The two men who investigated test cheating in the Atlanta Public Schools said Monday that the number of participants in the scheme may exceed the 178 implicated to date.
Former Attorney General Mike Bowers, appearing with former DeKalb County District Attorney Bob Wilson before the Atlanta Rotary Club, said in their first public remarks since their report was released last week that there are other educators the investigation didn’t catch.
“I will guarantee you there are more of them than that [178],” Bowers said. Not all of the alleged wrong-doers could be identified, he added, “because we ran into a wall of silence … a wall of silence that was created by an atmosphere of secrecy and intimidation.”
The investigators issued several hundred subpoenas, conducted 2,100 interviews and reviewed 800,000 documents. The report they submitted to the state says 178 educators including 38 principals were participants in cheating. More than 80 confessed. Cheating was confirmed in 44 of 56 schools examined.
Bowers said he was shocked when six principals exercised their constitutional right not to answer questions that could incriminate them.
“When we asked, ‘Did you cheat? Did you allow cheating? Did you know about cheating?' [They] would say, ‘I invoke the Fifth Amendment.”
The aim of the inquiry, Bowers explained, was to get at the truth, developing data that would remove offending teachers from the classrooms and could be used in possible criminal prosecutions.
He said the assignment was unique.
“The governor agreed … that we would call it as we saw it. There would be no preview of any draft we prepared,” a very different approach from other reports, Bowers said.
Wilson said the investigators began by verifying the state's analysis of the unusual numbers of erasures on students' tests.
“As early as 2005, we found that the upper leadership had signs that should not have been ignored,” he said, citing the case of one school that went from 830th place out of 1,200 to first place in a single year.
It was obvious, Wilson said, that upper leadership was not looking.
“Unfortunately, we found too many times, those who reported cheating became victims of reprimands and investigations themselves,” Wilson said.
He said he did not believe it was monetary bonuses that caused the cheating but the fear of humiliation, being disciplined or even losing one’s job. Clearly, some good people abandoned their ethics under pressure, he said.
“These people made us cry,” Wilson said.
As for the actual cheating, Wilson said there were many ways to do so beyond erasing children’s answers.
“If you can think of it, it was done. The ingenuity was incredible at times,” he said.
Interim Atlanta schools Superintendent Erroll Davis also appeared before the Rotary audience, drawing applause when he said, “The people who have been implicated, the people who have cheated, will not be in front of your children this fall.”
“Whether they ever teach again will be up to the Professional Standards Commission and maybe up to the judicial system, but they will not appear in our system,” Davis said.
Bowers called the investigators’ findings heartbreaking.
“We were saddened beyond anything I can tell you all by what we saw,” he said.
Wilson said, “The teachers who did wrong need to be dealt with, but do not brand all teachers. … They did not all do wrong.”
-- Channel 2 Action News contributed to this article.
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