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Ethics Lawyers: Why Fani Willis is not Disqualified Under Georgia Law

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2024 //
24

Three prominent ethics lawyers—Norman L. Eisen. Joyce Vance, and Richard Painter— express their shared view of the legal challenge to Fani Willis and her Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade. I have excerpted only the opening paragraphs from the website “Just security.” Please open the link to finish the article. The authors’ bios appear at the end of the excerpt.

They begin:

No one is praising Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s apparent romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, an attorney in private practice who she brought on board as a Special Prosecutor in the criminal investigation and now prosecution of Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants. We have not yet heard that much of Willis’s side of the story. However, based on what is known so far, it represents poor judgment—especially in a case of this magnitude, even if a prosecutor’s private life is generally none of the public’s business. Willis has already said publicly that she is “flawed” and “imperfect” in her public remarks at Bethel AME Church following the allegations. But whether there were personal failings is not the operative legal test for whether Willis or Wade should be disqualified from the case, and accordingly that question is not the focus of this essay. Prosecutors are human, and they can and do make mistakes. The question here is whether Willis’s and Wade’s apparent mistakes have any bearing on the election conspiracy prosecution in a way the law would require their removal from the case.

The motion filed by defendant Michael Roman seeks primarily to do just that – to disqualify Willis and Wade from further participation in this case. Under Georgia law, however, even if all the factual allegations regarding Willis and Wade were true, there would be no basis for disqualifying them from prosecuting Roman or any of the other defendants in the election conspiracy case.

The key point is that regardless of whether the factual circumstances involving Willis and Wade give rise to separate ethical concerns with respect to his hiring, such questions do not affect the propriety of the prosecution against Roman and his co-defendants. Questions about gifts and related matters go to Willis’s and Wade’s obligations to the Fulton County District Attorney’s office, and have no connection to assuring the defendants a fair trial. These allegations are as irrelevant to the trial as allegations in other situations that prosecutors took office supplies for personal use, drove county vehicles for personal errands, or plagiarized portions of their student law review notes. All of those are legitimate issues—for prosecutors’ offices and those with oversight responsibilities to address—but such allegations do not bring criminal prosecutions to a stop or require that cases be transferred to a different office. Defense attorneys cannot use allegations of prosecutorial ethics violations, real or imaginary, that have nothing to do with a trial to delay or force prosecutors off of a case….

The authors:

Norman L. Eisen:

Ambassador Norman Eisen (ret.) (@NormEisen) served in the White House as special counsel and special assistant to the president for ethics and government reform and as ambassador to the Czech Republic under President Barack Obama, as well as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee from 2019–20, including for the first impeachment and trial of President Donald Trump.

Joyce Vance

Joyce White Vance (@JoyceWhiteVance) is Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law and former United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017. Member of the Editorial Board of Just Security.

Richard Painter

Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA). is the S. Walter Richey Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and was the chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Georgia

“Democracy” Weighs In on Controversy in Atlanta About Fani Willis and Prosecutor

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2024 //
59

There has been a heated debate on the blog about charges that District Attorney Fani Willis was romantically involved with prosecutor Nathan Wade. Defendants’s lawyers suggest the case should be thrown out or the entire prosecution team be replaced. Clearly, the public needs to know more about what happened before reaching judgment. As Nikki Haley has said repeatedly about Trump, “wherever he goes, chaos follows.” That may be why he’s been so successful in the courts in more than 3,500 cases—evasion, delay, chaos.

Our reader “Democracy” added this insight:

Here’s more on the Fanni Willis “scandal” from today’s NY Times, and other media, along with some comments from me:

“the bombshell accusations have rocked the criminal case — one of four Trump faces this year as he also seeks a second term in the White House. Trump blasted Willis and Wade over the allegations again on Friday, calling the prosecutors ‘the lovebirds’ and accusing them of targeting him ‘to ENRICH themselves, and to live the Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous!’ In posts on his social media platform, Trump called for the prosecutors to ‘face appropriate consequences’ and for charges against him to be dismissed.”

•• It’s rather rich for Trump to be ridiculing ANYONE about trying to enrich himself, and it’s the height of hypocrisy for Trump to be demanding “appropriate consequences” for Fanni Willis when he is doing everything he can to try and evade accountability for himself.

