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Former Atlanta Schools Chief Is Charged in Testing Scandal Former Atlanta Schools Chief Is Charged in Testing Scandal
(35 minutes later)
A grand jury on Friday indicted Beverly L. Hall, the former superintendent powerhouse of the Atlanta School District, on racketeering and other charges, bringing a dramatic new chapter to one of the largest cheating scandals in the country. During his 35 years as a Georgia state investigator, Richard Hyde has persuaded all sorts of criminals — corrupt judges, drug dealers, money launderers, racketeers — to turn state’s evidence, but until Jackie Parks, he hadd never tried to flip an elementary school teacher.
The grand jury also indicted 34 teachers and administrators in addition to Dr. Hall, who resigned in 2011 just before results of an investigation into the scandal were released. The panel recommended $7.5 million bond for Dr. Hall, who could face up to 45 years in prison. It worked.
In a list of 65 charges against the educators that includes influencing witnesses, theft by taking, conspiracy and making false statements, Fulton County prosecutors painted a picture of a decade-long conspiracy that involved awarding bonuses connected to improving scores on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, the state’s main test of core academic subjects for elementary and middle schools, and a culture where, in some schools, cheating was an acceptable way to get them. In the fall of 2010, Ms. Parks, a third-grade teacher at Venetian Hills Elementary School in southwest Atlanta, agreed to become Witness No. 1 for Mr. Hyde, in what would develop into the most widespread public school cheating scandal in memory.
“Prosecutors allege the 35 named defendants conspired to either cheat, conceal cheating or retaliate against whistle-blowers in an effort to bolster C.R.C.T. scores for the benefit of financial rewards associated with high test scores,” according to the indictment. Ms. Parks admitted to Mr. Hyde that she was one of seven teachers — nicknamed “the chosen” — who sat in a locked windowless room every afternoon during the week of state testing, raising students’ scores by erasing wrong answers and making them right. She then agreed to wear a hidden electronic wire to school, and for weeks she secretly recorded the conversations of her fellow teachers for Mr. Hyde.
Reached late Friday, Richard Deane, Ms.Hall’s lawyer, said they were digesting the indictment and making arrangements for bond. In the two and a half years since, the state’s investigation has reached from Ms. Parks’s third-grade classroom all the way to the district superintendent at the time, Beverly L. Hall, who was one of 35 Atlanta educators indicted Friday by a Fulton County grand jury.
“We’re pretty busy,” he said. Dr. Hall, who retired in 2011, was charged with racketeering, theft, influencing witnesses, conspiracy and making false statements. Prosecutors recommended a $7.5 million bond for Dr. Hall; she could face up to 45 years in prison.
As she has since the beginning, Ms. Hall has denied the charges and any involvement in cheating or any other wrongdoing and will be fully vindicated, Mr. Deane said. During the decade she led the district of 52,000 mainly poor, African-American children, Atlanta students often outperformed wealthier suburban districts on state tests.
“We note that as far as has been disclosed, despite the thousands of interviews that were reportedly done by the governor’s investigators and others, not a single person reported that Dr. Hall participated in or directed them to cheat on the C.R.C.T.,” he said in a later statement issued by e-mail. Those test scores brought her fame — in 2009, the American Association of School Administrators named her superintendent of the year and Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, hosted her at the White House.
Among the list were 6 principals, 2 assistant principals, 14 teachers, 6 testing coordinators, a school improvement specialist and executives in the human resources department and the school resource team. All defendants have been ordered to turn themselves in by Tuesday, the district attorney’s office announced at a news conference. And fortune — she earned more than $500,000 in performance bonuses while superintendent.
On Friday, prosecutors essentially said it really was too good to be true. Dr. Hall and the 34 teachers, principals and administrators “conspired to either cheat, conceal cheating or retaliate against whistle-blowers in an effort to bolster C.R.C.T. scores for the benefit of financial rewards associated with high test scores,” the indictment said.
Reached late Friday, Richard Deane, Dr. Hall’s lawyer, said they were digesting the indictment and making arrangements for bond. “We’re pretty busy,” he said.
As she has since the beginning, Mr. Deane said, Dr. Hall has denied the charges and any involvement in cheating or any other wrongdoing and expected to be vindicated. “We note that as far as has been disclosed, despite the thousands of interviews that were reportedly done by the governor’s investigators and others, not a single person reported that Dr. Hall participated in or directed them to cheat on the C.R.C.T.,” he said later in a statement.
In a 2011 interview with The New York Times, Dr. Hall said that people under her had allowed cheating but that she never had. “I can’t accept that there is a culture of cheating,” she said.
