Beverly Hall, the former Atlanta school superintendent facing charges in the district’s infamous cheating scandal, is terminally ill with breast cancer. But to Mike Bowers, the former Georgia attorney general who helped to lead the state’s investigation, delaying Hall’s trial because of her health would be an injustice.
“What happened to the children because of years of misconduct that emanated from Dr. Hall’s office was an absolute scandal,” Bowers said last week. “I also saw very vulnerable people — most of them single moms — become devastated by the pressure and feel like they had no choice but to cheat. Anybody who wants to sweep that under the rug should be ashamed of himself.”
Civil rights icon and former Atlanta Mayor Andy Young has made the opposite argument, interrupting a court hearing last week to demand that the proceedings be delayed for humanitarian reasons. Young also went beyond that argument. In an impromptu courtroom exchange with the judge, he accused the state of Georgia of doing "everything it could to wreck a very good school system," an apparent reference to Bowers' investigation.
Young’s outburst was both ill-advised and ill-informed. In fact, it bolstered the argument of those who want to move forward with Hall’s trial as soon as possible. The best reason for proceeding is that a full jury trial, with testimony under oath and evidence laid out for all to see, would make it much more difficult for Young and other apologists to try to deflect blame from the leadership of the Atlanta Public Schools, where it clearly belongs.
Contrary to Young’s claims, the state of Georgia did not ruin a very good school district. A “very good school district” does not generate improved test scores by tolerating and even encouraging widespread cheating by its own administrators and teachers. A “very good school district” does not blind itself to evidence that its children are being cheated of an education. A “very good school district” does not force state officials to intervene to see that justice is done. Only a broken school district does such things.
As those statements suggest, Hall’s attorneys probably would not want me on a jury that hears her case. The evidence already on the public record, as well as my own interviews and discussions with Hall as the scandal was breaking, strongly suggest that she knew of evidence of widespread cheatings, that she willfully ignored that evidence, that in some cases she suppressed that evidence, and that she continued to reap the financial, professional and personal rewards of such systemic cheating without regard to the impact on students or on lower-level employees under her leadership. The final verdict on all that isn’t mine, but the courts’.
With all that said, I’ve also witnessed the progression of the type of terminal breast cancer that afflicts Hall, and it is not a pleasant thing. Oncologists called to testify by both the prosecution and defense agreed that her prognosis is grim. The prosecution’s expert, Dr. Jerry Stark, was particularly blunt, saying that “it’s highly unlikely any more anti-cancer therapy is going to be of any help to this lady.”
“ … If we are going to try her,” Stark said, “we should do it tomorrow.”
Given all that, I agree on humanitarian grounds with last week’s decision by Judge Jerry Baxter to delay the case from May to August, even if it becomes moot by that point. I simply have a hard time believing that Hall is getting away with anything.