“Roman’s motion argues that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade violated the state bar’s rules of professional conduct, the county code regarding conflicts of interest and, possibly, federal law. It calls for the case against Mr. Roman to be dismissed, and for Mr. Wade, Ms. Willis and Ms. Willis’s entire office to be disqualified from the case.”

•• Whether or not Fanni Willis violated any code of professional conduct remains to be seen, and it seems that a pretty good case can be made that she did not. But, yeah, optics matter. Still, there is a STRONG legal case AGAINST Mr. Roman that is completely UNRELATED to WIllis taking a private trip or two with Mr. Wade.

“On Saturday morning, Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment, who has been vocal in supporting the Georgia prosecution, called on Mr. Wade to step down, saying that the recent allegation of an affair ‘had become a distraction.’ ”

•• That’s the WHOLE point of this sordid nonsense, is it not? To cause a distraction from the fact that Trump AND his accomplices tried to steal the electoral votes in Georgia away from Mr. Trump by throwing out the verified, certified election results. Also, if in fact Wade were to resign, wouldn’t THAT be a legitimate end to the issue?

“For years, Mr. Wade was a regular at county Republican breakfast meetings, and he served for a time as a delegate to the county convention, said Jason Shepherd, who chaired the Cobb County Republican Party at the time…In 2016, during one of his unsuccessful attempts to run for Cobb County superior court judge, he was supported by Ashleigh Merchant — the lawyer who filed the motion this month on Mr. Roman’s behalf that seeks to have him removed from the Trump case. The motion questions Mr. Wade’s qualifications. But in a Facebook post in the midst of his judge’s race, she praised him for his extensive résumé…’Nathan has practiced in every area of the law that appears before the Superior Court bench,’ she wrote.”

•• Ahem…

Let’s rehash here. As PBS News Hour reported two short days ago,

“Trump and Roman were indicted by a Fulton County grand jury in August along with 17 others. They’re accused of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to try to illegally overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Four of those charged have already pleaded guilty after reaching deals with prosecutors. Trump, Roman and the others who remain have pleaded not guilty…Roman was the director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign and also had worked in the White House…Prosecutors say he helped coordinate an effort to contact state lawmakers on Trump’s behalf to encourage them to ‘unlawfully appoint presidential electors.’…He is also alleged to have been involved in efforts to have Republicans in swing states that Trump lost, including Georgia, meet on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign certificates falsely saying Trump had won their states and that they were the electors for their states. He was in touch with local Republican officials in several states to set up those meetings.”

And yet Roman (and Trump, and a whole cast of other weirdos), think that private “dating” or a few private trips somehow create an act of immense impropriety that should THROW OUT legally obtained indictments for subverting the 2020 presidential election returns in the state of Georgia, thereby disenfranchising every single voter who cast a ballot for Mr. Biden.

This is beyond stupid, is it not?

Michael Roman’s attorney, Ashleigh Merchant has asked not only that Fanni Willis and Nathan Wade BE REMOVED from this case but also that ALL CHARGES against Roman BE DROPPED.

Here are some other cases where Ashleigh Merchant demanded that charges be dropped. Take a peek.

2017: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ga-supreme-court/1862249.html

2021: “In addition to Matthews’s admission that he stabbed Young, his cell phone records and his knowledge of information about the crime scene that the police had deliberately withheld from the public supported a finding that he was present when the crime occurred. Evidence found in his home and in the adjacent dumpster, including the set of steak knives that matched the knife blade found on Young’s body, Young’s debit and credit cards, and the cap that one of the men using Young’s debit card was wearing just after the murder, also connected him to the crimes. The evidence was legally sufficient to authorize a rational trier of fact to find beyond a reasonable doubt that Matthews was guilty of malice murder and possession of a knife during the commission of a crime.”

“Count 6 of the indictment charged Matthews with knowingly taking without consent a Bank of America Visa debit card, which was “issued to Adrianne Young as cardholder and from whose possession the said card was taken.” A rational trier of fact could find beyond a reasonable doubt that Matthews was guilty of financial transaction card theft from the evidence presented, including evidence that debit cards and a credit card belonging to Young were found in the dumpster adjacent to Matthews’s residence, that Young’s purse was missing from the crime scene, and that Matthews attempted to use Young’s debit card within an hour of her murder.”

https://casetext.com/case/matthews-v-state-2093

2022: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ga-supreme-court/2162540.html

2023:  https://casetext.com/case/kim-v-state-60

Kind of makes one wonder.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Georgia, Justice, Trump

Guiliani Trial Begins Today in Georgia

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2023 //
16

Rudy Guiliani admitted that he defamed two Georgia election workers by accusing them of fraudulently switching ballots. The two are mother and daughter Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. As a result of his repeated accusations on national television, which were repeated by Trump, calling them out by name, the pair were subjected to continual threats, harassment, and intimidation. They are suing Guiliani for a sum between $15.5 million and $43.5 million. Jury selection begins today.

