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Valerie Strauss: Remember the Atlanta Cheating Scandal?

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2022 //
30

A few years ago, I reviewed Shani Robinson’s book “None of the Above,” about the Atlanta cheating scandal. Teachers were charged as racketeers for allegedly changing answers from wrong to right. When questioned by investigators, they were offered immunity if they confessed or accused someone else. Shani pleaded innocent and accused no one. She was sentenced to prison, although there was no evidence against her other than an accusation. She was a first-grade teacher whose student scores did not affect the city’s ratings, nor was she eligible for a bonus. She has appealed and is waiting, years later, to learn whether she will be sent to prison.

Valerie Strauss posted this story and wrote the introduction.

Back in 2015, an Atlanta jury convicted 11 teachers of racketeering and other crimes for cheating on student standardized tests, one of many such scandals reported in those years in most states and the District of Columbia. The fallout continues.

The key difference between all the other scandals and the one in Atlanta: Prosecutors used a law ordinarily used to prosecute mobsters — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO — to go after those they deemed guilty.

A grand jury in 2013 indicted Beverly Hall, the now-deceased superintendent, who was accused of running a “corrupt” organization that used test scores to financially reward and punish teachers. Thirty-four teachers, principals and others were also charged. All but one of the charged was Black. Many pleaded guilty. Twelve went to trial; one was acquitted of all charges and the 11 others were convicted of racketeering and a variety of other charges.

The cheating scandals — including some broad-based ones in the District of Columbia over several years — came during a time when standardized test scores had become the chief metric to evaluate teachers, principals, schools and districts because of federal policy during the Bush and then the Obama administrations. Teachers’ jobs were on the line if student test scores didn’t improve (despite questions about whether the tests really showed improvement in student achievement).

In Georgia, the prosecutions were pushed by two Republican governors, one of whom, Sonny Perdue, used the test scores that resulted from cheating to win federal funding in President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top school reform initiative.

This post looks at the current state of things in this scandal. It was written by Anna Simonton, who is a journalist for the Appeal, a worker-led nonprofit newsroom covering the U.S. criminal legal system. She is the co-author with Shani Robinson of “None of The Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators.” Simonton says she is a proud graduate of Atlanta public schools.

Robinson is one of the teachers who was indicted and who maintains her innocence. “None of the Above” is revelatory about how the prosecutions were handled — the news media virtually ignored the many times the case was nearly dismissed as well as clear examples of prosecutorial misconduct. The judge in the case called the cheating scandal “the sickest thing that’s ever happened to this town,” never mind slavery, Jim Crow laws and their continuing effects, the dismantling of public housing, etc.

Here’s Simonton’s piece.

By Anna Simonton

Teachers have faced unprecedented burdens during the coronavirus pandemic — the risks of teaching in person, the challenges of online schooling, and the furor over critical race theory. Now another threat looms on the horizon for a group of former educators in Atlanta: prison.
The Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal rose to national attention in 2015 when 11 Black educators were convicted of racketeering and conspiracy for allegedly cheating or enabling cheating on students’ standardized tests. The reaction from many corners was outrage.
Commentators asserted that charging teachers with RICO — a federal statute which was originally designed to prosecute mobsters — was overreaching and harsh, that Black educators were scapegoated for a widespread problem, and that sending them to prison wouldn’t solve the systemic failures that led to cheating.

Eventually, the news cycle moved on, and the case was largely forgotten outside of Atlanta. But it’s far from over.

Seven educators who maintain their innocence are still appealing their convictions in a process that has moved at a glacial pace. Last month brought the first major development in several years: Former principal Dana Evans had her appeal rejected by the Georgia Supreme Court on Jan. 11. Evans will soon be incarcerated for one year, followed by probation, unless the trial judge agrees to modify her sentence.
Retired Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter has the power to resentence these educators to time served or any number of alternatives to prison. Now local education advocates are petitioning Baxter, District Attorney Fani Willis, and other elected officials to bring a just resolution to a case that legal experts have called “a textbook example of overcriminalization and prosecutorial discretion run amok.”

It all began in 2010, when then-Gov. Sonny Perdue (R) launched a state investigation into Atlanta Public Schools because he wasn’t satisfied with the district’s internal probe into a suspiciously high number of wrong-to-right erasures on standardized tests.

