Sheridan Rogers spent four decades as an Atlanta educator before helping teachers engage in test cheating.
And while unrelenting pressure to reach unrealistic targets clouded her judgment, it did not excuse her actions, the anguished former educator said Friday. If the true test results had been allowed to stand, Rogers noted, the students who performed poorly would have received the remedial education they needed.
Rogers, once the testing coordinator at Gideons Elementary School, joined two other former educators who entered guilty pleas Friday in the Atlanta Public Schools test-tampering scandal. All three were given sentences of probation.
Rogers worked her way through Spelman College before beginning her Atlanta teaching career in 1966. At that time, she taught in segregated classrooms, said her lawyer, Derek Jones.
During much of her plea hearing, Rogers sat at the defense table in the Fulton County courtroom with her eyes closed, her head resting on her hands and her face pointing down. On occasion, she used a white tissue to wipe tears from her eyes.
Rogers admitted she followed orders from her principal, Armstead Salters, to give Gideons’ teachers access to their students’ tests and the answer sheets. This allowed the teachers to change wrong answers to right ones after students completed taking standardized tests in 2008 and 2009, Fulton prosecutor Clint Rucker said during the hearing.
At one point, Rogers told Salters the cheating had to stop, Rucker said. But Salters insisted it must continue, slamming his fist down on his desk, the prosecutor said.
As a result, the principal continued sending teachers Rogers’ way and Rogers continued giving the teachers access to the testing materials. Salters pleaded guilty Thursday.
“I truly wish I had not engaged in this activity and had stood up to the pressure,” Rogers wrote in a letter of apology, which her lawyer read aloud because his client was unable to. “The students’ test results should have been what they were and not what the administration wanted them to be.”
Rogers, who agreed to testify at trial for the prosecution, said she believes her former regional director, Michael Pitts, and former APS Superintendent Beverly Hall knew the test results obtained by Gideons’ students did not match their academic abilities.
Former school improvement specialist Tameka Goodson, who worked at Kennedy Middle School, and former testing coordinator Francis Mack from D.H. Stanton Elementary School also entered guilty pleas Friday.
Goodson admitted to changing answers on her students’ standardized tests in 2008. She told prosecutors that co-defendants Lucious Brown, the school’s principal, and secretary Carol Dennis did the same thing as the trio sat together in Brown’s conference room.
In her letter, Goodson called what she did “one of my darkest moments” and said it would “haunt me for the rest of my life.”
During Mack’s plea, lead prosecutor Fani Willis noted the former testing coordinator did not participate in test cheating. But Mack had previously been told about testing irregularities at D.H. Stanton and did not disclose that information when asked about it by GBI agents investigating the scandal.
Mack had been told by her principal at the time that if she did divulge such information, she’d lose her job, Willis said. “She bowed to that pressure.”
The massive APS test-cheating prosecution shrank significantly over the past week. One by one, weary and resigned former educators, some fighting back tears, stood before Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter and admitted to wrongdoing.
In March, a Fulton grand jury indicted 35 people in the alleged racketeering conspiracy. The remaining number of those still facing charges is now 23.
So far, 11 former educators have pleaded guilty. Another defendant, former principal Willie Davenport, died in September.
Baxter has set a Jan. 6 deadline for negotiated pleas to be entered, and more guilty pleas are anticipated before then. The trial is set for next spring.
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