The showdown between the financially strapped Giuliani and the two temporary poll workers he baselessly accused of ballot tampering in 2020 will highlight a major court battle over false claims that became central to former president Donald Trump’s efforts to stay in power and is now at the heart of two criminal cases against him.


U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell has already found Giuliani liable for more than a dozen defamatory statements against Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, who are mother and daughter, leaving a jury of eight only to decide how much he should pay in damages for violent threats and harassment the pair received. Howell previously ordered Giuliani to pay the women $230,000 in legal fees and sanctions for failing to turn over relevant information. She said those failures, combined with Giuliani’s own admissions, compelled her to rule without a trial that he defamed both women, intentionally inflicted emotional distress on them as part of a civil conspiracy, and owes punitive damages.

If you want to hear the details of what happened to them, watch this clip from the Rachel Maddow show. In addition to hearing their story, you will also hear testimony from the #2 official at the Justice Department, Richard Donahue, who testified to the January 6 Commission that he met with Trump and told him that the Justice Department had investigated all his claims of election fraud and found no evidence for them.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Elections, Extremism, Georgia, Justice, Lies, Trump

Shani Robinson: I Was Convicted in Atlanta on RICO Charges. I Was Innocent.

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2023 //
18

Shani Robinson was one of the Atlanta teachers who was convicted during the Great Cheating Scandal of 2015. Almost ten years later, she and five others who refused to plead guilty are still free while appealing their convictions. Shani wrote a book about her ordeal called None of the Above, which I reviewed here. Shani’s book persuaded me that she had not cheated; she had no motivation to cheat since the scores of first-graders did not count for AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) or for a bonus for her. She was outraged to be accused of cheating, and she resisted all plea deals that required her to plead guilty or to accuse others, even if the plea deal allowed her to walk free. She was determined to insist on her innocence rather than make a deal with prosecutors.

Now that Trump and others are accused using the RICO statute, I contacted Shani to ask her where her case stands today.

Shani wrote this account for the blog:

Most everyone I know is paying attention to the prosecution of former President Donald Trump and 18 of his allies related to an alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act makes that possible. I view the proceedings with mixed feelings, as I was falsely accused and convicted under that same RICO Act during the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) Cheating Trial in 2015.

My name is Shani Robinson and I’m a former first grade teacher. I was falsely accused of cheating on my students’ standardized tests by a former co-worker, whose story changed every time she was interrogated by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), but who was ultimately offered immunity in exchange for her testimony. Former Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard Jr. claimed that cheating was the result of a criminal conspiracy. He used RICO—a law devised to take down the American Mafia—to throw the book at educators. I was offered a plea deal that would have whittled my potential 25-year prison sentence down to community service. But I wasn’t willing to admit guilt for something I hadn’t done and/or falsely accuse someone else. I also never received bonus money (the basis for the RICO charges) because my school didn’t reach the district targets, which were APS’s testing goals that prosecutors claimed were the main culprit behind the cheating. There was no motive for me to cheat because as a first-grade teacher, my test scores didn’t count toward the district targets.

The APS cheating case was rife with corruption from the beginning. Former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue sent an unprecedented number of GBI agents into APS in 2010. Teachers were pulled out of their classrooms and told to speak with these agents, and in most cases, there were no attorneys present. Agents used intimidation to elicit confessions and accusations: Some educators complained that GBI interrogators threatened that they could lose custody of their children if they didn’t cooperate. Educators who maintained their innocence were asked to sign pre-written statements saying they didn’t cheat. Some of the teachers who signed the forms were still accused of cheating and were charged with making false statements and writings, a felony, because they had followed instructions and signed the statements the GBI provided. At the same time Perdue’s investigation was underway in APS, he turned around and used the same questionable test scores in an application for President Obama’s Race to the Top program and won a $400 million federal grant.

