APS teacher forced to crawl under table at faculty meeting because of low test scores

By the way, I see that Kasim Reed is jumping quickly from U. S. S. Beverly Hall. It didn’t take him long to change his tune and jump this sinking vessel! Ha! Just like a politician. But, I hope that the voters remember that he was on Beverly Hall’s Cheer Squad to the very end…with pom poms and streamers always in his hands. According to Kasim, it was all the board’s fault…well, the fault of Mr. El and his four colleagues who tried to deal with the Hall Administration and the cheating scandal.

Kasim, I don’t know if the voters’ memories are that faulty. I think that they are going to remember where you stood. HallGate may have done you in politically. This is not just CheatingGate. It is HallGate.

Any opponent in the upcoming Mayoral race need only write, “Kasim Reed…He Defended Beverly Hall!” Enough said.

Yep, it’s a price to be paid for all those nice, swanky lunches at the Piedmont Driving Club. Heck, Kasim, just go to O’Charley’s or Taco Bell. Ha!

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Dr, John,

Let’s get some sleep. Unfortunately, this problem will be with us tomorrow and for many days thereafter.

Look forward to your comments tomorrow.

Good night.

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Maureen – I thought the report was 800 pages long. The 3 volumes on the AJC site only go up to 400. Or am I missing something?

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I taught at Whitefoord Elementary in 2003. To describe it as a hostile work environment would be an understatement. Disrespect and bullying of teachers by the administration was rampant. I have worked for 42 years in the corporate world and in teaching and that was undoubtedly the worst work experience of my life.

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@exaps teacher: I heard a brief interview on the radio with Shirley Franklin, and all she could talk about was how great BHall made APS. No comment on the cheating or on BHall’s role in it.

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This type of behavior IM SURE happens more than we know. Its a typical representation of these types of pseudo leaders.

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There is no way on this earth I would ever get under a table unless things are falling from the sky. If that teacher did not do anything abt that, it is on her/him…I want to see Hall return ALL the money she received for progress. I want to see all $$ stopped for everyone for gains. They DO NOT do the job, the teachers do and we certainly do not see any $$ for it. We see our pay cut and furloughs on top of that…
I believe she was in on it. All the recognition APS has gotten for gains is a lie to the public and the students. I hv heard a lot abt children being promoted that maybe shouldn’t hv been. Students are promoted that do not need to be promoted every year. That isn’t all abt test scores. That is abt administrations and parents as well.

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http://www.scribd.com/doc/1273803/-description-tags-0108

“DATA ANALYSIS, REFORM MODEL, TURN AROUND ATLANTA SCHOOL. Six years ago, when Venetian Hills Elementary School in Atlanta failed once again to meet basic academic standards, it was identified by the state as “needing improvement” and ordered to offer students free tutoring or transfers to better-performing schools. At the start of school that same year, Clarietta Davis was appointed principal. Facing an audience of anxious parents at open house night, she vowed, “We’re going to be more deliberate with the way we deliver instruction, and we’re going to deliver instruction with more rigor.”
Today, Venetian Hills—where all but a handful of students qualify for the free lunch program—has been given a new label: 2007 No Child Left Behind–Blue Ribbon School, the highest recognition for academic
excellence from the U.S. Department of Education. Student performance has improved sharply during Davis’ tenure, with approximately 96 percent of its students in grades 3-5 now performing at grade level in reading and math, according to the latest data. Venetian Hills “proves that with hard work, every student can achieve great things,” said Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who gave much credit to the school’s leadership during a recent visit. Davis—honored two years ago as one of
Georgia’s High Performance Principals, and recently as one of six recipients of the Department’s Terrell H. Bell Award for Exemplary Leadership—said it all began with analyzing test score data….”

For the rest of the highly laudatory article, click the link. I think I’ll write Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and ask her what sort of taste she gets from having both of her feet in her mouth, and I’m going to laugh and laugh and laugh…

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At what point do teachers REFUSE to do things that are blatantly crazy? Crawl under a desk? Erase answers? Excuse me?

