A fear of failure, consequences from low test scores and mismanagement led educators in 11 of Dougherty County’s 26 schools to cheat on state exams in 2009, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.
One teacher said her fifth-grade students could not read, yet did well on the state's Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests. Another confessed to changing answers after school hours at her principal's request. Another gave her students the correct answers on test day so they could correct their mistakes.
A total of 49 educators in the south Georgia school district were involved in testing misconduct and 18 confessed to cheating in what is the second widespread test-tampering scandal uncovered in Georgia this year. In July, another stinging report revealed almost 180 educators in Atlanta Public Schools participated in cheating at 44 schools.
Both reports confirm suspicions raised by the state and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution after an erasure analysis showed statistically improbable wrong-to-right answer changes on the 2009 CRCT. The highest score changes were found in Atlanta, and the second highest in Dougherty County, a 16,000-student district that encompasses the city of Albany.
The latest probe, conducted by the same team of special investigators who worked on the Atlanta case, describes a system where educators faced “undue” and “constant” pressure to have students pass the CRCT and their schools meet the federal benchmark of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), which is based heavily on the test results.
Dougherty schools, principals and teachers that didn't make AYP were worried about being seen as failures. Low-performing teachers were demoted to earlier grades. Some principals based teacher evaluations on test scores. At least two said they received a negative evaluation and cheated out of fear that a second one would cost them their jobs, the report stated.
Those reasons and more led educators to cheat, the report said.
Deal called the 200-page report "alarming," and said it will be sent to the Professional Standards Commission, which monitors educator ethics, and to the Dougherty County district attorney’s office. A criminal investigation is pending in the Atlanta case, although many educators have resigned or retired.
“The findings out of Dougherty County are alarming as they paint a tragic picture of children passed through with no real or fair assessment of their abilities," Deal said in a statement. "To cheat a child out of his or her ability to truly excel in the classroom shames the district and the state."
Dougherty County school board members said the district is prepared to begin termination proceedings against educators named in the report. Board members received the report Tuesday and have no plans yet to meet and discuss it.
Superintendent Joshua Murfree, who started in mid-2010, said the district will look into offering night or weekend tutorial programs to help affected students. He said he will evaluate the report to determine what punishments are warranted. Educators who confessed to cheating will be targeted for termination immediately, he said.
“I can’t afford to try and build a district if I can’t get teachers who cheated out of the system,” he said.
"If the report has found if there are people involved in cheating, they will be fired," said David Maschke, who has been on the board for 11 years. "The Dougherty County School System is not going to tolerate cheating."
Cheating in Dougherty was driven by a desire to meet state and federal standards as opposed to Atlanta where pressure to meet unrealistic local targets put stress on educators, the investigators said. The misconduct also appeared to bubble up from schools in Dougherty rather than down from top administrators, as investigators suggested was the case in Atlanta.
Former Dougherty Superintendent Sally Whatley, who has since left the district, did not know about cheating but was ultimately to blame, according to investigators. She erred by allowing the board to micromanage her, weakening her authority and power to discipline problem employees.
Attempts to reach Whatley Tuesday were unsuccessful.
In both districts, principals were found to have orchestrated cheating, and some looked the other way when evidence of misconduct was brought to them. Principals in Dougherty had too much authority because of leadership problems at the top of the district. That led to a job security that emboldened them to cross ethical lines, investigators said.
At New Jackson Heights Elementary School, Principal Lazoria Walker Brown directed teachers to enter other teachers' classrooms and cheat. Six people admitted to cheating on the 2009 test, and investigators concluded that cheating was a "way of life" and occurred even on unit tests.
As evidence, investigators attached an e-mail exchange between Brown and teacher Tanza Sutton with the subject line called "divine intervention."
In the emails, two educators discuss their stress over the CRCT. Brown instructs Sutton to go back and forth between classrooms to check on the math students during test time. Investigators say this order was Brown telling Sutton to cheat. Sutton went to another teacher's class and gave students the answers on the math section of the CRCT.
Brown denied telling Sutton to cheat. She told investigators she only wanted to encourage the teacher to "show her face" to students during the math exam to help them relax. The principal acknowledged it was a testing violation for Sutton to enter the other classrooms during test time.
At the end of her interview with investigators, Brown asked, “Am I going to jail?”
All 11 principals were found to have been directly involved in criminal conduct or to have failed in their duty to adequately surprise supervise their school’s CRCT testing. Beyond the 49 educators implicated in the report, others may have been involved in cheating, but investigators said they did not feel the evidence was sufficient to identify those individuals.
Overall, investigators said top-level administrators in Dougherty County far more cooperative than their counterparts in Atlanta. Still they said three principals refused to answer their questions, citing their Fifth Amendment rights.
As an off-shoot of the cheating probe, the investigators said one principal wrongly allowed her family to claim they were eligible to receive a federally funded free lunch each school day.
The principal made more than $90,000 per year, and the law says free lunches are available only to families with annual income less than $24,089.
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