I thought they were volunteers?!?

Communities In Schools ties with Atlanta’s public schools in jeopardy | SaportaReport
For 40 years, Communities In Schools has been working with the Atlanta Public Schools to help the most vulnerable students stay on course and graduate.
The organization, which was founded in Atlanta as Exodus in 1972, now is in 24 states and the District of Columbia working with about 3,000 schools across the country. It is considered one of the nonprofits that has been most successful in getting tangible results.
But now the Atlanta Board of Education is considering ending its partnership with Communities In Schools.
Erroll Davis, superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools, has proposed ending the school system’s relationships with several nonprofit organizations, including Communities In Schools, Teach for America, Project Grad and Hands On Atlanta as cost saving measures.
But ending those relationships is creating great concern among community leaders who are concerned about what will happen to the students who are in great need of extra support if those nonprofits are not there.

Wait. You mean APS is paying them? So they're not really volunteers, they're subcontractors?

Oops. Never mind. Sort of.

12 Atlanta educators named in cheating case going back to work | ajc.com
Twelve Atlanta educators implicated in a massive test cheating investigation will be allowed to return to work, school district officials said Thursday. It's the first time Atlanta Public Schools has reinstated any of the approximately 180 educators named in the case.
...After reviewing the cases, the district concluded there was not enough evidence to prove the 12 reinstated educators cheated or knew about cheating.
...Eight of the reinstated educators are from Peyton Forest Elementary, two are from Finch Elementary, one is from D.H. Stanton Elementary and one is from Fain Elementary, [Superintendent Erroll] Davis said. The educators may not be assigned to the same school, as their positions were filled while they were on leave.

It seems to me that if this announcement meant that APS has unequivocally cleared these employees of wrongdoing, they would name names. That's how I read this comment from Bob Wilson, co-author of That Report To The Governor:

If anything, he said, the report fell short of identifying all educators who participated in cheating. But standards of evidence must be met in order to fire teachers, and that’s not what the investigation set out to do. “I don’t think it raises any questions about the investigation,” he said. “The mere fact they don’t have enough evidence doesn’t mean teachers didn’t violate protocol of the test.”

So, if you look at this scandal as if it were a game, a dozen players just won. They got to take a year off with pay and have jobs waiting for them this fall.

Do you suppose they will return to work committed to record-keeping honesty? Thinking "*whew*, dodged a bullet, better not do that again"? Or will they conclude that what they did is pretty much what APS wants them to do?

LATER: Now we've got names, and they and their attorneys seem to think their names have been cleared, which just goes to show they don't know how trials work.

If it's this hard to fire a teacher...

Readers Write 6/18 | ajc.com
After following the proceedings of the APS tribunal, I have a question for the teachers and some administrators who claimed fear for their jobs as reasons for cheating: If it is this hard to fire a teacher, even one accused of such a serious offense, why were you in fear for your job?

Ooh, that's a good question. It has an obvious answer, but I can't fault this AJC letter-writer for not seeing it: I didn't see it at first, either, until I asked an actual APS employee.

It's only difficult to fire a teacher if you go through proper channels, as the current administration is doing.

The previous administration, led by the Dirty Half-Dozen (Beverly Hall, her deputy superintendent and the School Reform Team Directors, the authors of the climate of fear and intimidation under which the APS ran), didn't feel constrained by "proper channels". They were happy to use rumor and innuendo to ensure that those not looked upon with favor faced dead-ends and mandatory "professional advancement" certifications on which their continued employment depended. (Principals and SRT directors could place a teacher in corrective training without having to prove that corrections are needed. Teachers can't refuse or challenge. And enough of those on your record become grounds for termination.)

And even if they can't manage to outright fire you, they can see to it that you get transferred to a position you'd rather quit than occupy. "Fear for your job" also means being pulled out of a school you like and assigned to one where you fear for your life. But if you say "no" to whatever crap they hand you, then they can fire you on the spot.

(I was tempted to reply to AJC's "Letters to the Editor" and make this point, but in order to do so I'd have to give the AJC my full name, address and phone number. With no guarantee that my comment would see the light of day, and no link to the question it answers if it were used.)