I have been asked to do things that were unethical before. I refused, and resigned the position. I have seen fellow teachers do things that were unethical before. I reported them. NOTHING is as important as your personal ethics!

I think now is the time to get it all out. Those who were forced unjustly to resign should band together for a class-action lawsuit. Those on the Board who conspired to continue the unethical behavior should be investigated and perhaps jailed/fined. Those on the Blue Ribbon Committee who came up with the stupidest report to “save B Hall”, including especially members of the Atlanta business committee, should be investigated and perhaps jailed/ fined for their role in the corruption obfustication. It is time for a complete housecleaning of all the corruption rife in the school and business community (as it impacts the schools). Perhaps it is time to dissolve APS and partition it off to the surrounding systems (except Dekalb–they are nearly ripe for this kind of investigation as well).

Will it cost money to recoup the funds STOLEN in pursuit of the hoax? Yes, but there should be some lawsuits to collect, personally and individually, the money to pay for the legal action. B. Hall was not hired to lie, cheat, and steal. That she did no makes her personally liable for the legal fees the system should recoup.

How about some GREAT BIG, BOLD-FACED ANNOUNCEMENTS by the corporations who feted her about how they were wrong?

I am sick and tired of these educational streetwalkers (chosen because I don’t think the blog filter will accept the word that starts with wh and ends with res) making an already difficult job even harder with their exaggerated claims of greatness! FOLKS, IF SOMETHING SEEMS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, IT IS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE!

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@Teacher Reader, you wrote: “Standardized testing with tests like the CRCT are in fact criminal. They give false information to parents who think that an 800 means their child is doing okay, when in fact it means that their child barely answered more than 50% of the questions correctly. This is a crime to the child.”

It isn’t the standardized test that is harmful. It’s the liberal way the test is graded that harms children, and does so in the same way that the CRCT cheating harmed them. You’re test and its grading process must allow for the possibility of failure, even miserable failure, among those who are tested. Also, it must not firewall the upper range of scores because that prevents the test from distinguishing between the very best students and those who are just “pretty good.”

A well designed standardized test, fairly administered without any cheating, and scored by a method that doesn’t introduce, for feel-good purposes, unnecessary non-linearity on the low or the high score ranges, is a very good educational tool.

The SAT once was a better test than it is today: before it was “recentered” with a firewall at the top and a push-up skew at the bottom. But even when I took it, in the 1970s, it had a flaw. Namely, I got 400 points on the combined Part I just for showing up to take the test. Only the points above 400 were points that I had actually earned. That low firewall should be eliminated, too.

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Disgusting, it is the system NOT the teachers. Anyone raised up to the 90’s in public school came out fine when teachers could teach and NOT teach to a test.

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hey john trotter.
I sent you an email and voice message.
ABC news with Diane Sawyer wants to do a interview with me about my experience at APS back in 2005, when I reported cheating at a high school in atlanta.
Since I was a MACE member, would you please join me for the interview?

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@ exaps teacher: I just read your email. I would be happy to appear with you on ABC. I remember what you and the others went through, and I remember how strong you guys were. Remember when one of the guys in the “leadership” threatened my life? Ha! (I responded with an 11 or 12 page letter that literally went all over the State and the internet too.) We picketed like hell (three big pickets that year). Filed several PSC Complaints, and the PSC actually came back in this situation with sanctions against four people in the “leadership.” Two stepped down. The principal suddenly announced in an April faculty meeting that he was retiring. That was a year, right? 1994-95, right? You shed the light on the rampant cheating on the High School Graduation Test. You were very strong, an unsung hero at the time. I encouraged you to get the hell of our APS and accept the job in the suburban county where they would appreciate you. Good to hear from you!

@ former APS teacher: I think that the new superintendent, whomever will be appointed, will want to move on and try to forget as hastily as he or she can about this sordid time in the annals of APS. Unfortunately, I don’t think that he or she will engage in any restitution in which he or she should engage. Too many lives were destroyed.

@ Craig of Augusta: I received your email. Will try to respond today. The main person who would be addressing this with the new teacher is on vacation this week. But, I’ll try address it with you. Thanks!