The trial was like a circus. The judge called out prosecutors on multiple occasions for improperly influencing the jury. But the judge himself was often out of line too: from telling the jury a story about a man he caught masturbating, to having a private conversation with former District Attorney Paul Howard Jr., to pressuring my co-defendants and me to take plea deals. While the prosecutorial and judicial misconduct that took place was bad enough, the mainstream media helped fuel the fire to justify the RICO charges. Their overall narrative was that educators cheated to get bonus money. This patently contradicted the GBI investigative report, which stated bonus money provided “little incentive” to cheat. One of the lead investigators on the case also stated this when he testified during the trial. Despite the flaws, the jury convicted all but one of us that was on trial.

The problem with RICO is that it criminalizes such a broad range of conduct, including acts by many people who have nothing to do with each other. RICO was originally written to attack organized crime; using such a statute against educators for cheating on standardized tests is unconscionable. Since the 2001 enactment of No Child Left Behind, a federal policy that mandated standardized testing and imposed sanctions on schools that failed to meet unrealistic goals, The National Center for Fair and Open testing documented cheating cases in nearly 40 states and Washington, DC. Only in Atlanta did educators face felony charges saddled with decades-long prison sentences.

This RICO indictment has hung over my head for the past 10 years, leading to a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The impact of PTSD and the fallout from the trial has taken a significant toll on my family. I have 2 small children, sothe thought of going to prison and being separated from them is agonizing. There are 6 defendants, including me, still appealing convictions. We’ve all been able to remain out of prison thus far due to being on appeal bonds. But the case has been handled so poorly; the entire appeals process restarted this year with no end in sight. Millions of tax players dollars have already been spent on this trial.

 Last year brought a ray of hope: Judge Jerry Baxter granted a new sentence for a principal who was convicted, enabling her to avoid prison and do community service instead. I’m hopeful that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and Judge Jerry Baxter will come to the realization that RICO was misused in our case and find a peaceful resolution. Otherwise, the APS Cheating Trial could potentially be used as a playbook for other unjust prosecutions that clog up the legal system and waste public resources.

Categories Atlanta, Cheating, Georgia, Teachers

Georgia: Report Warns that Costs of Vouchers Make Them Risky

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2023 //
3

The National Education Policy Center issued a report about the likely fiscal impact of vouchers, which finds that vouchers are a risky venture with no proven benefits. NEPC is noted for its peer-reviewed reports.

An NEPC Review funded by the Great Lakes Center

Key Takeaway: Tax-credit scholarship programs probably incur more costs than savings for state and school districts, placing financial strain on state budgets and driving the need for future budget cuts.

GRAND RAPIDS, MI (September 26, 2023) – A recent report from the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts examines the monetary costs and benefits of the state’s Qualified Education Expense Tax Credit (QEEC), a voucher policy that provides a public subsidy for families to pay for private school tuition. A review of the report, however, contradicts its claim that the policy provides a net fiscal benefit to the state budget.

David Knight of the University of Washington reviewed Qualified Education Expense Tax Credit: Economic Analysis, and he found several methodological challenges that undermine the report’s conclusions and its usefulness.

One key claim in the report is that the tax credit results in $81 million of forgone state tax revenue per year. Another key claim is that the vouchers incentivize almost 20,000 students per year to choose private schools instead of public, thus removing the cost of educating those students from state and local budgets. Based largely on these two claims, the report concludes that QEEC provides a net fiscal benefit for Georgia’s state budget.

Professor Knight points to a lack of data about how many students per year do actually switch from public to private schools because of the voucher subsidy and incentive. In fact, existing private-school families have extremely strong incentives to accept the public subsidies. And if most of the vouchers are provided to support these students who were already planning to attend a private school, then the policy only subsidizes private school students with funding that could otherwise be returned to taxpayers or invested in the state’s public education system, which is open to all students.

While these calculations are all necessarily grounded in some speculation because of the unregulated elements of the voucher policy and the resulting lack of hard data, the most likely result of tax credit scholarship programs like QEEC is that the state and school districts incur more costs than savings, placing financial strain on state budgets that could require future cuts.

Because the report relies on unrealistic assumptions, its suggestion that program benefits outweigh costs is tenuous and risks misleading state education leaders. Instead, state leaders should invest educational dollars in policies that have a positive return on investment and therefore help, rather than harm, state and local budgets.

