for an interview.
The investigators’ final report made little mention of Ray’s culpability, including his altering of the students’ transcripts. The report contended that no student was wrongly denied the chance to take the test, because none “presented themselves” for the exam — that is, the students who were told they couldn’t take the exam didn’t try to take it, anyway.
With that, the investigation ended.
Deirdre Cox wasn’t finished, however. In an interview, she said Chantel “missed a whole year” in special education after the writing test incident. Chantel passed most of her days browsing random websites. Once she spent an entire day in physical education. Finally, last winter, with graduation a few months away, and perhaps too late for administrators to retaliate, Deirdre filed a complaint with state officials, asserting that the school had violated Chantel’s rights under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Chantel received her special education diploma in May. The district settled her mother’s complaint, agreeing to provide Chantel with a year of tutoring and a work-training program at Grady Memorial Hospital.
When Deirdre Cox thinks about the day of the writing test, she remembers stopping at Carver that morning to drop off “healthy snacks” the PTSA provided for students taking the exam. She assumed Chantel was among them. No one at the school, she said, told her otherwise.
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