"They're supposed to be helping us, not cheating."
"They're selling us short."
"I think they're really taking education away from us."
Students in the Atlanta Public Schools are angry. They feel betrayed -- cheated, in fact -- after learning last week that nearly 180 educators in 44 schools doctored students' answers on state competency tests. These, they said, are the very people they had looked up to as models of good behavior, the people who regularly instructed them on the basics of right and wrong.
More than a dozen students interviewed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution -- including Tony Hughley, Valencia Tucker and Sebastian Mathis, quoted above -- said all students are victims of the corrupt educators who, they believe, put their jobs above the student's education.
It was all about greed -- "to make sure the money is there," said Tucker, 18, a student at Carver school of the arts.
The students whose answers were changed on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests were robbed of an honest reflection of their academic progress and the additional resources needed to boost it, the students said. All other students were robbed of some measure of legitimacy, they said, because the entire district and all its students now carry the taint of scandal. Some said they feared that their college prospects have been damaged.
"They're cheating us," said Mathis, who just finished eighth grade at Parks Middle School, one of the campuses flagged as having some of the worst cheating.
Mathis was among several Parks students who were defensive about the accusations against the school, where investigators said 13 educators, including Principal Christopher Waller, cheated, with seven confessing. Some children thought they were ones being accused of cheating and they repeatedly asserted that they hadn't.
Some were just shocked.
Taylena Perchiano, a 14-year-old at Parks, liked Principal Waller. He was making the school better, she said.
"He had us on point," she said.
But state investigators said the prinicpal's achievements were inflated by falsehoods. In 2006, Waller's first year at Parks, the percentage of eighth-graders who passed the math section of the CRCT rose from 24 to 86. By 2007, Parks was meeting 100 percent of its goals set by the district.
Waller has denied any involvement in the cheating.
When Quentrice Lowe heard that math teacher Damany Lewis confessed to cheating, she didn't believe it at first.
"He was a nice cool person," said Lowe, 14. "At least he told the truth. But I don't like what he did."
She said the scandal "made me feel like I was in a low-down school."
But Parks Middle School was hardly alone. The investigators' report said the cheating harmed thousands of school children across the Atlanta district. The governor's special investigators uncovered organized and systemic misconduct within the district as far back as 2001.
Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students' answer sheets. Area superintendents thwarted whistle-blowers, and Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored and buried complaints, the report said.
Hall has said through her lawyer that she did not know of any widespread cheating and that neither she nor her senior staff was involved in any wrongdoing.
Some students suspected cheating was going on during state tests.
William Heckstall, 17, recalled one incident during a fifth-grade test at Thomasville Heights Elementary School.
"The teacher looked at her [a student] and said that wasn't a correct answer," he said.
The AJC first called attention to evidence of cheating in Atlanta schools more than two years ago.
In February of last year, the state flagged 39 percent of classrooms at Thomasville Heights Elementary for evidence of cheating. One fifth-grade class with 15 students racked up 139 suspicious erasures; the state average for a class that size was 27.
Later, when fifth-graders at the school took state tests under close monitoring, the proportion of students who failed math increased by 31 percentage points.
Yet investigators chosen by the Atlanta school system interviewed only two Thomasville Heights staff members. No one at the school was identified for possible disciplinary action. That Atlanta investigation, separate from the more recent state probe, has been discredited.
While the cheating accusations centered on Atlanta's middle and elementary schools, high schoolers also felt damaged by the fallout. The cheating debacle intensified bickering among members of the Atlanta Board of Education, which led the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to threaten to revoke the district's accreditation.
If Atlanta loses its accreditation, it could handicap students' efforts to get into college or obtain scholarships.
That prospect impelled Ashley Brown, who graduated in May from Grady High School, to speak up at the school board meeting in November. She figured she had spent years making sure she got good grades and was agonizing over college entrance essays, only to now see her future jeopardized.
"I was thinking it could have all been for naught," said Brown, 18. "It's honestly sickening that these people who are supposed to look out for kids took advantage of the students' and the parents' trust."
She said she told the school board members that they need to stop thinking about themselves and start thinking about the students.
The scandal, she said, has created "a perverted representation of all APS students -- and it's revolting."
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