Paul L. Howard Jr., the district attorney, said that under Dr. Hall’s leadership, there was “a single-minded purpose, and that is to cheat.”Paul L. Howard Jr., the district attorney, said that under Dr. Hall’s leadership, there was “a single-minded purpose, and that is to cheat.”
“She is a full participant in that conspiracy,” he said. “Without her, this conspiracy could not have taken place, particularly in the degree it took place.”“She is a full participant in that conspiracy,” he said. “Without her, this conspiracy could not have taken place, particularly in the degree it took place.”
Starting in the early 2000s, Atlanta school leaders reported impressive results: Some of the poorest elementary schools with chronically low scores were suddenly getting better grades than wealthier suburban schools. Longstanding Rumors
A state investigation began in 2009 after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found steep, unexplainable rises in student test scores. The newspaper compared entire grades of students’ scores from one year to the next and found that many had improved so much that statisticians said it all but proved that cheating was responsible. For years there had been reports of widespread cheating in Atlanta, but Dr. Hall was feared by teachers and principals and few dared to speak out. “Principals and teachers were frequently told by Beverly Hall and her subordinates that excuses for not meeting targets would not be tolerated,” the indictment said.
At Peyton Forest Elementary School, for example, students went from among the bottom performers statewide to among the best over the course of a year. The odds of such an improvement were less than one in a billion, statisticians told the newspaper. Reporters for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and state education officials repeatedly found strong indications of cheating — extraordinary increases in test scores from one year to the next, along with a high number of erasures on answering sheets from wrong to right.
In July 2011, the state’s special investigators issued a scathing 800-page report. It said cheating had occurred in 44 schools and involved 178 educators — about 3 percent of the school system’s employees — including 38 principals. Teachers operated under a “culture of fear” that pressured them to cheat to improve test scores or face punishment from supervisors, the report said. Altering scores on standardized tests became so common, the report said, that one school held pizza parties to correct wrong answers. But they were not able to find anyone who would confess to it.
The cheating began as early as 2001 and lasted a decade, the report said. That is until August 2010, when Gov. Sonny Perdue named two special prosecutors — Michael Bowers, a Republican former attorney general, and Robert E. Wilson, a Democratic former district attorney — along with Mr. Hyde to conduct a criminal investigation.
Investigators laid blame for the biggest standardized-test cheating scandal in the country’s history on the superintendent, Dr. Hall, who led the 50,000-student school system from 1999 until her resignation in 2011. Dr. Hall, who was hailed as National Superintendent of the Year in 2009 for her role in making Atlanta’s once-failing urban school district a model of improvement, had “emphasized test results and public praise to the exclusion of integrity and ethics,” the report said. For weeks that fall, Mr. Hyde had been stonewalled and lied to by teachers at Venetian Hills including Ms. Parks, who at one point, stood in her classroom doorway and blocked him from entering.
The report asserted that Dr. Hall, while not tied directly to cheating or the direct target of a subpoena, tried to contain damaging information and did not do enough to investigate allegations, especially after 2005, when “clear and significant” warnings were raised. As superintendent, she received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses tied to bogus improvements in test scores. But day after day he returned to question people, and eventually his presence weighed so heavily on Ms. Parks that she said she felt a terrible need to confess her sins. “I wanted to repent,” she recalled in an interview. “I wanted to clear my conscience.”
In a 2011 interview with The New York Times, Dr. Hall said that people under her had allowed cheating but that she never had. Ms. Parks told Mr. Hyde that the cheating had been going on at least since 2004 and was overseen by the principal, who wore gloves so as not to leave her fingerprints on the answer sheets.
“I can’t accept that there is a culture of cheating,” she said. “What these 178 are accused of is horrific, but we have over 3,000 teachers.” Children who scored 1 on the state test out of a possible 4 became 2s, she said; 2s became 3s.
Most of the accused teachers have appeared before a tribunal that decides whether or not to suspend their contract. Of the 178 educators implicated in the report, most have been dismissed or have resigned, a school system spokesman said. Twenty-one educators have been reinstated, and three are appealing their dismissals. “The cheating had been going on so long,” Ms. Parks said. “We considered it part of our jobs.”
Atlanta is hardly the only school district to grapple with a widespread cheating scandal. In Memphis, a former assistant principal who was also a guidance counselor was charged with helping teachers in three states cheat on licensing tests. In El Paso, school administrators were charged last year with not only manipulating test scores but also preventing low-performing students from showing up for the tests. And in Great Neck, N.Y., in 2011, a group of students with low test scores were accused of paying classmates to take the SAT or ACT in their place. She said teachers were under constant pressure from principals who feared they would be fired if they did not meet the testing targets set by the superintendent.