The problem was widespread — 20 percent of Georgia’s elementary and middle schools were flagged in a 2009 erasure analysis — but Atlanta became the focal point. Less than a week after launching the investigation, Perdue announced the state won a $400 million federal Race to the Top grant for school reform from the Obama administration. What he didn’t mention was that the grant application touted those same test scores, attributing the rise to “higher standards and harder assessments.”

Meanwhile, agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents interrogated teachers without lawyers present, trading immunity for confessions and accusations against fellow educators. The result was a dragnet that hooked innocent people along with those who cheated. When the investigation concluded by implicating 178 educators in cheating, it was up to the local district attorney at the time, Paul Howard, to bring charges.

At that point, cheating had become commonplace in school districts across the country, due in part to federal laws like No Child Left Behind, which punished schools that didn’t increase test scores each year. In most places, the consequences for cheating amounted to suspended or revoked professional licenses, fines, and community service. When Howard indicted 35 educators (who were almost all Black and all people of color) on RICO charges in 2013, it sent shock waves through the city.

Howard stretched the bounds of RICO — which concerns crimes committed for financial gain — to allege that educators conspired to cheat to receive bonus money awarded to schools that scored well on standardized tests. The indictment was so broad that two teachers at different schools who cheated without any knowledge of the other’s actions could be cast as conspirators. And the claim about bonus money didn’t square with the state investigation, which had found that bonus money “provided little incentive to cheat.”

The 12 educators who went to trial had garnered a total of only $1,500 in bonus money, and some never received any at all. One defendant was a teacher whose students didn’t even pass the test.

Others taught first and second grade, where tests were only taken for practice and didn’t count toward the metrics schools were judged upon. That was the case for Shani Robinson. She was accused by a colleague who was granted immunity by the GBI. A testing coordinator had instructed Robinson and other teachers to erase doodles students had drawn on their test booklets, a practice that was allowed under testing regulations. It wasn’t hard for her accuser to twist the scene to fit what investigators were looking for.

The trial lasted eight months — the longest criminal trial in Georgia’s history — and was marred by unreliable testimony. Most educators who were indicted had taken plea deals that required them to confess, accuse, and testify in exchange for community service instead of prison. Witnesses for the prosecution made contradictory statements so often that at one point the judge said, “Perjury is being committed daily here.” Two people even recanted on the witness stand.

At the end of the trial, prosecutors made a last-ditch effort to convince the jury that educators cheated for financial gain by claiming that their salaries — forget the bonus money — justified a RICO conviction. They reiterated that educators could be conspirators without knowing it. And where reason fell short, they relied on emotion, making impassioned declarations like, “America will never be destroyed from the outside! If we falter and lose our freedoms it will be because we destroyed ourselves!”

As if Atlanta educators were responsible for the downfall of democracy.
That was the tenor of the media surrounding the trial as well. Politicians and pundits used the case to paint public education as a failure and peddle corporate-friendly reforms. On the day the prosecution rested, and the cheating scandal dominated headlines, then-Gov. Nathan Deal (R) announced a plan for the state to take over “failing” schools and turn them into charters.

Even if cheating did signal a need for sweeping change, throwing the book at teachers hasn’t led to a better education system. Some students whose tests were manipulated have said the cheating didn’t take a toll on their academic achievement in the first place. The school district’s remediation program for those who have struggled wasn’t very impactful. And new cheating allegations have surfaced because the policies at the root of the problem have not been addressed.

Instead, two educators have served prison sentences and others are headed that way. Changing their sentences and keeping them out of prison would represent a real step toward rectifying the Atlanta cheating scandal.

Categories Atlanta, Charter Schools, Cheating, Georgia

Richard P. Phelps Looks Back on D.C. Reform, Part 2

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2021 //
10

Richard P. Phelps was hired by D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to oversee testing, which was a crucial element in her plans to “reform” the district and raise test scores. During his time there, outsiders raised questions about whether there was widespread cheating on tests.

Phelps addresses those questions in this post.

He begins:

Ten years ago, I worked as the director of assessments for DCPS. For temporal context, I arrived after the first of the infamous test cheating scandals and left just before the incident that spawned a second. Indeed, I filled a new position created to both manage test security and design an expanded testing program. I departed shortly after Vincent Gray, who opposed an expanded testing program, defeated Adrian Fenty in the September 2010 DC mayoral primary. My tenure coincided with Michelle Rhee’s last nine months as chancellor.