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As someone raised the question, the favored ones were exempt from any investigation, not just cheating. Sexual harrassment and other charges were ignored if they were producing the numbers. Again this parallels what happened at Enron.

Something to keep in mind is that this is just 38 principals and 142 teachers that have been IDENTIFIED. In other cases they couldn’t identify who was doing the cheating. And they only looked at 56 schools of the 90 where testing was done. The erasure analysis prioritized what they looked at. They found that 69% of the schools were at least of moderate concern and 77% were at least minimal concern. 52 of those 90 schools had erasures in 20% of more of their classrooms that only had a 1 in 370 chance of being random. There was undoubtedly cheating, but to a lesser extent, at more than just the 44 schools identified. There are a large number of people who have escaped. If we punish the ones who got caught and the enabling administrators its a lot less likely the rest will repeat the activity.

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Why do educators fear tests? If the school/teacher promise to teach my child math and reading, then I deserve an independent evaluation of whether that goal was met. That is known as a test. If my child fails to do well, then teacher and parent should discuss what can be done to improve the process and result.

The TIAA-CREF money managers for educators’ money uses an independent review process to check if they are investing wisely and reporting accurately. Teachers expect that their money is being managed wisely, and that is appropriate. TIAA-CREF is not afraid of the “test” of its work. Why are so many teachers afraid?

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Testing…even if the tests were somehow well-designed to avoid bias of all kinds and to make sense (often, questions are so absurd that educated adults can’t figure out what is intended), they still only can measure the lowest levels of skills or knowledge. They are the ultimate dumbing-down of our schools.

Remember, these standardized tests have no scientific basis. The current and previous administrations simply have kept repeating the same mantra over and over again, and eventually the “scientifically sound basis” becomes “true,” despite its conflict with facts.

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@ Dr. Trotter. Bev Hall wouldn’t listen to you or Atty. Woods. Thanks to Atty. Woods, I was not terminated when my principal filed charges against me because of the way that she mismanaged a $5,000 grant that I received. Instead, Dr. Hall tried to fire me. Sheryl Freeman in OIR tried to coerce me into saying that I gave the principal permission to use the funds at her discretion. This principal deserves to be terminated, and I do not have any sympathy for her.

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@catlady–I am in agreement and well said! If you have no ethical judgement and allow yourself to be berated and humiliated in front of your colleagues, then to me, you don’t deserve to hold a teaching license.

What I want to know is will these individuals be eligible for their pension benefits?!!

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I resigned from Cobb County. I chose to rather than being terminated; which makes no sense if the contract year is over…

I will gladly join any class action suit that ensues here in the state of Georgia. I wrote the AJC, Cathy Cox, called the office of Fred Sanderson, and spoke with two attorneys. TO NO AVAIL.

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I tell you who should be outraged and that’s the parents and students in Clayton County. SACS ripped away the accreditation for this district and they didn’t do anything NEAR this. The sad part is, Atlanta Public Schools now has all sorts of high profile people involved that it won’t get anywhere near the level of punishment that Clayton received. But SACS won’t be fair and use the same measuring stick for APS like it did Clayton County. SACS was just flexing muscle to let the world know how powerful they are. But I bet you any amount of money they will back down and won’t do ONE THING to APS. Bet the farm on that!

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@QuidProQuo: APS = Too Big to Fail. Believe That.

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Testing isn’t bad in and of itself. Of course it is invaluable as a means to measure the success of instruction that has been delivered in a particular place over a particular time. But the way we are using testing in education is ludicrous. When you compare results of one year’s administration with a different year’s administration, you aren’t measuring a teacher’s success at delivering instruction. Therefore, how can these results be tied to such things as teacher performance, salary, etc.? What about special education teachers? In many cases their students won’t come close to passing these tests, so are we fair in concluding these teachers are failures? If there are 40 students in a subgroup in a Georgia school, those scores count toward AYP. Often a student may fall into more than one recognized subgroup (depending upon race, socioeconomic status, and disability); is it fair to count their scores more than once?