The Atlanta scandal gained national attention because of the vast number of people implicated and the tenacity of Fulton County prosecutors, who pursued the case for years and waited until this week to bring criminal charges, right before the statute of limitations on crucial charges expired in April. In 2010, Mr. Howard, the district attorney, appointed two special prosecutors to investigate test tampering. Dr. Hall was known to rule by fear. She gave principals three years to meet their testing goals. Few did; in her decade as superintendent, she replaced 90 percent of the principals.
“The Atlanta situation was so widespread and so obviously troubled,” said John Fremer, the president of Caveon Test Security, a forensic data analysis firm hired by investigators to analyze Atlanta’s test results. “Every professional who looked at the data could see things were so wrong.” Teachers and principals whose students had high test scores received tenure and thousands of dollars in performance bonuses. Otherwise, as one teacher explained, it was “low score out the door.”
After the cheating scandal, the Atlanta Public Schools system opened special remedial classes for students who might have been affected, at a potential cost of $6.4 million. Ms. Parks, a 17-year veteran, said a reason she had kept silent so long was that as a single mother, she could not afford to lose her job.
The school system has spent $2.5 million investigating teachers accused of cheating, including hiring private lawyers for the tribunals, said Stephen Alford, a spokesman. He said the city had also spent millions of dollars more on paying salaries to accused teachers while they waited for their hearings. When asked during an interview if she was surprised that out of Atlanta’s 100 schools, Mr. Hyde turned up at hers first, Ms. Parks said no. “I had a dream about it a few weeks before,” she said. “I saw people walking down the hall with yellow notepads. From time to time, God reveals things to me in dreams.”
Erroll B. Davis Jr., the current superintendent, said steps have been taken to prevent cheating in the future, including an anonymous hot line for reporting ethics violations, an annual ethics training program for all employees and new safeguards for test security. He said “95 percent of our teachers” were not implicated. “I think God led Mr. Hyde to Venetian Hills,” she said.
“This indictment is a legal matter between the D.A.′s office and the people named on the indictment,” he said. “We will continue to focus on our students.” Whatever delivered Mr. Hyde (he said he picked the school because he knew the area from patrolling it as a young police officer), 10 months after his arrival, on June 30, 2011, state investigators issued an 800-page report implicating 178 teachers and principals — including 82 who confessed to cheating.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

By now, almost all are gone. Like Ms. Parks, they have resigned or were fired or lost their teaching licenses at administrative hearings.
Higher Scores, Less Aid
Some losses are harder to measure, like the impact on the children in schools where cheating was prevalent. At Parks Middle School, which investigators say was the site of the city’s worst cheating, test scores soared right after the arrival of a new principal, Christopher Waller — who is one of the 35 named in today’s indictment.
His first year at Parks, 2005, 86 percent of eighth graders scored proficient in math compared with 24 percent the year before; 78 percent passed the state reading test versus 35 percent the previous year.
The falsified test scores were so high that Parks Middle was no longer classified as a school in need of improvement and, as a result, lost $750,000 in state and federal aid, according to investigators. That money could have been used to give struggling children extra academic support. Stacey Johnson, a Parks teacher, told investigators that she had students in her class who had scored proficient on state tests in previous years but were actually reading on the first grade level. Cheating masked the deficiencies and skewed the diagnosis.
When Erroll Davis Jr. succeeded Dr. Hall in July 2011, one of his first acts as superintendent was to create remedial classes in hopes of helping thousands of these students catch up.
It is not just an Atlanta problem. Cheating has grown at school districts around the country as standardized testing has become a primary means of evaluating teachers, principals and schools. In El Paso, a superintendent went to prison recently after removing low-performing children from classes to improve the district’s test scores. In Ohio, state officials are investigating whether several urban districts intentionally listed low-performing students as having withdrawn even though they were still in school.
But no state has come close to Georgia in appropriating the resources needed to root it out.
And that is because of former Governor Perdue.
“The more we were stonewalled, the more we wanted to know why,” he said in an interview.
In August 2010, after yet another blue ribbon commission of Atlanta officials found no serious cheating, Mr. Perdue appointed the two special prosecutors and gave them subpoena powers and a budget substantial enough to hire more than 50 state investigators who were overseen by Mr. Hyde.
Mr. Bowers, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Hyde had spent most of their careers putting criminals in prison, and almost as important, they could write. They produced an investigative report with a narrative that read more like a crime thriller than a sleepy legal document and placed Dr. Hall center stage in a drama of mindboggling dysfunction.
