This past week, 35 former employees of the Atlanta Public Schools were indicted as a result of the cheating scandal. Included in the 35 is Beverly Hall, the APS superintendent for more than a decade. She faces up to 45 years in prison,due largely to the RICO charges added onto her indictment.
RICO’s origins date back to 1970 and its intent was to hammer the leaders of criminal syndicates — the Mafia at the time.It has since become a handy weapon of prosecutors to pressure people into plea deals in the face of long prison sentences, or to obtain such sentences in the rare event that these cases actually go to trial.
The are so many things I find compelling here — I began my career as an attorney and matters criminal still intrigue me.
One fact of note is that only 35 people are charged. You don’t have to go back too far to read about the hundreds of people who allegedly cheated their students, or the 180 or so who were actually fired for such activities.
I’ve always thought that the criminal activity here was limited. In the end, most of the convictions will come from plea deals; that’s just the way the criminal justice system works in America. Prosecutors over-charge and in the face of the consequences of such charges and the prohibitive costs of mounting a real defense, defendants plead to some lesser offense. On the other hand, I doubt there will be a plea deal with Hall. The prosecutors are clearly convinced she is guilty of heinous crimes and I suspect Hall disagrees pretty vehemently.
The indictment in her case begins this way. Hall, we are told, was an incredibly demanding leader. She insisted that the children in her district could succeed — success being defined as passing the infamous CRCT tests — and would accept no excuse for failure from her principals. This inflexibility, we are led to believe, created a climate where principals and teachers were left with almost no choice but to cheat.
I have three things to say here. First, Hall didn’t invent the CRCT, nor was she the one that made that test the be-all and end-all. That decision was made by our federal government in all its wisdom.
Second, take-no-prisoner leaders are often praised for their insistence on excellence. In this case, those standards would appear to have risen to the status of criminal activity. One needs to understand how RICO works in order to make sense of this. The defendant can actually be convicted under RICO for the offenses of others if she created a climate where such offenses were likely to occur. I sure hope that if Dr. Hall is convicted, it is for something other than being a demanding, even an overly demanding, boss.
Finally, a whole lot of teachers apparently didn’t find that the only response to Hall’s leadership style was to cheat. A whole, whole lot.
I am not making excuses for Hall. All this happened on her watch and, in the end, she has to be held accountable and I think she has been.
There are specific allegations against Hall that if proven, would appear to be criminal acts — making false statements, withholding evidence, etc. I have no issue with those charges, none at all. But the big RICO conspiracy charge seems to me to be beyond the bounds of reasonableness.
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