Another thing the public doesn’t realize is that schools (and teachers) are labeled as “failing” when they don’t meet targets that continue to increase until reaching 100% in 2014. If 88% of my students (the majority of whom come from low socioeconomic backgrounds where the priority is survival rather than educational attainment) passed the English portion of the Georgia High School Graduation Test, I feel that is a HUGE success (especially when early data analysis predicted nearly half to fail). But since 91.8% did not pass, my students, my school, and I are deemed failures according to NCLB, the media, and politicians. We seem to forget we are dealing with human beings, not inputs and outputs in a predictable formula. When can anyone say they have gotten 100% of human beings to do ANYTHING? The public classroom that accepts all students regardless of circumstances, desires, or preparation is a reflection of our society at large, not a carefully controlled vacuum in which we can reliably assume that action “X” will result in consequence “Y”. There are so many variables that affect one’s educational performance that cannot even be identified much less measured or manipulated. Anyone with a brain can see beyond the hype and recognize that “failing” schools and systems are the ones with the highest enrollment of students living in poverty. These students by and large are not read to as small children, and consequently they are seriously lacking in critical reading skills. They come from environments where higher education simply doesn’t even enter their realm of thinking in terms of realistic post-secondary options. While a teacher may have enormous power to impact the lives of his or her students, we simply aren’t equipped to give these babies all the advantages we had. The majority of teachers in these schools CHOOSE to be where they are needed most, where they feel they can do the most good. They work ridiculous hours (including all the planning, data analysis, committee assignments, and assessment) and differentiate instruction in every conceivable way to meet the needs of thirty or more human beings (in each class) who have distinct learning styles, preferences, and abilities. And they do this in an environment that has become rife with suspicion, paranoia, and intimidation. Improvement initiatives have a short shelf life and are exchanged with the next trend. Teachers and students are expected to shift gears and directions at the drop of a hat without ever really being sure of the purpose.

This isn’t just happening in APS. I have taught in several Georgia school systems (all schools with a majority of “at-risk” students), and it is the same. Schools in the “better” attendance zones (read $$$) sustain an entirely different culture. Because their students make the scores, teachers are respected as competent professionals and lauded for “thinking outside the box.” They aren’t harassed or bullied into complying with a specific set of behaviors. Teachers in the “bad” schools (like their students) are treated as bumbling idiots who must be policed and berated into submission. They don’t have time to plan relevant, engaging lessons that students will actually be motivated to participate in because test prep doesn’t allow time for that. Also, they often lack the technological resources that would make a classroom resemble the “real” world their students will graduate into.

While this has long been the case for schools that serve mostly impoverished students (whom the voting public knows little about or has much use for), this hostile climate now encroaches upon the “better” schools who will be unable to met ridiculously high AYP targets without some serious manipulation of the data (if not outright cheating). The focus is no longer on helping each child within a classroom achieve his or her maximum potential, but on how we can get our numbers to fall within the magic range so that we can all keep our jobs and take care of our families. But the commodity we work with is people, not numbers, and the educational deficiencies they bring with them into the classroom can’t be eradicated with the introduction of a new administrator, a particular test prep program, or improvement model.

I did some research on Susan Ohanian several years ago and came across a document in which she (and others) pointed to a corporate conspiracy to undermine our public education system for monetary gain. At the time, my reaction was, “What a nut.” But everything the authors predicted is coming to pass. When you get the public to buy in to the notion that schools are failing, you open up a very lucrative market in terms of charter schools, consultants, improvement models, test prep materials, etc. Sure these services are backed by “research,” but this research is often sponsored by the vendor and flawed in terms of design, methodology, and validity.