The recurring test cheating scandals of the Rhee-Henderson years may seem extraordinary but, in fairness, DCPS was more likely than the average U.S. school district to be caught because it received a much higher degree of scrutiny. Given how tests are typically administered in this country, the incidence of cheating is likely far greater than news accounts suggest, for several reasons:

–in most cases, those who administer tests—schoolteachers and administrators—have an interest in their results;

–test security protocols are numerous and complicated yet, nonetheless, the responsibility of non-expert ordinary school personnel, guaranteeing their inconsistent application across schools and over time;

–after-the-fact statistical analyses are not legal proof—the odds of a certain amount of wrong-to-right erasures in a single classroom on a paper-and-pencil test being coincidental may be a thousand to one, but one-in-a-thousand is still legally plausible; and

–after-the-fact investigations based on interviews are time-consuming, scattershot, and uneven.

Still, there were measures that the Rhee-Henderson administrations could have adopted to substantially reduce the incidence of cheating, but they chose none that might have been effective. Rather, they dug in their heels, insisted that only a few schools had issues, which they thoroughly resolved, and repeatedly denied any systematic problem.

Phelps’ articles were originally published at the Nonpartisan Education Review. They were reposted on Valerie Jablow’s blog.

Categories Accountability, Cheating, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Rhee, Michelle, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations

A 50-State Analysis of PPP Funding of Charter Schools, Religious Schools, and Private Schools

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2021 //
13

Good Jobs First has studied the distribution of COVID relief funds in depth. It created a site called COVID Stimulus Watch. It published an article about the depth of corruption in the Trump administration, which distributed COVID relief funds.

In this post, the researchers at Good Jobs First reveal the federal funding in the Paycheck Protection Program for all 50 states, distributed to charter schools, religious schools, and private schools.

As you review the funding for your own state, please bear in mind that public schools received an average of $134,500 each. Also, public schools were not allowed to apply for PPP funding. Charter schools were, however, allowed to get a portion of the public school funding and then to apply for PPP funding as if they were small businesses.

Check out your own state. You will find that elite private schools with high tuition and large endowments received grants that often were millions of dollars.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Cheating, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Scandal, Separation of church and state

Richard Phelps Reviews Michelle Rhee’s Reforms, Part 2

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2020 //
11

Richard Phelps was in charge of assessment in the last year of the reign of Michelle Rhee as superintendent of the District of Columbia Public Schools. In this post, he describes how difficult and time-consuming it is to identify test cheating and how little the D.C. leadership cared about making the effort. Phelps was supposed to monitor test security and expand testing.

He writes:

The recurring test cheating scandals of the Rhee-Henderson years may seem extraordinary but, in fairness, DCPS was more likely than the average US school district to be caught because it received a much higher degree of scrutiny. Given how tests are typically administered in this country, the incidence of cheating is likely far greater than news accounts suggest, for several reasons:

· in most cases, those who administer tests—schoolteachers and administrators—have an interest in their results;
· test security protocols are numerous and complicated yet, nonetheless, the responsibility of non-expert ordinary school personnel, guaranteeing their inconsistent application across schools and over time;
· after-the-fact statistical analyses are not legal proof—the odds of a certain amount of wrong-to-right erasures in a single classroom on a paper-and-pencil test being coincidental may be a thousand to one, but one-in-a-thousand is still legally plausible; and
· after-the-fact investigations based on interviews are time-consuming, scattershot, and uneven.

Still, there were measures that the Rhee-Henderson administrations could have adopted to substantially reduce the incidence of cheating, but they chose none that might have been effective. Rather, they dug in their heels, insisted that only a few schools had issues, which they thoroughly resolved, and repeatedly denied any systematic problem.

He punctures Rhee’s claim that the test security agency Caveon never found evidence of “systematic cheating.”

He writes:

Caveon, however, had not looked for “systematic” cheating. All they did was interview a few people at several schools where the statistical anomalies were more extraordinary than at others. As none of those individuals would admit to knowingly cheating, Caveon branded all their excuses as “plausible” explanations. That’s it; that is all that Caveon did. But, Caveon’s statement that they found no evidence of “widespread” cheating—despite not having looked for it—would be frequently invoked by DCPS leaders over the next several years.

