Memorable moments from APS cheating testimony

Here are some memorable moments:

» On Day 4 of testimony, former Atlanta math teacher Fabiola Aurelien buried her face in a tissue, hands shaking, as she recalled a former Parks Middle School student in her advanced algebra class who could barely add or even write. She said she emailed then-Parks Principal Christopher Waller: “You’re so lucky nobody cares to find out about what you’re doing to these kids.”

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» On the seventh day of testimony, former Gideons Elementary fifth-grade teacher Oliver Banks testified that he spent hours one weekend changing answers on students’ exams with members of his “team” at the Douglasville home of fellow teacher Bernadine Macon. Banks, 76, paused several times when overcome by emotion. “Data, data, data,” he said. “That was a problem with me. They were concerned with data, data, data, but what about the children?” Banks testified that he left Gideons after serving there 49 years, humiliated over his role in the cheating scandal. “I could not stand it and stay there and face those people every day knowing what I’d done.”

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» Keylina Clark broke down in tears when a defense attorney repeatedly questioned her about her son’s disciplinary record at school, which included suspensions for bad behavior. “Don’t make my baby out to be a monster!” she yelled at attorney Annette Green during Day 10 of testimony. “What does this have to do with the CRCT?” Earlier, Clark testified she filed a complaint after her son told her a teacher gave him the answers to state tests.

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» During an aggressive cross-examination on Day 13, defense attorney George Lawson cited contradictory statements made by Margaret Merkerson, a retired teacher who testified against Tabeeka Jordan, a former assistant principal at Deerwood Academy. Lawson asked: How can the jury believe you now when “you told everyone else a lie?” Merkerson responded, “I didn’t tell that many lies.”

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» On Day 15 of testimony, former Kennedy Middle School principal Lucious Brown admitted to working with three other staff members at Kennedy to change answers on state achievement tests for two years in a row. Brown said they vowed to keep what they did secret. “We said we wouldn’t say anything and we would take it to our graves.”

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» In 2010, state officials showed Superintendent Beverly Hall a list of schools suspected of cheating on state tests. Kathleen Mathers, who headed the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, said the schools were listed in order of suspicion of cheating, with schools least likely to have cheated at the top of the first page. “So, we don’t look so bad,” Hall said, according to Mathers’ testimony on Day 19. But Mathers said she then told Hall to flip the document over and look at the second page. There was an awkward silence as Hall realized most APS schools had been flagged for possible cheating.

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» Former Parks Middle School teacher Dorothea Wilson admitted to cheating on state achievement tests. She said she changed students’ answers because she feared being transferred to a different school. “You either conform or you was reformed,” she testified on Day 21. “It’s Atlanta Public Schools.”

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» Former Gov. Sonny Perdue testified he was once one of Beverly Hall’s biggest cheerleaders. But when an erasure analysis required APS to conduct its own investigation of test cheating, Perdue said he called Hall out of courtesy and asked her to take the matter very seriously. Hall initially shared that sentiment but then seemed to change her tone, Perdue said on the 22nd day of testimony. “There was a growing defensiveness in her voice. I got the feeling that she just wanted this to go away.”

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» Bob Wilson, one of the governor’s special investigators, said not all of the educators who admitted to changing students’ test answers were morally corrupt. Some did it because they were single parents who feared they’d lose their jobs if their students didn’t meet unrealistic targets. “They did have ethics,” Wilson testified on Day 24. “They went to pieces and told us of their deep pain over what they’d done.”

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» When Parks Middle School principal Christopher Waller told Sandra Ward, the school’s reading coach at the time, that he was taking the school’s testing coordinator to lunch after students finished the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, that was the signal for teachers to congregate in the downstairs foyer, Ward testified on Day 26. There, teachers gained access to the tests and erased wrong answers and changed them to right ones, Ward said. Waller kept the testing coordinator away from the tests with lunches that lasted almost to the end of the school day, she said.

