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“Guilty,” Judge Jerry Baxter read the jury’s verdicts for conspiracy for 11 of the 12 defendants in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating trial.
The conspiracy charge was the most serious and could bring sentences up to 20 years.
Only one defendant, Dessa Curb, walked away with no conviction on any charge.
Curb was sobbing out of joy. “I knew I was innocent and I knew God had my back,” she said.
She was going to head home and go to church Wednesday night. She has retired from teaching but will continue to volunteer in the schools.
The jury returned a mix of guiltys and not guiltys on the remaining felony charges, such as making false statements, for the other 11. They will be sentenced in the next two weeks.
>>See charges and photos of the convicted teachers here.
The conspiracy verdicts bring a definitive conclusion to a seven-month trial and years of allegations that teachers and administrators conducted and covered up widespread cheating in Atlanta Public Schools.
The 11 convicted former teachers and administrators – 21 others had already pleaded guilty to lesser charges – were led out in handcuffs and face long sentences. The other felony charges could each bring five to 10 years in prison for each count.
As the first guilty verdicts were read the defendants and defense attorneys stood. Their faces fell as they heard the "guilty" verdicts roll.
The convictions close a long, troubling period that tarnished the image of the school system and the city as educators and administrators chose their careers and bonuses over doing right by the children they taught.
Investigators said the educators worked together, sometimes holding erasure parties or dinners, sometimes working alone, to correct answers on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test. The cheating robbed students, who were passed up to the next grade without being prepared to succeed, and caused the schools to miss out on grants that could have provided tutoring or other help for those who were failing.
The investigation revealed student test sheets that had inordinate numbers of erasures changed to correct answers. One expert testified that the odds that students in one classroom would have so many wrong-to-right erasures without some kind of intervention was one in 284 septillion, 284 followed by 21 zeros.
The scandal, one of the most notorious to strike a U.S. school district, was uncovered by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2008, when it found improbably improved scores on on the tests. After a number of newspapers articles, the governor called for a special investigation, in spite of protestations and coverups by Atlanta school leaders including Hall. She was not tried, as she was suffering from breast cancer. Hall died March 2, her attorneys still claiming her innocence.
The governor’s 413-page investigation report, released in July 2011, detailed a system that had a wonderful goal in mind – to improve student performance and learning in even the poorest schools in the district, with no excuses accepted for failure. But it was derailed by the way it was set up.
Hall set rigorous accountability measures, stronger than federal objectives of the No Child Left Behind law, and demanded ever increasing test scores. As yearly scores improved, she garnered state and national accolades, but the governor’s report says teachers suffered under the unrealistic goals, and the system was made ripe for cheating by severe consequences meted out for failure, including firings, demotions and public humiliation.
As allegations of cheating began popping up the administration failed to recognize or seriously investigate them and instead retaliated against those who were reporting the problems.
