Tabeeka Jordan was an assistant principal in Atlanta when, officials say, she coordinated and oversaw cheating on tests.
Jordan, since demoted to teacher and home on leave, worked at Deerwood Elementary School, where a state investigation found rampant test cheating. She is among about 90 educators that Atlanta Public Schools is trying to fire in connection with the cheating alleged to have occurred on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests.
The preliminary stage of her tribunal hearing started Tuesday when her lawyer, George Lawson, tried to get elements of the case thrown out. He contested the premise of the charges against her, which are based in part on an arcane statistical analysis of erasure marks on tests.
"To my knowledge, it has never been accepted by any court in this country," Lawson said of the analysis, which has been used to uncover cheating in other school systems. The analysis looks for an inordinate number of wrong answers that were rubbed out and replaced by correct answers.
At Deerwood, 48 percent of the classrooms were flagged for excessive erasures on the 2009 tests. In six of the classrooms, the odds of those erasures occurring "without adult intervention or cheating" was no better than one in a trillion, according to the charge letter against Jordan.
Jordan is accused of recruiting a retired educator as a test coordinator. That retiree and another one allegedly erased and changed student answers on tests in 2008 and 2009, while Jordan watched.
The hearing officer, O.V. Brantley, denied most of Lawson's motions, but allowed the hearing to be postponed until May 22 so Lawson can gather personnel files and other records. He said he'd asked for them but APS had not provided them.
After the morning hearing, which lasted about two hours, Jordan had no comment except this: "I absolutely deny all of the allegations."
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