Categories Accountability, Cheating, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Rhee, Michelle, Standardized Testing

Civil Rights and Education Groups File Suit Against DeVos

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2020 //
15

A group of civil rights and education organizations have filed suit against Betsy DeVos, who seeks to divert public funding to private schools. Say this for DeVos: She is maddeningly consistent in her efforts to fund private schools. Whether authorized or not, she presses forward on behalf of the private school sector. She doesn’t care about public schools or their students. She wants them to open in the middle of a pandemic without regard to safety of students or teachers.

DEVOS SUED BY PUBLIC SCHOOL PARENTS, NAACP, AND SCHOOL DISTRICTS TO BLOCK ILLEGAL RULE THAT DIVERTS CRITICAL COVID-19 AID FROM PUBLIC SCHOOLS TO PRIVATE SCHOOLS

A rule issued by the U.S. Department of Education this month coerces school districts to use an illegal process to inflate the amount of federal COVID-19 aid they must share with private schools. The rule will drastically diminish the resources available to support public school children and historically underserved student populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a lawsuit filed today by public school parents, districts, and the NAACP. The lawsuit seeks to block the rule.

The lawsuit, NAACP v. DeVos, explains that the rule imposes illegal and harmful requirements on the emergency relief funds allocated to public school districts under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Under the rule, school districts must divert more funding for “equitable services” to private school students than the law requires or face onerous restrictions on the use of those funds in their public schools. Both options violate the clear language and intent of the CARES Act and will undermine district efforts to adequately serve students who desperately need services and supports due to the impacts of the pandemic.

The CARES Act directs public school districts to calculate the amount they must set aside for private schools based on the number of low-income students enrolled in private schools. However, DeVos’ rule forces school districts to comply with one of two illegal options, either: (1) allocate CARES Act funds for private schools based on all students enrolled in private school, which includes students from affluent families, or (2) allocate these funds based on the number of low-income students at private schools, but face severe restrictions on how the rest of the district’s CARES Act funds can be used, including a prohibition on their use to serve any students who do not attend Title I schools.

The rule was first introduced in April as non-binding guidance from Secretary DeVos and received widespread criticism from education leaders and lawmakers that the guidance violated the CARES Act and would leave districts without resources essential to address the impacts of COVID-19. Several state attorneys general have also filed suit to challenge these new rules.

“Amid a national health crisis, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is robbing public school children of desperately needed relief and diverting it to private schools,” said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO, NAACP. “This is a new low, even for an administration intent on promoting inequality in education. Children and families across the nation are facing unprecedented risks to their safety and educational opportunities. COVID-19 has magnified the hardships for children from low-income households and diminished access to quality instruction, digital technology, nutrition, social development, and other vital resources. These are consequences that will last a lifetime.”

“Forcing districts to spend even more funding on private schools exacerbates existing inequities in Arizona,” said Beth Lewis, Title I school parent and teacher in the Tempe Elementary School District and cofounder of grassroots advocacy group Save Our Schools Arizona. “Our public schools have been defunded for decades and already lose hundreds of millions of dollars to private schools via vouchers every single year. Secretary DeVos’s binding rule forces our neighborhood schools to give desperately needed federal aid to private schools that have already accepted small business bailouts. Meanwhile, Title I public schools like mine have to rely on local charities and donors to help us feed students and stock classrooms. This rule will harm the students and families who need resources the most.”

“Secretary DeVos’ new rule is plainly illegal because it violates the clear language and congressional intent of the CARES Act,” said Jessica Levin, Director of the Public Funds Public Schools campaign, a collaboration of the organizations that represent the plaintiffs in the case. “The impact on students and schools will be severe, as the rule shows complete disregard for the reality that public schools need increased resources as they continue to serve 90% of our nation’s students during this incredibly challenging time.”

The coronavirus pandemic has focused the nation’s attention on the essential role public schools play in the lives of families and communities. Since closing buildings in March, public schools across the country have worked tirelessly to maintain instruction and provide students with meals, access to technology, health services, and social and emotional supports. Public schools now need more – not fewer – resources. Yet, Secretary DeVos continues to exploit the pandemic to promote her political agenda of funneling taxpayer dollars to private schools.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are represented pro bono by the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, LLP, as well as Education Law Center (ELC) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), all of whom collaborate on Public Funds Public Schools.

