Across Atlanta Public Schools, staff worked feverishly in secret to transform testing failures into successes.
Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students answer sheets.
Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible.
Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor childrens ability to learn.
For years as long as a decade this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests. The scores soared so dramatically they brought national acclaim to Hall and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.
In the report, the governors special investigators describe an enterprise where unethical and potentially illegal behavior pierced every level of the bureaucracy, allowing district staff to reap praise and sometimes bonuses by misleading the children, parents and community they served.
The report accuses top district officials of wrongdoing that could lead to criminal charges in some cases.
The decision whether to prosecute lies with three district attorneys in Fulton, DeKalb and Douglas counties who will consider potential offenses in their jurisdictions.
For teachers, a culture of fear ensured the deception would continue.
APS is run like the mob, one teacher told investigators, saying she cheated because she feared retaliation if she didnt.
The voluminous report names 178 educators, including 38 principals, as participants in cheating. More than 80 confessed. The investigators said they confirmed cheating in 44 of 56 schools they examined.
The investigators conducted more than 2,100 interviews and examined more than 800,000 documents in what is likely the most wide-ranging investigation into test-cheating in a public school district ever conducted in United States history.
The findings fly in the face of years of denials from Atlanta administrators. The investigators re-examined the states erasure analysis which they said proved to be valid and reliable and sought to lay to rest district leaders numerous excuses for the suspicious scores.
Deal warned Tuesday there will be consequences for educators who cheated. The reports findings are troubling, he said, but I am encouraged this investigation will bring closure to problems that existed.
Interim Atlanta Superintendent Erroll Davis promised that the educators found to have cheated are not going to be put in front of children again.
Through her lawyer, Hall issued a statement denying that she, her staff or the vast majority of Atlanta educators knew or should have known of allegedly widespread cheating. She further denies any other allegations of knowing and deliberate wrongdoing on her part or on the part of her senior staff, the statement said, whether during the course of the investigation or before.
Dont blame teachers?
Phyllis Brown, a southwest Atlanta parent with two children in the district, said the latest revelations are horrible. It is the children, she said, who face embarrassment if they are promoted to a higher grade only to find they arent ready for the more challenging work.
Still, she doesnt believe teachers should be punished.
Its the people over them, that threatened them, that should be punished, she said. The ones from the building downtown, they should lose their jobs, they should lose their pensions. They are the ones who started this.
AJC raised questions
Former Gov. Sonny Perdue ordered the inquiry last year after rejecting the districts own investigation into suspicious erasures on tests in 58 schools. The AJC first raised questions about some schools test scores more than two years ago.
The special investigators report describes years of misconduct that took place as far up the chain of command as the superintendents office. The report accuses Hall and her aides of repeatedly tampering with or hiding records that cast an unflattering light on the district.
In one case, Halls chief Human Resources officer Millicent Few illegally ordered the destruction of early, damning drafts of an outside lawyers investigation of test-tampering at Atlantas Deerwood Academy, the report said.
Another time, Few ordered staff to destroy a case log of cheating-related internal investigations after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution requested it, the report said. Few told staff to replace the old log with a new, altered version. When the district finally produced the complaints, the investigators wrote, it illegally withheld cases that made it look bad either because its investigation was poor or because wrongdoing received minimal sanction.
Few also made false statements to the investigators, the report said.
Few, who could not be reached for comment Tuesday, denied to the investigators that she tampered with documents or ordered anyone else to do so.
Lying to investigators and destroying or altering public records are felonies under Georgia law with a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
Deputy Superintendent Kathy Augustine, as well as area superintendents Michael Pitts and Tamara Cotman, also gave the investigators false information, the report said, and the districts general counsel Veleter Mazyck provided less than candid responses.
The report also said Hall and Augustine illegally suppressed a report by a testing expert last year. Andrew Porter, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, largely confirmed an AJC analysis that suggested cheating occurred, but the district withheld his findings from the media and public.
Augustine, Pitts and Cotman could not be reached Tuesday. Mazyck referred questions to her attorney. Im shocked that they would characterize her statements as less than candid, said Richard Sinkfield, Mazycks attorney. She was fully cooperative, fully open, and has not participated in any wrongdoing.
The investigators said district officials misled them and hampered their investigation.
Dr. Hall pledged full cooperation with this investigation, but did not deliver, the report said. APS withheld documents and information from us. Many district officials we interviewed were not truthful.
You guys take everything like maximum serious.