We have to exercise a little common sense and investigate the source of the data we are being fed, examine the real causes of performance gaps, and ensure that we are comparing apples to apples. For example, we keep hearing that the U.S. fares horribly in comparison to other nations in terms of academic achievement. But do all countries test all students? Nope, just us. Do all countries operate under the ludicrous assumption that all students will enter a traditional four-year college? Nope (In Georgia, all students now follow a “College Prep” track. There is no such thing as vocational anymore). Do all countries regard teachers in the same light? Nope! What should be glaringly relevant to anyone interested in these matters is the correlation between poverty and education. In countries where people work to equalize opportunity for students regardless of where their parents live or how much money they make, the students perform better academically. Why can’t we acknowledge this here? Because there’s too much money to be made by villifying those who impact the future of our society more than any other profession. I wonder how much we spend on improvement and assessment consultants, implementing trendy improvement models, designing, evaluating, reporting, and investigating standardized tests, supplemental education services (schools at a certain needs improvement level must provide this), and lawyers to cover all our butts in the process.

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@Inescapable yet unspoken “Union are needed.”
Amen. I posted a comment last week stating that I didn’t believe the cheating scandal could’ve happened with union protection like I had out-of-state. This was way before hearing of the excessive abuses at Parks M.S.

@Teacher Reader
Yes, cheating happens in heavy union district, but the difference I find is the systematic inculcation of cheating in APS, often led by administrators, rather than a sole teacher. BTW, I agree that high stakes testing is a faulty barometer that education must stop relying upon.

@Mikey D
Michelle Rhee’s administration has already been discredited. Like BH, she created a climate of fear in DC schools that led to similar advances, now being investigated as systematic cheating.

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Ms. Baker, I think you’re right on the money (as it were). I assume that when you say “testing isn’t bad in and of itself,” you are referring to the broader category of assessing, and not simiply standardized testing (which I do believe is seriously bad). Is my assumption correct? I hope so, for if you read Ohanian’s site regularly, you’ll see just how much (corporate-sponsored) baloney comprises the entire standardized testing industry. Business Roundtable and ilk saw a huge cash cow in the 600 billion dollars of education funds, and then they created a way to milk it.

Keep remembering it, everyone: there’s no scientific basis to the standardized testing fantasy. All the independent research about what makes good and great education/teaching/classrooms leads us in a decidedly opposite direction.

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@ Former APS Teacher: You were strong to take a stand, and, yes, Attorney Bill Woods, would not back down. He was one of my dearest friends, but he passed away in July of 2006 from heart failure — but he had the heart of a Lion, and we named our Person of the Year Award at MACE each year “The ___ Annual William L. Woods Person of the Year Award.” I know that he gets a kick of this!

I was in the office today and walked through what we call “the William L. Woods Parkway” in the office, a sort of memorial shrine set up for “the Woodman,” with many photos, his Emory chair (where he earned his undergraduate degree), his Georgia State University Law Degree, his published book of poetry (Burger Boy — some great poems in here), and, of course, his photo of Uga IV. He loved the Georgia Bulldogs, his chicken wings, his pizza, and maybe a maybe a nip or two of Jim Beam. Ha! We miss him dearly! There will never be another Woodman. In fact, I think that I will write an article later this evening or in the wee hours of the morning about Beverly Hall and this sordid mess in Atlanta, and I will use a photo of “the Woodman” (as we all called him and he called himself…in the third person!) attached to this article because he and Norreese Haynes fought many battles for Atlanta teachers, especially ones dealing with cheating (or, rather some teachers who refused to cheat and were therefore being ostracized and abused). In fact, at lunch today (Godby Road Piccadilly, baby!), Mr. Haynes was telling me how many, many of his OIR cases in the last couple of years were dealing with this type of situation. I remember going with him and Ben Barnes last year to assist one of our members who had strong evidence about this same type of cheating at Turner Middle School. Now I see why the APS Administration appeared so nervous about this situation. When I had visited this Turner Middle School with my colleagues, Mr. Haynes, Mr. Barnes, and Mr. David Cochran, the principal asked us to be sequestered in a conference room and she then got someone on the phone from Downtown. I got on the phone, and I told this OIR person that we were following protocol and simply had come to visit teachers after school and that we had signed in, to which she replied: “Dr. Trotter, you know [that] they see you as John Wayne when you show up.” True story. But, I have many funnier and more weird situations than this when I showed up at school. Maybe I’ll go into them later. They would make for a good article! Ha!

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