Press Contact:
Sharon Krengel
Policy and Outreach Director
Education Law Center
60 Park Place, Suite 300
Newark, NJ 07102
973-624-1815, ext. 24
skrengel@edlawcenter.org

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Cheating, Civil Rights, Health, Safety, U.S. Department of Education

Robert Shepherd’s Glossary of Adjectives to Describe Trump

By dianeravitch
May 31, 2020 //
50

Robert Shepherd writes comments on the blog frequently, and he also writes his own blog. He is a recently retired teacher in Florida who spent decades as a writer, editor, and developer of curriculum and assessments in the education publishing industry.

Since he has often expresssed his views of the current occupant of the White House, I invited him to assemble a Trump glossary.

He did.

Some people respond to crises with focused, quiet intensity. Not our 73-year-old President in the orange clown makeup. He can’t stop tweeting and blabbering randomly and profusely. And what does he tweet and blab about? Well, he suggests holding events at his resorts, he attacks perceived enemies, and he praises himself. And then on Memorial Day, while others are laying a wreath on the grave of Uncle Javier who died in Vietnam, Trump accuses a journalist of murder and goes golfing.

This demonstrated lack of concern for others (for victims and survivors of natural disasters and war and disease, for example) shows that Donald Trump doesn’t give a microbe on a nit on a rat’s tushy about anything but Donald Trump. Obviously, he cares only about money (sorry, Evangelicals, his only God is Mammon) and about himself.

But hey, Trump’s a romantic figure, a man in love. This must be his appeal. And when he speaks, in his toddler English, about the love of his life, Donald Trump, you can be certain that he will use terms like “a winner,” “the greatest,” “the best,” and so on. He will tell you about his “great genes” and his uncle who was “a super genius [which is a lot better than an ordinary genius] at MIT.”

OK, over the years, I’ve had my disagreements with the man to whom I variously refer as Moscow’s Asset Governing America (MAGA); Don the Con; IQ 45; The Don, Cheeto “Little Fingers” Trumpbalone; Vlad’s Agent Orange; the Iota; our Child-Man in the Promised Land; our Vandal in Chief; Dog-Whistle Don; The Man with No Plan and the Tan in the Can; President Pinocchio; Trump on the Stump with His Chumps; Jabba the Trump; Don the Demented; King Con; Donnie DoLittle; the Stabul Jenius; Scrotus Potus; The Mornavirus trumpinski orangii; Ethelorange the Unready; our First Part-time President, now become, in his nonresponse to the pandemic, Donnie Death. However, I do agree with him that in descriptions of Trump, SUPERLATIVES ARE IN ORDER.

The British writer Nate White wisely observed, in a post that Diane Ravitch shared on her indispensable blog, that Donald Trump’s “faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws.” Trump is a one-person compendium of human vices and failings. In this respect, truly, HE HAS NO EQUAL. And so I offer here an ABECEDARIUM of adjectives, each of which demonstrably describes the occupant of the now Offal Office in the now Whiter House, the fellow who has shamed us before the world, made us a laughing stock, and led the now Repugnican Party in an unprecedented Limbo Dance (“how low, how low, how low can we go?).

Trump is. . . .

abhorrent, amoral, anti-democratic, arrogant, authoritarian, autocratic, avaricious, backward, base, benighted, bloated, blubbering, blundering, bogus, bombastic, boorish, bullying, bungling, cheap, childish, clownish, clueless, common, confused, conniving, corrupt, cowardly, crass, creepy, cretinous, criminal, crowing, crude, cruel, dangerous, delusional, demagogic, depraved, devious, dim, disgraceful, dishonest, disloyal, disreputable, dissembling, dog-whistling, doltish, dull, elitist, embarrassing, erratic, fascist, foolish, gauche, gluttonous, greedy, grudging, hate-filled, hateful, haughty, heedless, homophobic, humorless, hypocritical, idiotic, ignoble, ignominious, ignorant, immature, inarticulate, indolent, inept, inferior, insane, intemperate, irresponsible, kakistocratic, kleptocratic, laughable, loathsome, loud-mouthed, low-life, lying, mendacious, meretricious, monstrous, moronic, narcissistic, needy, oafish, odious, orange, outrageous, pampered, pandering, perverse, petty, predatory, puffed-up, racist, repulsive, rude, sanctimonious, semi-literate, senile, senseless, sexist, shady, shameless, sheltered, slimy, sluglike, sniveling, squeamish, stupid, swaggering, tacky, thick, thin-skinned, thuggish, toadying, transphobic, trashy, treasonous, twisted, ugly, unappealing, uncultured, uninformed, unprincipled, unread, unrefined, vain, venal, vicious, vile, and vulgar.

