Throughout teacher Sabrina Luckie’s tribunal hearing Monday, everyone kept talking about the "look."
Luckie, 28, admitted giving her students a look that expressed disappointment when they blackened the wrong ovals on a statewide test. She maintained, though, that she wasn't trying to get her first-graders at Fain Elementary School in Atlanta to change their answers.
The tribunal Monday evening upheld Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Errol Davis' recommendation to dismiss Luckie following the hearing.
Some 90 educators named in a state investigation into cheating stand to undergo the same tribunal process. Overall, about 180 APS employees were implicated in what is thought to be the largest test-cheating case in U.S. history. Another teacher, Michelle Ross, quit over the weekend rather than face a similar panel Monday.
Following the tribunal's ruling, Luckie saw herself as a victim of a redistricting plan that includes closing a number of APS' low-income schools. "I just think they had an agenda of getting rid of the teachers without considering what really happened," she said.
Evidence against Luckie included a state analysis of wrong answers that were rubbed out and replaced by correct ones on the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests.
The classrooms of 17 teachers -- nearly 40 percent of the classrooms at Fain -- were flagged for a high number of erasures. The Governor's Office of Student Achievement ordered the analysis. Kathleen Mathers, the executive director at the time, testified in Luckie's hearing that the rate of flagged classrooms at the school was "very, very unusual -- sort of like a blizzard in Fort Lauderdale in the middle of July."
Classrooms were flagged if they strayed more than three standard deviations from the statewide average for wrong-to-right erasures.
A standard deviation is a statistical measure, and Mathers explained it like this: The average man stands 5 feet 10 inches. Former basketball star Michael Jordan is three standard deviations from that at 6 feet 6 inches.
In Luckie’s classroom: wrong-to-right erasures were 4.8 standard deviations from the norm on the language arts test and 4.0 on the math portion.
Luckie's own words to an investigator also worked against her.
In February 2011, she voluntarily discussed the erasure rate at Fain with a state investigator. Luckie admitted to Eve Rodgers, a special agent with the GBI, that she gave students a "look" when she saw them fill in the wrong answers.
Rodgers didn't dig any deeper than Luckie's statement. She didn't interview students or their parents, she said, because Luckie had dug her own grave.
"That she felt it was enough to get them to change their answers was enough for me," Rodgers testified.
But Luckie testified that she didn't look at students to make them change their answers. She said she knew that then-principal Marcus Stallworth had urged teachers to help students find the correct answers using "voice inflections" but that she declined to cheat. (Stallworth was no longer working for APS by last summer when a state investigation accused him of telling teachers to use voice inflection, pointing to answers and other means to cue students to correct answers. Stallworth had denied those accusations. An APS spokesman said he had been fired for staff harassment.)
"It wasn't like I was looking at the children or trying to get their attention to make them change their answers," Luckie said.
Luckie's attorney, Careton Matthews, said the investigator focused on his client because she was among the few who were "candid" enough to tell the truth about Fain.
But Carol Callaway, an attorney for the school system, said Luckie should be fired for three reasons: the look she gave her students, her failure to report the principal's orchestration of cheating and the Professional Standards Commission's finding of probable cause to suspend Luckie's license.
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