Special investigators for the governor last year uncovered widespread test-cheating in the Atlanta Public School system and fingered almost 180 educators for being involved in the scandal.
But APS Superintendent Erroll Davis, citing “insufficient evidence,” recently told 12 of those educators they can return to work.
Davis’ decision has sparked criticism from lawyers who are now questioning the thoroughness of the state investigation and from teachers who say their reputations were tarnished.
“I felt like I was wearing a scarlet letter ‘C’ for cheating,” said former Finch Elementary School teacher Sharona Thomas-Wilson recently, who is among the reinstated.
The investigators — former state Attorney General Mike Bowers, former district attorney Bob Wilson and investigator Richard Hyde — say they stand by their report.
In August 2010, then-Gov. Sonny Perdue appointed the special investigators to determine whether there had been extensive cheating on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests. The investigators uncovered years of systemic cheating at APS and depicted a culture that rewarded cheaters, punished whistle-blowers and covered up wrongdoing. Their report strongly contradicted denials of widespread cheating by top-level APS officials.
It found evidence of cheating in 44 schools and cited analyses that found statistically impossible wrong-to-right answer changes on students’ tests. Among the schools with the highest wrong-to-right erasure changes was Peyton Forest Elementary, where eight of the 12 reinstated educators worked.
“They haven’t learned a thing,” Bowers said of the school system’s decision to reinstate the teachers. “That they have let these people off given what the report says is outrageous.”
While lawyers representing a number of teachers have questioned the decision to publicly identify teachers implicated in the scandal, Bowers said that was what Perdue and his successor, Gov. Nathan Deal, instructed them to do.
“Both governors gave us the same directive: Call it as you see it,” Bowers said. “We did that. We weren’t going to cover up anything.”
In interviews, Bowers and Wilson blamed the school system for not consulting with them or with GBI agents involved in the investigation before deciding to reinstate teachers and questioned the wisdom of bringing back eight teachers who worked in a school where some of the most rampant cheating occurred.
In a statement, APS spokesman Keith Bromery said school attorneys analyzed all recordings and statements provided by the GBI and the special investigators to the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, which is considering indictments in the scandal. APS attorneys also went directly to the sources — the witnesses themselves.
“In these cases, the only evidence of teacher misconduct was circumstantial evidence associated with relatively high numbers of wrong-to-right erasures on test answer sheets and resultant increases in scores from previous test results,” Bromery said. “There is no direct evidence establishing that the individual teachers in these cases were involved in any misconduct.”
In other cases, Bromery added, APS lawyers found that a small number of individuals altered tests administered by a larger number of teachers. “Therefore, we know it is possible for an individual teacher’s tests to be altered without the teacher necessarily being involved in any improprieties.”
Reinstated
Most of the educators named in the cheating investigation no longer work at APS.
Of the approximately 180 named in the special investigators’ report, almost 130 either resigned or retired.
The rest have been subject to disciplinary tribunals. Since March, tribunals composed of former educators have been hearing cases to determine whether those implicated in the cheating scandal can get their jobs back. The dozen educators who are being reinstated did not have to appear before the tribunals. For the past year, all were on paid leave.
Davis did not completely clear the 12 educators. In his letter to them, Davis said APS reserves the right to bring charges should it later discover evidence that shows the educators engaged in or failed to report wrongdoing.
At Peyton Forest, more than 86 percent of its classrooms were flagged for wrong-to-right erasures in 2009, and only two other APS schools had greater proportions.
The special investigators’ report said that an analysis of wrong-to-right erasures in 59 Peyton Forest classrooms showed that the probability that erasures occurred without adult intervention was one in a million; in 34 classrooms, the probability was in the one-in-a-trillion territory.
The investigators’ report cited unnamed witnesses who said they heard a “select group of teachers” were changing answers on tests after school and on the weekends. One teacher said she was given a copy of the 2008 test so she could use it to prepare students. Another witness said she saw teachers cheating on “benchmark assessment tests” and on the fifth grade writing test.
Patrick Moore, a lawyer who represents the eight Peyton Forest teachers, concedes that cheating occurred at the school. “But it wasn’t us,” he said of his clients.
The benchmark test was a practice test, and if the report said cheating occurred on that, “someone didn’t know what they were talking about,” Moore said. As for the fifth-grade tests, half of his clients were fourth-grade teachers, Moore said.
“APS made up for the investigators’ mistakes and absolutely did the right thing,” Moore said. “If not for APS fixing these mistakes, there would have been eight teachers — eight extraordinary teachers — who would no longer be able to work with young people again. That would have been a travesty.”
Objection
Wilson, the former DeKalb district attorney, said he appreciates the disciplinary tribunal process and its requirement that APS lawyers must overcome a burden of proof to remove teachers from the school system. But he also says the numbers “don’t lie.”
“It wasn’t just the janitor who popped in at night and changed the answers on those tests,” he said. “There were people there who were cheating and others who knew it was going on.”
Wilson said he appreciates the disciplinary tribunal process and its requirement that APS lawyers must overcome a burden of proof to remove teachers from the school system.
“If they can’t piece together well enough a case against an individual teacher, that’s part of the process,” Wilson said. “If the evidence can’t meet the tribunal standard, I accept that. But it doesn’t mean they’re innocent. It doesn’t mean cheating didn’t occur. And it doesn’t undermine the investigation at all.”
If almost 130 of the roughly 180 educators named in the report resigned or retired, Wilson said, “I say that’s a pretty good success rate.”
Atlanta lawyer Nancy Rafuse, who focuses on employment law and civil rights litigation and has closely followed the test-cheating scandal, questioned APS’ decision to reinstate the teachers before seeing their cases through. Parents and their children had the right to see what the cases were made of, she said.
“For years, we had a school system that said it didn’t have a full-blown cheating problem,” Rafuse said. “Then the governor steps in, there’s an investigation that’s handed over and the system finally says, ’Oh, my gosh, we have a cheating problem. You have our attention.’
“And here we are now a year later and they’re letting these twelve return to work, without putting them through the tribunal process. Frankly, we’ve come full circle.”
The governor’s special investigators, in an 800-plus page report, implicated about 180 Atlanta Public School System educators in the test-cheating scandal.
APS UPDATE
The governor’s special investigators, in an 800-plus page report, implicated about 180 Atlanta Public School System educators in the test-cheating scandal. Here is where those cases stand:
1 -- Number of educators whose recommended firing was not upheld by a tribunal.
10 -- Number of educators whose recommended firing has been upheld by a tribunal.
12 -- Number of educators recently notified they will be reinstated back to classrooms.
30 -- Number of educators named in the investigation who are still on the APS payroll, awaiting resolution.
127 -- Approximate number of educators named in the investigation who resigned or retired.
Source: Atlanta Public Schools
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