19 more frycooks available

19 APS educators may lose licenses over cheating | ajc.com
The Georgia Professional Standards Commission recommended Thursday that 19 Atlanta educators caught up in the nation's largest test cheating scandal be barred from the classroom.
...Ten educators in leadership positions had their certificates revoked; nine teachers had their certificates suspended for two years.
...Forty-eight cases have yet to be decided, including those of former Superintendent Beverly Hall and other top leaders who worked at APS.

I've updated the scorecard. I wonder if GPSC will name names when they get to the Dirty Half-Dozen?

Two firsts

Atlanta educator prevails in tribunal

Angela Williamson, formerly of Dobbs Elementary School, is now the first teacher named in the CRCT scandal whom the APS tribunal has recommended be reinstated.

APS tribunal, for first time, backs firing a principal for test cheating

Selena Dukes-Walton, formerly of Slater Elementary School, is the first principal to go before the tribunal. Although no one contends she was personally involved in falsifying test results, the tribunal has recommended that she be fired for failing to prevent cheating.

I'm still thinking these tribunals would be a lot shorter if the so-called Blue Ribbon Commission hadn't done such a good job of tainting the evidence. But although I have nothing against Ms Dukes-Walton personally, I'm encouraged that "should have known" is almost as damning as "knew". It gives me hope that the same attitude will prevail with the people who really deserve to fry for gross malfeasance.

Six APS principals sue district to keep jobs
The district isn't planning to renew the expiring contracts of the six principals, all of whom were implicated in the 400-plus-page cheating investigation report released in July.
...The six principals have job protection rights earned while they were teachers. That means the district doesn't have to promise them another principal position, but it does have to guarantee them a teaching contract, or show why they should be fired from the district completely.

"Knew or should have known." Only two of these six are accused of actively cheating or telling teachers to cheat, but all of them satisfy the same criteria as Ms Dukes-Walton above: It was their job to ensure that this didn't happen in their schools, and they failed.

"She was referring to previous years when ...rules were different"

Tribunals fire two in APS cheating cases | ajc.com

There's always a reason it isn't really cheating. I didn't know you meant that. I was just clarifying the question. I only told students to recheck their answers. This isn't an unbiased panel. You can't judge me. I did that when I taught second grade: The rules were different. It was just to get them to focus.

The educators being slowly processed through their tribunals are not producing the "smoking gun" testimony I'm looking for. It's an open secret that the SRT directors were telling their principals to raise the test scores by any means necessary or face non-renewal of contracts--a threat passed on to the teachers. It's a mystery to me why this isn't coming out in these hearings.

Can it be that the teachers are still too terrified to name names?

Told you so

Hall a no-show at APS cheating tribunal | ajc.com
The former superintendent [Beverly Hall], who retired as the standardized test cheating scandal consumed her district, was subpoenaed by [Camille] Neely’s attorney to testify at Thursday’s hearing.
The attorney, Michael King, said he wanted Hall to testify about whether she knew his client was accused of changing answers on the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test when Neely taught third grade at Gideons Elementary School.
Thomas Cox, an attorney representing APS, and Richard Dean, Hall’s personal attorney, noted that Hall, who didn't attend the hearing, received King’s subpoena Wednesday afternoon.
“She got it with such short notice, and she could not rearrange her affairs to be here,” Dean said.

I'm sure her days are packed. Otherwise, she would have been delighted to repeat her often-invoked mantra that she don't know nothin' 'bout changin' no test scores.

In a pig's eye. You know it, I know it, and Neely and her attorney both know that there wasn't a snowball's chance Hall would show. They're laying the groundwork for Hall's absence to justify moving for a mistrial (or whatever one calls the equivalent dismissal of an APS tribunal hearing).

It probably would have worked if Hall were still the superintendent.

"Cheating is a risk that can be anticipated"

Retired Deerwood educators say they had OK to cheat | ajc.com
"She didn't know anything, and no one told her anything about cheating," he [Tabeeka Jordan's attorney, George Lawson] said.

I'm really trying not to pick on individual educators on trial (I'll admit it's the SRT directors and others who oversee principals that I'm eager to see fry), but Tabeeka Jordan's hearing is the second recently in which the principal claimed that she isn't responsible for conduct she didn't know about. (There's a lot of that going around. More than one principal named in the Bowers/Wilson report said "If I don't see it, I don't have to report it.")