Find the review, by David Knight, at:
https://www.greatlakescenter.org

Find Qualified Education Expense Tax Credit: Economic Analysis, written by Greg S. Griffin and Lisa Kieffer, and published by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts, at:
https://www.audits.ga.gov/ReportSearch/download/29827

NEPC Reviews (https://nepc.colorado.edu/reviews) provide the public, policymakers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected publications. NEPC Reviews are made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice: https://www.greatlakescenter.org

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Funding, Georgia, Privatization, Religion, Vouchers

Peter Greene: This Teacher Was Fired in Georgia for Reading an Innocuous Book to Her Students

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2023 //
72

Peter Greene writes with outrage about the firing of a teacher in Georgia whose crime was to read a book to her fifth-grade students. One parent objected to the book.

He writes:

The story of  Katherine Rinderle has dragged out over the summer and has now come to a predictable and yet unjustifiable conclusion. This is just wrong.

The short version of the story is that Rinderle read Scott Stuart’s “My Shadow Is Purple” to her fifth graders, after they selected it for their March book. A parent complained. The Cobb County School District suspended her and the superintendent announced a recommendation to terminate her. A tribunal appointed by the board recommended that she not be fired. The board just fired her anyway.  

This is a bullshit decision.

Was this one of those graphic books with blatant displays of sex stuff? No. This is the most bland damn thing you could hand a kid. I would read it to my six year olds without hesitation. 

A child plays with action figures and dolls, likes dancing and sports and ponies and planes and trains and glitter, and, in the climactic event, wants to go to the school dance in an outfit that has a suit-ish top and a skirt-ish bottom. Discouraged by the insistence that they must choose either blue or pink at the dance, the purple-shadowed child decidesd to leave, but then an assortment of friends declare their shadows are a wide variety of colors, and a happy ending ensues. “No color’s stronger and no color’s weak.”

That’s it. That’s the book. (I’ve attached a read-aloud video at the bottom so you can see for yourself.) There’s nothing about sex, barely a mention of gender, and the message is simply that there are other ways to be beyond stereotypical male or female roles. 

That’s the book that this woman lost her job over. 

Georgia has, of course, a “divisive concepts” law with appropriately vague language so that teachers can live in fear that they could lose their jobs over anything that some parent thinks is divisive and disturbing. Meanwhile, the boardwas trying to argue its bullshit decision, by hinting that Rinderle is a big old troublemaker:

Without getting into specifics of the personnel investigation, the District is confident that this action is appropriate considering the entirety of the teacher’s behavior and history. However, as this matter is ongoing, further comment is unavailable. The District remains committed to strictly enforcing all Board policy, and the law.

Sure. So Georgia’s teachers have been sent a clear message about staying in line and not bringing up anything remotel;y controversial ever.

And now the children of Cobb County in particular and Georgia in general have been sent an important message– if you’re different, that’s not okay, and if someone suggests that it’s okay, well, that’s illegal. Shame on Cobb County’s school board. Shame on the state of Georgia. And if you’re so sure that these kind of reading restrictions are only about protecting children from graphic pornography, take a look at this and think again.

Open the link to see the read-aloud video.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, Democracy, Extremism, Georgia, Students, Stupid, Teachers

Georgia: Teacher May Be Fired for Teaching “Divisive Concept” about Gender

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2023 //
120

Like other Republican dominated states, Georgia passed copycat legislation banning the teaching of “divisive concepts” that might make some students feel uncomfortable or ashamed of something that happened long ago (like slavery, Jim Crow laws, peonage, segregation, etc., all of which is factual and true).

Despite the fact that the law was designed to deter teachers from accurately teaching about racism, a fifth-grade teacher is fighting for her job because she assigned a book about gender.

Anyone who wants to understand why teachers are leaving and teacher shortages are widespread should read this story.

At first glance, the plight of Katherine Rinderle, a fifth-grade teacher in Georgia, might seem confusing. Rinderle faces likely termination by the Cobb County School District for reading aloud a children’s book that touches on gender identity. Yet she is charged in part with violating policy related to a state law banning “divisive concepts” about race, not gender.

This disconnect captures something essential about state laws and directives restricting classroom discussion across the country: They seem to be imprecisely drafted to encourage censorship. That invites parents and administrators to seek to apply bans to teachers haphazardly, forcing teachers to err on the side of muzzling themselves rather than risk unintentionally crossing fuzzy lines into illegality.