Aside from those peccadilloes (we all have our faults, don’t we?), I have no problem with the guy.

Categories Bigotry, Character, Cheating, Corruption, Cruelty, Failure, Fake, Fascism, Fraud, Lies, Stupid, Trump

TIME: How the Real Estate Industry Got $160 Billion in the CARES Act

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2020 //
24

TIME magazine has a depressing expose about the $160 billion in tax breaks that the CARES Act awards to the real estate industry, including the family business of Jared Kushner.

The CARES Act is the coronavirus relief package of $2 trillion intended to save mom-and-pop businesses and other small businesses at risk of failing due to the prolonged shutdown.

When Democrats realized that the real estate moguls had pulled a fast one, they wrote repeal legislation that has no chance of passing in the Senate.

TIME’s analysis of drafts of the bills and lobbying disclosures, along with interviews with half a dozen staffers and lobbyists, show that the provisions originated with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley’s office, which was working with other Republicans on the committee, and were lobbied for heavily by the real estate industry, including a prominent real estate trade group, of which Jared Kushner’s family’s company is a member…

Jared Kushner’s family’s company, Kushner Companies, is a member of NMHC’s advisory committee, according to the organization’s website. That membership appears to be the lowest level of membership and requires an annual fee of $5,000. The NMHC website also lists Avi Lebor, Kushner Companies’ director of acquisitions, as the contact for the company on the membership directory. Lebor was in prison with Kushner’s father and joined Kushner Companies after they were both released, according to Bloomberg. The Trump Organization, which will also benefit from the tax provisions, is not publicly listed as a member of NMHC.

War profiteers.

Categories Accountability, Cheating, For-Profit, Fraud

Shani Robinson Speaks About Her Trial in Atlanta

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2019 //
20

Shani Robinson is one of the teachers who was convicted of cheating in the infamous Atlanta case. In her absorbing book None the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators, Robinson makes a convincing case that she was railroaded by an over-zealous, unscrupulous and racist prosecution.

In this brief video, she explains what happened. She was teaching first grade, where there were no stakes, no rewards, attached to scores. One of her colleagues falsely accused her to avoid prosecution. The trial was a sham. Many cities had cheating scandals. Atlanta is the only one where teachers were tried (using a “racketeering” statute written for the Mafia) and sent to jail.

The video is part of a collection of over 1,000 videos by Bob Greenberg. Bob calls them “brainwaves.” He is a former teacher turned videographer.

Here are two more “Brainwaves” that Greenberg made with Shani Robinson.

Lord, Why Did You Make Me Black https://youtu.be/vOTsBznfejA

Teachers Make a Difference https://youtu.be/RmipMN0FdGU

Categories Atlanta, Cheating, Teachers

G.F. Brandenburg on the Strange Case of the D.C. Editorialist Who Still Loves Michelle Rhee

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2019 //
21

 

G.F. Brandenburg cannot understand the Washington Post editorial writer Jo-Anne Armao. When Michelle Rhee started her job as chancellor of the D.C. schools in 2007, Armao interviewed her and decided that she was the greatest educator ever. Nothing that has happened in the past dozen years has changed her views. To this day, she still writes lovingly, respectfully about the Miracle that was Michelle Rhee. All her initiatives have failed. A huge cheating scandal was covered up and forgotten. Charter scandals have come and gone. A high school boasted of its 100% graduation rate, but it was a fake.

No matter. The Washington Post editorial board has Rhee’s back, almost a decade after she left.

For a fun trip down memory lane, read the comments on the John Merrow post from 2013 that is included.