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» Christopher Waller, the former Parks Middle School principal who pleaded guilty and turned state’s witness, testified on Day 27 that he orchestrated test cheating indirectly, through two employees at Parks who enlisted other teachers in the scheme. Waller said he wanted to distance himself so he would have “plausible deniability.” When asked if he thought Beverly Hall enforced a strict chain of command so she, too, could have plausible deniability, a chorus erupted from the defense attorneys representing the 12 defendants. “Objection!” they yelled. Judge Jerry Baxter agreed that the prosecution was seeking inadmissible speculation.

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» On the 28th day of testimony, George Lawson, defense attorney for former APS regional director Michael Pitts, asked prosecution witness Christopher Waller about his past affairs with teachers. The former Parks Middle School principal admitted he’d had indiscretions, then said to Lawson, “Do you want to go down that road?” When Lawson asked Waller whether Pitts ever put pressure on him because of his affairs, Waller said that never happened. “I’m sure he (Pitts) was dealing with his own (indiscretions),” Waller said. The questions about affairs stopped there.

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» On Day 34, a former Dobbs Elementary School student testified that after he reported possible cheating to a school employee, a teacher threatened him. “If I lose my job, I’m a beat your ass,” the student testified fourth-grade teacher Derrick Broadwater said. But through his lawyer, Broadwater emphatically denied ever physically harming or threatening to harm “any child, at any school, for any reason.” Meanwhile, another student testified that defendant Angela Williamson allegedly said this to kids about reporting cheating at Dobbs: “If you tell anyone, it’ll be the last person you tell, I promise you that.”

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» One spring afternoon in 2007, three teachers gathered in a classroom to “clean up the answers” on their students’ state test sheets, former Dobbs Elementary teacher Derrick Broadwater testified on Day 36. He said defendant Angela Williamson, whom he described as a friend, erased and changed students’ answers while sitting next to him. And Broadwater said he cheated again the following year. He said defendant Dana Evans, who at the time was Dobbs’ principal, told teachers they could be put on “professional development plans” if their students’ test performance was too low. “The way it was being used was pretty much, ‘This is a threat against you,’” he testified.

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» “I didn’t think it (the state investigation into cheating) was going to go anywhere because it’s Atlanta Public Schools,” former Dobbs teacher Derrick Broadwater testified on Day 37. “If I could erase time I would go back to 2006 and erase every single part so we could start over.”

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» Former Dobbs Elementary School paraprofessional Naomi Williams testified on Day 43 about being fired in July 2009. She said the termination process began within days of her telling Dobbs principal Dana Evans that teacher Dessa Curb had asked her to change answers on a student’s standardized test. Williams testified that before she was fired, she complained to the school district about her treatment, about abuse of students in the classroom, and about instances of cheating. And in 2010, Williams said, she wore a special jacket to a public meeting with the superintendent that had a message stenciled on the back: “For testifying against Ms. Evans, I got harassed, humiliated, retaliated and fired.”

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» Patricia Whitehead, once the facilitator of the Success For All program at Benteen Elementary School, told of students who scored high on standardized tests despite their struggles in the classroom. One Spanish-speaking student “didn’t really have a command of the English language,” Whitehead said. “In the CRCT there is a lot of vocabulary that would have been difficult for her without help, without prompts, without strategies.” Yet that little girl outscored all the other students in her grade level in the English section of the 2009 test, Whitehead said on the 45th day of testimony.

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» Former Usher-Collier Heights Elementary School teacher Stacey Smith testified for the prosecution that she changed answers on some of her third-grade students’ 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests after Usher-Collier Heights testing coordinator Donald Bullock brought them to her classroom. “I cheated because I was scared. I did it because I was told to,” said Smith, who was 25 and in her second year of teaching at that time. “I was the first person in my family to go to college. I helped my family. I helped other people. And I was looked at as a success,” she said on Day 48. “I didn’t want to fail. I wanted to appear to be a team player.”