And it's the first hearing in which Superintendent Erroll Davis himself appeared, to say what he's said before:

"From a leadership perspective, what I see here is a complete and utter failure to exercise appropriate duty of care," he said. "Cheating is a risk that can be anticipated. It is one that can be managed. In this case, I saw it as being mismanaged."

Yes, Madame Principal, you are responsible. It's your job to know what's going on in your own school. That's the price of that comfy chair. "Knew or should have known." Accomplice or stooge.

Racial integration is a distraction

A nation grows more diverse as many of its schools grow less | Get Schooled
I have written a lot about the resurgence of segregated schools in the South, not by court order, but by housing choices.
Despite the hopes of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, court-ordered school desegregation never led to full community integration.
...When the Harvard Civil Rights Project looked at race and education 10 years ago, it concluded that metro Atlanta’s suburban residential segregation was the cause of its school resegregation.

Suburban residential segregation? Oh, I get it. This is code for "white flight". It's all those white folks who are leaving town and taking their school-age children with them. They're the problem. If they had stayed, no way would APS have let these schools get this bad.

We aren't able to build and administer schools of equal quality in black and white neighborhoods. Clearly integration is the only fix. But we can't have an integrated school system if we still have segregated neighborhoods.

So, what's the answer?

We tried busing students around town, artificially creating the racial mix we wanted regardless of where the children actually live. That worked so poorly and generated such ill will on every side that to this day, in many neighborhoods, "busing" is a four-letter word.

It's not possible to gerrymander a school's attendance zone to achieve that mix: Atlanta is a majority-black city, and has been since the 70s.

And we can't force people to live where there presence will satisfy some misguided notion of racial balance.

And we certainly can't fudge the test figures so that the students in the Schools That Suck appear to be learning just as much as the students in the Schools That Excel. We're seeing where that road leads.

The fix, if there is to be one, lies in refuting the assumption I breezed by without challenge: We aren't able to build and administer schools of equal quality in black and white neighborhoods.

I don't believe that for a minute. This attitude cannot be tolerated. We don't have that luxury. The basics of language, mathematics, science and social studies are color blind. Shuffling students around to achieve someone's idea of a pleasing racial mix is not only unpleasant and ineffective, but irrelevant to the school's mission. Forced integration is a distraction.

We can, if we have the determination and courage to do so, create schools that all have the same standards no matter what color the surrounding neighborhood is. But in order to do this, we also have to have parents who expect--demand!-- that their children meet those standards and master the academic content even if the parents haven't. Because that's the biggest difference between the Schools That Suck and the Schools That Excel: The presence, or absence, of a home and neighborhood environment in which scholastic achievement is viewed as a good thing.

It can be done, but the odds don't favor it.

Don't bother

A human side of APS scandal | ajc.com
In the most alarming and troubling moment of the tribunal that day, former Slater teacher Nettie Walker, who has resigned, acknowledged that she cheated. The first-grade teacher said she pointed out answers to students, and she corrected answers on student tests.

The writer (who also happens to be AJC's editor) is apparently more alarmed by this than the fact that Ms Walker, having resigned, faces no further censure from APS while Vanessa Jackson, the testing coordinator whose hearing this is, faces termination, certificate suspension and criminal charges.

This, and pointing out that Vanessa Jackson, her husband, and the three members of APS' tribunal all had lunch at the same Subway, is what they consider "putting a human side" to this story. (If you haven't spent much time at the APS CLL building, you may not know that options are severely limited. Do a Google Maps search for "lunch" near 130 Trinity Avenue.)

Does anybody want to talk to the students with questionable test scores? The ones who went to middle school unprepared for its academic demands?

While we're looking for human faces, who got those financial bonuses that these rigged test scores "earned"?

On top of everything else going on at APS

Alleged illegal immigrants arrested at APS schools | FOX 5
FOX 5 has learned illegal workers cleaning Slater and Adamsville Elementary Schools were arrested and hauled off to jail.
"Our security director was at Slater Elementary investigating something else and she happened to come across three contractual custodial workers there and she inquired into their identification, saw that they were fraudulent and immediately arrested them for having fraudulent documentation being on district property illegally," said APS spokesperson Keith Bromery.
...FOX 5 has learned that four additional illegal workers were handcuffed at district headquarters while trying to become certified to work for APS.
"The people who were doing the processing for us noted that there were suspicions about their documentation, so security was called, came and four individuals were arrested for attempting to use fraudulent documents," said Bromery.

