Parks Middle School was a hotbed of cheating on standardized tests, prosecutors allege, and the former school principal there testified Monday that his boss had to know something was amiss.
Christopher Waller, who pleaded guilty in February in connection with the Atlanta Public Schools test-cheating scandal, took the stand in the 27th day of the trial to contend that Superintendent Beverly Hall had set unrealistic targets and that Michael Pitts, Waller’s direct boss, had to know.
Waller said he repeatedly told Pitts that students from feeder elementary schools were performing in class well below where they should have been given their prior test results. He said he told Pitts that cheating must have occurred at the elementary schools. On one occasion, Waller testified, he showed Pitts a student who had exceeded expectations when tested in elementary school. Now, in middle school, the boy couldn’t even follow along with the class during a reading lesson, Waller said.
“So Mr. Pitts had the opportunity to see it with his own eyes,” Waller told the jury Monday morning. He said Pitts told him to stop making such accusations without direct evidence of cheating. He said Pitts also threatened to send high-performing elementary school students to other middle schools.
Pitts, who was a regional School Reform Team director, is among a dozen defendants who say they are innocent and did not participate in cheating on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests. The standardized state tests, since replaced by other measures, were used to rank school performance. Parks had a history of failing the test and was at risk of closure in 2006 when Waller said he led his staff to cheat. A dramatic turnaround that year led to cash bonuses for all employees, including cafeteria workers and bus drivers, he said.
Like numerous prior witnesses, Waller testified about how staffers at schools that failed to meet targets were consigned to the bleachers at the school district’s annual convocation. “It was almost like having leprosy,” he said of the humiliating experience.
Waller, who is on probation after pleading guilty to a count of false statements and writings, wore a dark sweater vest Monday that had the Parks Middle School logo over his heart with the slogan “Eliminating The Achievement Gap.” He told jurors that that, in the face of high targets set by Hall and orders from Pitts to cease with allegations of cheating, he decided to orchestrate cheating at his own school in order to protect his job. The following spring, during the 2006 administration of the CRCT, Waller said he directed two staffers to lead an effort that involved erasing wrong answers and changing them to correct answers.
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