“Teachers are fearful,” Rinderle told us in an interview. “These vague laws are chilling and result in teachers self-censoring.”

In short, when it comes to all these anti-woke laws and the MAGA-fied frenzy they’ve unleashed, the vagueness is the point.

As CNN reported, the district sent Rinderle a letter in May signaling its intent to fire her for a lesson using “My Shadow Is Purple.” The book is written from the perspective of a child who likes both traditionally “boy” things like trains and “girl” things like glitter. Its conclusion is essentially that sometimes blue and pink don’t really capture kids’ full interests and personalities — and that everyone is unique and should just be themselves.

The district’s letter, which we have obtained, criticized Rinderle for teaching the “controversial subject” of “gender identity” without giving parents a chance to opt out. She was charged with violating standards of professional ethics, safeguards for parents’ rights and a policy governing treatment of “controversial issues.”

But Rinderle and her lawyer, Craig Goodmark, argue that the policy on “controversial issues” is extremely hazy. They point out that it prohibits “espousing” political “beliefs” in keeping with a 2022 state law that bans efforts to persuade students to agree with certain “divisive concepts” that don’t reasonably apply here.

After all, in that law, those “divisive concepts” are all about race. Among them are the ideas that the United States is “fundamentally racist” and that people should feel “guilt” or bear “responsibility” for past actions on account of their race. It’s not clear how this policy applies to Rinderle’s alleged transgression.

What’s more, we have learned that this action was initiated by a parent’s troubling email to the district, provided to us by Rinderle and her lawyer, in which the parent notes that teachers were told to avoid “divisive” concepts. The parent then writes, “I would consider anything in the genre of ‘LGBT’ and ‘Queer’ divisive.”

Five years ago, this book would not have drawn attention. It is not advocating for LGBT OR queer behavior. Girls can be tomboys, boys can like to play with dolls without being gay.

But now an email from a single parent is enough to get a teacher fired.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Extremism, Freedom, Freedom to Read, Gender, Georgia, Racism

The Atlanta Cheating Scandal Is Not Over

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2023 //
24

In 2009, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution scrutinized test score gains in the city’s public schools and discovered a number of schools where the gains seemed improbable. The story triggered intense scrutiny by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Eventually nearly three dozed educators were charged with changing answers on the standardized tests from wrong to right in hopes of winning a bonus and pleasing their superintendent Dr. Beverly Hall, who put pressure on all teachers to raise scores or be humiliated.

During Beverly Hall’s tenure, the Atlanta district was celebrated for its miraculous test score gains, and she won recognition as Superintendent of the Year. She was the poster educator supposedly proving the “success” of No Child Left Behind. What she actually proved was that NCLB created perverse incentives and ruined education.

The facade of success came tumbling down with the cheating scandal.

After the investigation, Beverly Hall was indicted, along with 34 teachers, principals, and others. All but one of those charged is black. Many pleaded guilty. Ultimately, 12 went to trial. One was declared innocent, and the other 11 were convicted of racketeering and other charges. Beverly Hall died before her case went to trial.

The case was promoted by then-Governor Sonny Perdue. Ironically, the rise in Atlanta’s test scores was used by the state of Georgia to win a $400 million Race to the Top award.

One of those who was punished for maintaining her innocence was Shani Robinson, who was a first-grade teacher. She is the co-author with journalist Anna Simonton of None of The Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators.

I reviewed their book on the blog. While reading her book, I became convinced that Shani was innocent. As a first-grade teacher, she was not eligible for a bonus. Her students took practice tests, and their scores did not affect the school’s rating. Yet she was convicted under the federal racketeering statute for corrupt activities intended to produce financial gain. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), was written to prosecute gangsters, not school teachers. Her conviction was a travesty.

Investigators offered Shani and other educators a deal: Plead guilty and you can go free. Or, accuse another teacher and you can go free. She refused to do either. She maintained that she was innocent and refused to accuse anyone else. Shani was accused by a teacher who won immunity. Despite the lack of any evidence that she changed scores, she was convicted.

Two Atlanta lawyers wrote a blog post in 2020 describing the Atlanta cheating trial as a legal outage:

The Atlanta Public Schools (APS) “cheating” scandal is a textbook example of overcriminalization and prosecutorial discretion gone amok, compounded by an unjust sentence of first-time offenders to serve years in prison. It is a glaring illustration of a scorched-earth prosecutorial mindset that has sparked a movement of reform-minded prosecutors nationwide — one which has yet to be embraced in Atlanta.