She had praised Mr. Waller of Parks Middle as one of the finest principals in the city, while Mr. Wilson, the special prosecutor, called him “the worst of the worst.”
According to the report, Mr. Waller held “changing parties” where he stood guarding the door as teachers gathered to erase wrong answers and make them right. “I need the numbers,” he would urge the teachers. “Do what you do.”
(When questioned by investigators, Mr. Waller cited his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.)
Dr. Hall had arrived in Atlanta in 1999, the final step in a long upward climb. She had advanced through the ranks of the New York City schools, from teacher to principal to deputy superintendent, and then in 1995, became the superintendent in Newark.
In Atlanta, she built a reputation as a person who got results, understood the needs of poor children and had a strong relationship with the business elite.
Her focus on test scores made her a favorite of the national education reform movement, nearly as prominent as Superintendents Joel I. Klein of New York City and Michelle Rhee of Washington. Like them, she was a fearsome presence who would accept no excuses when it came to educating poor children. She held yearly rallies at the Georgia Dome, rewarding principals and teachers from schools with high test scores by seating them up front, close to her, while low scorers were shunted aside to the bleachers.
But she was also known as someone who held herself aloof from parents, teachers and principals. The district spent $100,000 a year for a security detail to drive her around the city. At public meetings, questions had to be submitted beforehand for screening.
In contrast, her successor, Mr. Davis, drives himself and his home phone number is listed.
As long ago as 2001, Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters were writing articles questioning test scores under Dr. Hall, but when they requested interviews they were rebuffed. Heather Vogell, an investigative reporter, said officials took months responding to her public information requests — if they did at all. “I’d call, leave a message, call again, no one would pick up,” she said.
Community Pressure
What made Dr. Hall just about untouchable, was her strong ties to local business leaders. Atlanta prides itself in being a progressive Southern city when it comes to education, entrepreneurship and race — and Dr. Hall’s rising test scores were good news on all those fronts. She is an African-American woman who had turned around a mainly poor African American school district, which would make Atlanta an even more desirable destination for businesses.
And so when Mr. Perdue challenged the test results that underpinned everything — even though he was a conservative Republican businessman — he met strong resistance from the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.
“There was extensive subtle pressure,” Mr. Perdue said. “They’d say, ‘Do you really think there is anything there? We have to make sure we don’t hurt the city.’ Good friends broke with me over this.”
“I was dumbfounded that the business community would not want the truth,” he said. “These would be the next generation of employees, and companies would be looking at them and wondering why they had graduated and could not do simple skills. Business was insisting on accountability, but they didn’t want real accountability.”
Once the special prosecutors’ report was made public, it did not matter what the business community wanted; the findings were so sensational, there was no turning back.
Ms. Parks of Venetian Hills was one of many who wore a concealed wire for Mr. Hyde.
As he listened to the hours of secretly recorded conversations of cheating teachers and principals, he was surprised. “I heard them in unguarded moments,” Mr. Hyde said. “You listen, they’re good people. Their tone was of men and women who cared about kids.”
“Every time I play those tapes, I get furious about the way Beverly Hall treated these people,” he said.
Another important source for him at Venetian Hills was Milagros Moner, the testing coordinator. “A really fine person,” Mr. Hyde said. “Another single mom under terrible pressure.”
Ms. Moner told Mr. Hyde that she had carried the tests in a tote bag to the principal, Clarietta Davis, who put on gloves before touching them.
After school, on Oct. 18, 2010, the two women sat in the principal’s car in the parking lot of a McDonald’s. Inside Ms. Moner’s purse was a tape recorder Mr. Hyde had given her. Thirty yards away, he sat in his pickup truck videotaping as they talked about how the investigation and media coverage had taken over their lives.
Ms. Moner: I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, my kids want to talk to me, I ignore them. ... I don’t have the mental energy. ...
Ms. Davis: You wouldn’t believe how people just look at you. People you know.
Ms. Moner: You feel isolated.
Ms. Davis : There’s no one to talk to. ... See how red my eyes are? And I’m not a drinking woman.
Ms. Moner: It has taken over my life. I don’t even want to go to work. I pray day and night, I pray at work.
Ms. Davis: You just have to pray for everybody.
Later, when investigators tried to question Ms. Davis about her reasons for wearing the gloves, she invoked the Fifth Amendment. On Friday, she was one of the 35 indicted.

Kim Severson and Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 29, 2013Correction: March 29, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of the president of Caveon Test Security, a forensic data analysis firm. He is John Fremer, not John Caveon.

An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of the president of Caveon Test Security, a forensic data analysis firm. He is John Fremer, not John Caveon.