A tribunal ruled in favor of an Atlanta Public Schools administrator accused of seating low-performing students alongside high-performing students to facilitate cheating.
Nearly a dozen supporters of former Woodson Elementary School teacher Deborah Dixon looked on as the district laid out its case against her, and others testified as character witnesses for her.
And Dixon successfully defended herself, becoming the third educator to be cleared by a tribunal.
Dixon was an instructional liaison specialist, an administrative position similar to assistant principal. APS sought to fire her, a decision it made last year in seeking to remove the roughly 80 educators named in the state’s test cheating investigation who were at the time still employed with the district. About 100 of the 180 educators named in the report either quit or retired.
The school board will now decide Dixon’s fate. So far the board has deferred to the tribunal.
“We have lost confidence in her ability to be in front of students, [and] to serve as a role model for students,” Assistant Superintendent Steven Smith told the tribunal, which had briefly heard testimony on July 17 before delaying the proceedings until Tuesday.
The district pointed to statements allegedly made by Ashlyn Strozier, a Woodson educator who has been fired for test cheating. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Strozier told agents that Dixon had instructed her to seat students next to each other so they could cheat on Georgia’s 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test.
“The strategy was to place a lower-achieving student alongside a higher-achieving student,” said GBI Agent Eve Rodgers, who interviewed Strozier during the initial investigation into the cheating scandal.
Dixon testified in her own defense, insisting she never told anyone to cheat. She said Strozier harbored a personal bias against her.
At a tribunal on July 25, Strozier denied implicating herself or Dixon, but the tribunal upheld her firing.
APS also alleges that Dixon encouraged cheating by telling “faculty members to do whatever they needed to do to make district-wide scoring targets.”
Cary King, Dixon’s attorney, worked to pick apart the district’s case. He questioned APS’ reliance on the disputed statements attributed to Strozier.
He argued that since Woodson classrooms didn’t have doors, it was unlikely a teacher could cheat.
Those who vouched for Dixon’s character included Mary Byrd, a former PTA president at Woodson. “My opinion of Ms. Dixon is that she’s very professional in the things that she does,” Byrd said. “She cared a lot about the kids, taught them honesty, and how to respect each other.”
Several Woodson employees also testified that Dixon never told them to seat students beside each other.
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