State investigators are winding down a probe into alleged test cheating in Dougherty County Schools, having interviewed more than 300 educators and obtained confessions from at least 10, a lead investigator says.
Some of those interviewed have admitted to violating test protocol by either sharing with students the correct answers or changing answers after students turned their tests in, special investigator Richard Hyde told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
"Now we need to see if those violations rise to the level of a crime," he said.
Hyde, former state Attorney General Michael Bowers and former DeKalb County District Attorney Bob Wilson were appointed by then-Gov. Sonny Perdue in August 2010 to investigate possible cheating on the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests in the Atlanta and Dougherty school systems.
In July, the three issued a scathing report, outlining evidence of a decade of systemic cheating in Atlanta Public Schools and implicating 178 educators at 44 of its schools. The fallout from that report is continuing, with a grand jury investigation and what’s expected to be months of potentially career-derailing hearings before the agency that licenses Georgia educators.
The Atlanta cheating investigation, believed to be the largest in U.S. history, was the priority. But after the release of the report, Hyde, Bowers and Wilson put the focus on Dougherty, where 14 of 26 schools were flagged in a CRCT erasure analysis.
Hyde said 12 GBI agents spent six weeks in Dougherty, interviewing between 300 and 350 teachers and administrators and obtaining “a fair number of confessions.” He would not say exactly how many, but Hyde said the number of confessions is in the "double digits,” so 10 or more.
A report on the findings in Dougherty is expected to be given to Gov. Nathan Deal by December, Hyde said.
A big difference in the two cheating investigations has been the level of cooperation, Hyde said. Tommy Coleman, a former Albany mayor and the school board’s attorney, has been “candid and open to the things that we have needed,” Hyde said.
“Where in Atlanta, we had to fight for every piece of paper we received,” he said.
Coleman said school officials wanted to be cooperative.
"We took the position that we needed to know if people were cheating or violating the law as much as they did," he said. "Confessions will be very useful."
Coleman said he has already made plans for disciplinary tribunals, made up of former school administrators from out of the county, to convene in January to expedite the removal of any teacher or educator suspected of wrongdoing.
"We want to get them off the payroll as quick as possible if they deserve it," Coleman said. "First thing of course we'll do is meet with those people and say: ‘Why don't you just resign. You're going to have a hard time. These hearings aren't pleasant.' "
During the state investigation, three school principals exercised their Fifth Amendment rights to decline to answer investigators' questions, Coleman said.
Investigators had to track down some educators who, since 2009, have moved to other schools or are no longer in the district. They seized one school computer, requested test data and reviewed electronic records showing when employees were in at least one building, Coleman said.
In an interview this summer at his Albany headquarters, School Superintendent Joshua W. Murfree Jr. said he expected teachers and staff in the 15,838-student school system to be exonerated.
"I know we don't have any cheaters in this system," he said at the time.
After the release of the erasure report, then-Superintendent Sally Whatley recruited local police to assist in an internal investigation and found no evidence of cheating. The school board later hired a former superintendent from Fulton County to conduct a second investigation. Again, no wrongdoing was found.
In Atlanta, the release of the special investigators' report followed more than two years of inquiries into huge gains on the 2009 CRCT. An AJC analysis first detected statistically improbable increases in test scores at two Atlanta schools in 2008. The following year, the AJC published another analysis that found suspicious score changes on the 2009 CRCT at a dozen Atlanta schools.
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