Categories Accountability, Cheating, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Disruption, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Fraud, Rhee, Michelle

The Inside Story of the Atlanta Cheating Scandal: A Book You Should Read

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2019 //
56

 

I just finished reading a compelling book about the famed Atlanta Cheating Scandal. It is titled None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators. I found it hard to put down.

It was written by Shani Robinson, one of the teachers convicted in 2015 of racketeering, for changing her students’ answers on a state test, and journalist Anna Simonton. It is Shani’s story, and with Anna’s help, it is a very good read.

Shani was a Teach for America teacher who taught first graders at Dunbar Elementary School in Atlanta. She was one of dozens of teachers and administrators accused of cheating to raise her students’ test scores. Being arrested, charged, threatened, tried, and convicted was an ordeal, which she describes in detail. Throughout this ordeal, she maintained her innocence. She very credibly insists that she never changed her students’ test answers. Her student scores were not counted towards the school’s “AYP” and had no bearing on the school’s rating because first grade scores were not part of the No Child Left Behind dragnet.

She never received a bonus or any other monetary reward. Yet she and other educators were accused and convicted on a racketeering charge (the federal RICO statute that was designed to snare members of the Mafia and other organized criminals). She did not conspire with anyone, she writes, and to this day she insists upon her innocence.

What is especially shocking is her account of the “justice” system. At every step along the way, she and the others who were accused were offered the opportunity to get out of the charges if only they agreed to plead guilty. They got off scot free if they were willing to accuse others. Repeatedly she was told that she had a choice: If you stick with your plea of innocence, you face 20 years in prison; if you confess your criminal behavior, you will get probation, community service, and a nominal fine. Those who were convicted lost their job, their reputations, their careers, and in some cases, their freedom.

Others whom Shani trusted confessed to crimes they had not committed. She insisted upon her innocence and refused to lie to win her freedom. She cannot help comparing the longest trial in Georgia’s history with the cheating scandal in Washington, D.C., where no one was charged and there was no trial or punishment, nor even a credible investigation.

Somehow the whole procedure sounds like a story from the old Soviet Union, but this is American “justice” as practiced in Georgia.

What makes the story even more interesting is the way she connects her personal dilemma with the history of racism and injustice in Georgia and with the manipulation of politics by corporate interests. She notes again and again that the media created a feeding frenzy because of allegations that educators cheated, but were not interested at all in reporting how corporate interests shifted or stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the schools for real estate development or gentrification.

She describes Atlanta’s history as the first city to build public housing, which became home to many thousands of black families, and the first city to tear down all of its public housing, ostensibly to woo middle class families back to the city (and to push out poor black families).

She became disenchanted with Teach for America as she saw its recruits—funded by out-of-state billionaires and trained by TFA’s Leadership for Educational Equity– organize a takeover of the Atlanta school board so as to make way for corporate education reform, especially charter schools.

She details the efforts of for-profit Charter Schools USA to open a charter in Atlanta, and the determination of the black community to keep them out.

Hypocrisy?

She writes:

“I tried to keep my cool as I came to terms with the fact that some very bad things had happened in my school district, worked to remain self-assured that my name would be cleared, and attempted to quell my outrage at the naked hypocrisy of some of the public figures who scrambled to condemn educators for ‘cheating the children.’ There were so many ways that children, particularly black children, were being cheated out of a decent life. During the decade that some APS staff members were tampering with tests, most teachers were doing the best they could with few resources for contending with kids who suffered generational trauma stemming from urban renewal, racialized violence, the drug epidemic, mass incarceration, and the obliteration of public housing. Meanwhile, real estate moguls and financiers were finagling ways to line their pockets with the education dollars that should have been going to the classroom.”

The most memorable line in the trial was uttered by the utterly reprehensible Judge Baxter, who said that the cheating scandal was “the sickest thing to ever happen in this town.” Shani wonders if he never gave any thought to slavery, Jim Crow, and the many other attacks on blacks as equally “sick.”

Shani Robinson’s appeal has not yet been heard. She may yet be sent to prison. Her book is a persuasive argument that some of the worst criminals in Atlanta were never tried for their crimes against the children of Atlanta.

 

Categories ALEC, Atlanta, Cheating, Education Reform, Georgia, Injustice
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