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» Former Usher-Collier Heights teacher Stacey Smith returned to the witness stand on Day 49 to be cross-examined by lawyers for the defense. Smith struggled to keep her emotions in check when defense attorney Gerald Griggs started his cross-examination. “You robbed those children,” Griggs said. “I did,” Smith answered through tears. “You damaged them,” he said. “I did,” she responded. Griggs noted that Smith still had a teaching certificate and now works with children as young as 3 in the Head Start Program. “Have you told those children’s parents what you did?” Griggs asked. “No,” Smith answered softly.

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» Gwendolyn Rogers, a retired Usher-Collier Heights Elementary School principal, countered testimony from several other witnesses that she pressured them to take steps to ensure their students did well on standardized tests. Prior witnesses recounted Rogers saying at a staff meeting, “If little Johnny can’t read … he better be able to read on test day.” But Rogers testified on Day 51 that she “would never say anything like that.” She blamed the statement on a member of her staff.

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» Millicent Few, who once headed the school system’s human resources department and was one of Beverly Hall’s most trusted advisers, testified on Day 52 that Hall ordered staff to shred a critical internal investigation report because “it would indicate there was cheating in the district.” Cover-ups went back to the 2006-07 school year, she said.

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» Judge Jerry Baxter exploded, "Hey!" when a defense attorney asked the prosecution’s star witness Millicent Few, the former APS human resources director, if she took a plea deal because the judge had told those indicted in the APS cheating case that their punishment would be severe if they went to trial. "Interjecting me into this is not going to be allowed," Baxter said on Day 53. “... If somebody broaches the subject of sentencing in this case, I'm going to send them to jail for contempt."  

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» University of Michigan professor Brian Jacob testified on Day 56 that students in one fourth-grade class at Dobbs Elementary School had a one in 288 septillion chance of doing as well as they purportedly did on the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test. “That’s 27 zeros,” Jacob said. Another fourth-grade class at Dobbs also saw dramatic improvements on the CRCT over what was expected. The odds? One in 4 quintillion, said Jacob, an authority on statistical analysis and education policy.

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» On the 59th day, the prosecution called its final witness, a 16-year-old girl who left jurors with the image of having to spend three years in the eighth grade because the Atlanta school system did not prepare her. The student said she was promoted to the eighth grade while in the Atlanta district, but she had to repeat the grade twice when her family moved to Clayton County. “How are you doing?” Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis asked. “Not good,” the girl answered. “I don’t get none of the math.” She wasn’t cross-examined.

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» On Day 60, Mario Watkins, an APS principal who for several years was an assistant principal at Dobbs Elementary, was due on the stand at 9 a.m. but arrived 20 minutes late because of an overturned car on I-20. It was particularly embarrassing for Watkins because the previous day he’d testified that prosecution witnesses who’d attacked former Dobbs principal Dana Evans were nothing more than disgruntled ex-employees whose flaws included an inability to get to work on time. “He’s in real big trouble,” Judge Baxter said while waiting for Watkins. Then, little more than an hour after Watkins took the stand, court ended abruptly because of a juror’s medical problem. “She has to go to the doctor right now,” Baxter said. “It has to do with a pregnancy.”

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» Prosecutors portrayed former Dobbs Elementary principal Dana Evans as a demanding and threatening leader who told teachers who couldn’t hack it that “Wal-Mart is always hiring.” Her defense attorney, Robert Rubin, called numerous witnesses over several days to counter that narrative, one of them former Dobbs kindergarten teacher Jaclyn Wallace, who testified on Day 61 that Evans “wanted the kids to be treated with respect.” She said she never heard the Wal-Mart comment.

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» Robert Rubin and three other defense lawyers rapidly called witnesses on Day 64 to speak to the good character of their clients. The recurring theme from a long string of witnesses called over several days on behalf of former Dobbs principal Dana Evans was that Evans was a visionary who tried to fix a broken school. “She believed in our students. She made sure they had the tools to be successful and prepared for the 21st century,” said Deandrea Johnson, a Dobbs media specialist. But Evans was still found guilty.

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» On Day 65, testimony ends. Over roughly six days, four defense attorneys called 29 witnesses to drive home an image of the dozen defendants as hardworking, honest people just trying to do a job. None of the defendants testified, and eight of them did not call witnesses.