Michael Pitts, one of the defendants in the Atlanta Public Schools conspiracy trial, didn’t divulge that he’d been told about possible cheating when he was interviewed before the testing scandal broke wide open, according to testimony Tuesday.
A panel known as the Blue Ribbon Commission interviewed APS employees in 2010 about suspicions of test-cheating. KPMG was contracted to conduct interviews, and a senior associate with the firm who interviewed Pitts testified Tuesday that Pitts did not acknowledge he’d been told by other employees nor an independent investigator about possible cheating.
Prosecutor Clint Rucker rattled off the names of several people who testified previously that they’d told Pitts about possible cheating. Rucker asked KPMG employee Aneil Sharma: Did Pitts tell you about that when asked if he’d been warned?
“No, he did not,” Sharma answered each time.
Reginal Dukes, a former Atlanta police officer who was hired to investigate test-cheating, testified previously that he told Pitts and other officials about it. And former Parks Middle School math teacher Stacey Johnson testified in the first week of the trial that she complained to Pitts about then-principal Christopher Waller.
“I told him we were being coerced and pressured to cheat on the upcoming CRCT test, ” Johnson testified, referring to the high-stakes Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests.
Waller, who subsequently pleaded guilty and turned state’s witness, testified last week that he orchestrated test cheating at Parks, then kept quiet about it at the direction of superiors, including Pitts.
Waller testified that he complained to Pitts that his school would never meet test score goals because students from the feeder schools were performing below where they should have been based on their elementary school test scores.
Waller testified that when he told Pitts that this showed cheating had to be going on at the elementary schools, Pitts told him to stop “slandering” elementary school teachers and threatened to send Waller’s school the lowest-performing students, which would make it even more difficult to make testing targets.
Also, when the school’s science test scores spiked, Waller said an APS research director told him to wait and see if anyone noticed. Waller testified that he told Pitts about the conversation, and Pitts “told me to keep my mouth shut and let’s see what happens.”
Tuesday marked Day 32 of the APS trial taking place in Fulton County Superior Court.
Prior to Sharma’s testimony, former Dunbar Elementary teacher Rose Neal took the stand for a second day to testify about cheating at that school.
After Sharma, Barbara Lunsford of the Georgia Department of Education testified about federal funding for schools that have a high rate of students living in poverty. She said Atlanta schools lost out on millions of dollars because of misleading test scores inflated by cheating.
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