Just this past week, the six remaining educators who have insisted on their innocence went before the same judge who found them guilty. Their public defender asked to be excused from the case because he thought it was a conflict of interest to represent all six defendants. The original prosecutor, Fani Willis, continues to believe the six educators should be imprisoned. Willis is now prosecuting the case of whether former President Trump interfered in Georgia’s election in 2020.

The six educators who insist they are innocent have lived in a state of suspended animation for more than a decade. They have not gone to prison, yet. They have lost their reputations, their jobs, their teaching licenses.

They hoped that Judge Baxter might use the hearing to dismiss their case. Shani asked me to write a letter supporting her. I did.

It didn’t matter. Judge Baxter decided that the defendants should get a new public defender and return for another hearing. The case has already cost millions of dollars and is the longest-running trial in the history of the state.

The judge ordered them to return to court with their new lawyers or public defenders on March 16. At that time, the entire appeals process might start again and take years to conclude.

I contacted my friend Edward Johnson in Atlanta to ask him what he thought. Ed is a systems thinker and a sharp critic of the Atlanta Public Schools‘ leadership, which is controlled by corporate reformers who make the same mistakes again and again instead of learning from them.

Ed wrote me:

Prosecuting teachers and administers was morally wrong to begin with. Continuing to prosecute any of them is doubly morally wrong. Teachers and administers were the real victims of Beverly Hall. So prosecuting them means being willfully blind to ever wanting to learn truths about anything that would help Atlanta avoid doing a Beverly Hall all over again.

I agree.

Categories Accountability, Atlanta, Cheating, Competition, Corruption, Cruelty, Education Industry, Equity, Fraud, Georgia, History, Injustice, Justice, Lies, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Standardized Testing

Ed Johnson: Atlanta Schoools Could Be the Linchpin for Reducing Crime and Violence

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2022 //
4

Ed Johnson is an Atlantan who acts as a watchdog for the Atlanta Public Schools. He is also a systems thinker, influenced by the seminal work of W. Edwards Deming.

He recently wrote about how the Atlanta pPublic Schools could help revitalize the city by thinking systematically instead of following its course of jumping from reform to reform.

His post begins:

Loopy APS is my mental model of interrelated causal factors exposed for all to see, question, and critique in a spirit of collaborative discourse. It began as a visual representation of my thinking about why Atlanta Public Schools cannot improve and why it can improve dumped out onto paper, static. The 2009 APS cheating scandal prompted doing so.

Then, during April 2017, by chance I discovered the cleverly named Loopy™ and promptly rendered my mental model in it. Hence the name Loopy APS.

Created by systems thinker Nicky Case, Loopy™ is “a tool for thinking in systems” and for simulating systems. It is highly effective and simple but not simplistic to use. If you can think, you can use Loopy™. It is freely available.

Loopy APS allowed seeing the dynamic behavior of a vicious causal loop that went unnoticed on paper. The vicious causal loop simulates interrelated factors influencing violence and crime in Atlanta to continually worsen amid a great deal of systemic instability.

It wasn’t clear at first why the vicious causal loop was in Loopy APS, as I did not knowingly model it. It was only after being able to see my thinking play out dynamically in Loopy APS did I notice it. So, to find out why, I ran Loopy APS, time and again, observing its behavior until a particular story became clear.

Reading from the snapshot image, in Figure 1, below, the story, told tersely, goes like this:

Greatly influenced by Partner Purposes, Atlanta BoE (Board of Education) and APS Superintendency provide for frustrating Authentic Education by employing SEL & Police (behavioristic practices) to favor inculcating routinized Teacher Learning and Student Leaning that obviate Wisdom, so as to obscure Democracy to allow Selfishness to flourish as Violence & Crimeto entangle Civil Society, while Atlanta BoE (Board of Education) and APS Superintendency are ever more greatly influenced by Partner Purposes.

Note the end of the story goes right back to its beginning. This makes the story a closed loop. Being a closed loop means every “thing” in the loop represents a causal factor that influences the behavior of every other “thing” or casual factor in the loop, including itself.

In other words, influence that goes around, comes around, whether directly or indirectly. Or, as Martin Luther King Jr tried to help us know and understand: “What affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Systems thinker Nick Chase did this short video honoring systems thinker Martin Luther King Jr. But, alas, I guess it takes one to know one, because being a systems thinker is not ordinarily ascribed to Dr. King. To many, he remains the guy who had a dream.

The overall, systemic behavior of a causal loop may be vicious or virtuous, or status quo-keeping. In the story above, pulled from Figure 1, it is vicious systemic behavior influencing violence and crime in Atlanta to continually worsen.

Now, given that story, the question becomes: What needs to change, so as to transform the closed loop of causal factors influencing violence and crime in Atlanta to continually worsen into one influencing violence and crime in Atlanta to continually lessen?

This question, of course, comes from recognizing that every vicious cycle holds the potential to reverse and become virtuous and, conversely, every virtuous cycle holds the potential to reverse and become vicious.

To follow Ed Johnson’s analysis, open the link and view his graphs and finish reading.

Categories Atlanta, Education Reform, Georgia

Herschel Walker Lost, But Is He the ”New Normal” for the Republican Party?

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2022 //
28

Tom Nichols, a staff writer for The Atlantic, posed the question that is the title of this post. Nearly half the voters of Georgia cast a ballot for a man who was manifestly unqualified for the office, by any measure. Republicans thought it was cunning to pick a Black candidate, hoping to peel support away from Senator Warnock. It didn’t work. Walker got very few Black votes. Warnock won with unified Black support and a multiracial coalition.

Nichols fears that Trump has dumbed down expectations for Republican candidates to an alarming degree. Following his model, they can be stupid, they can be immoral, they can be liars, they can be adulterous and flaunt it, they can mock democracy. There is no low too low for them.

Nichols writes:

Walker’s candidacy is a reminder of just how much we’ve acclimated ourselves to the presence of awful people in our public life. Although we can be heartened by the defeat of Christian nationalists and election deniers and other assorted weirdos, we should remember how, in a better time in our politics, these candidates would not have survived even a moment of public scrutiny or weathered their first scandal or stumble.

And yet, here we are: An entire political party shrugs off revelations that a man running on an anti-abortion platform may have paid for an abortion (possibly two), has unacknowledged children, and may also be a violent creep. Not long ago, Walker would have been washed out of political contention as a matter of first principles.

Think of how much our civic health has declined in general. Only 35 years ago, during the long-ago Camelot of the late 1980s, Gary Hart had to pull out of the Democratic primaries for getting caught with a pretty lady on a boat named “Monkey Business,” and the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart stood with tears streaming down his face because he’d been caught with a prostitute in a Louisiana motel. In 1995, Senator Bob Packwood (again, more tears) resigned in the aftermath of revelations of sexual misconduct just before being expelled from the Senate.

The Republicans were once an uptight and censorious party—something I rather liked about them, to be honest—and they are now a party where literally nothing is a disqualification for office. There is only one cardinal rule: Do not lose. The will to power, the urge to defeat the enemy, the insistence that the libs must be owned—this resentment and spite fuels everything. And worst of all, we’ve gotten used to it. I’m not sure who said it first, but the Doobie Brothers said it again in the title of their 1974 album: What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits.

There’s a lot of blame to go around, but no one did more to pioneer the politics of disgust than Donald Trump, who took the outrageous moments of his two presidential campaigns and turned them into virtues. Trump ran, and still runs, as something of a dare, a challenge to see if we’re just a bunch of delicate scolds who get the vapors over things like veterans or foreign influence or nepotism. Are you really going to let the commies and immigrants from the “shithole countries” take over? he seems to ask at every turn, just because of little nothing-burgers like whether I’m keeping highly classified documents in the magazine rack next to my gold toilet?

As usual, however, the real problem lies with the voters. The Republicans are getting the candidates they want. This is not about partisanship—it’s about an unhinged faux-egalitarianism that demands that candidates for office be no better than the rest of us, and perhaps even demonstrably worse. How dare anyone run on virtue or character; who do they think they are?

It’s terrifying to realize that totally unhinged candidates, not only in Georgia but in other states, like Arizona, received almost half the vote.

My hope lies with changing demographics and our youth. Young people who have grown up in the 21st century are likely to replace the shrinking generations of old white bigots, who are now the GOP base. America will be a better nation in the years ahead, as these voters make better choices and choose a better future where all of us make progress. Together.

Categories Character, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Georgia, Ignorance, Insane, Republicans, Trump
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