APS has already announced they plan to lay off as many as 100 janitors in favor of outsourcing the work (which will cost less in employee benefits). I'm sure they didn't anticipate having to arrest them, but hey, whatever seems appropriate.

May be easier than you think

APS board approves plan to cut nearly 500 jobs | ajc.com
The school board approved a plan Monday to cut up to 475 jobs, including about 230 teachers, 90 custodians and 14 bus drivers and transportation staffers. Some of the layoffs are a result of a recent school redistricting, others because of declining revenue.
“We’re going to rethink almost everything we do, from the classroom to central offices,” said Chuck Burbridge, APS' chief financial officer.

Look, with salaries and benefits accounting for about 80% of APS' expenses, it's unrealistic to expect or demand no payroll cuts. Just resolving those cheating suspensions will be a big help (assuming the Dirty Quarter-Dozen don't win that stupid lawsuit).

Next year's budget does include some funding for improvements. The district plans to add an assistant principal at every school -- something promised during a massive school rezoning approved last month. Nurses will work five days a week in every school, and a police investigator will also be funded for each APS cluster.

The need for assistant principals, nurses, and on-call police investigators seems obvious.

Talk Up APS Live Blog

LIVE BLOG: Board of Education Meeting – May 14, 2012 | Talk Up APS
Today we will have a 2pm Committee of the Whole meeting, followed by a 6pm Community Meeting and finally a 7pm Legislative Meeting. The Legislative Meeting is available to view on Cable Channel 22 after the meeting concludes.

Somebody wants to move into an empty APS school?

APS Redistricting: Wesley International Academy Wants To Utilize Cook Campus - East Atlanta, GA Patch
A group of parents at Wesley International Academy in Custer/McDonough/Guice have started a petition to convince Atlanta Public Schools officials that the public charter school should be allowed to move in to Cook Elementary School.
Cook, which is a few miles away from Wesley's current home on Custer Avenue SE, is one of seven APS schools that will close at the end of the 2011-12 school year.
...APS is considering using Cook's facilities as additional office space for the district and teacher training site because of its proximity to Georgia State University.
But [Andrea] Knight [the Grant Park parent who started the petition and whose children attend Wesley] said APS has closed schools in Old Fourth Ward that are much closer to GSU than Cook.

I thought Davis wanted to use Cook as a 6th grade academy extension of Inman. Without that, it looks like Inman will lose pretty much all of its soccer field to classroom trailers.

It makes sense that the Cook facility would be the one APS won't have trouble finding a new tenant for. Of all the schools scheduled to close, it's in the best shape. Heck, compared to a lot of schools that are staying open it's in pretty good shape, having been renovated fairly recently. And Wesley International pays $875,000 a year in rent for its current home: The thought of keeping that money "in the family" must be attractive to both Wesley and Davis.

Still think this is just a game?

Racketeering expert aiding APS investigation | ajc.com
Atlanta lawyer John Floyd, who has served as a special prosecutor in a number of high-profile cases, is working with the District Attorney's Office as a grand jury investigates the scandal, lawyers familiar with the probe said.
It is unclear how close [Fulton County District Attorney Paul] Howard is to deciding whether to ask the grand jury to hand up indictments in the APS case. It also remains to be seen whether racketeering charges will be sought and, if so, who would be the possible targets. But bringing Floyd into the case shows the charges must be under consideration.

It's hard not to see this revelation as a direct response to the Dirty Quarter-Dozen's threat to sue over delays in scheduling their APS tribunals. Those delays, APS says, are because the DA's office hasn't released its evidence or decided whether and whom to prosecute to what degree.

Nothing would make me happier than seeing Cotman, Pitts and Williams face racketeering charges... unless it would be seeing them found guilty. That would be appropriate restitution. They should be well convinced by now that an APS tribunal is the least of their problems.

Return of the Dirty Quarter-Dozen

Three accused of cheating sue APS for $6 million | ajc.com
Several educators, including [Tamara] Cotman, [Michael] Pitts and [Sharon] Davis Williams [three of the four ex-SRT Directors], were notified their contracts would not be renewed next school year. When a contract is “nonrenewed” an administrator isn’t entitled to the same job protection rights as one whose contract is terminated while in progress.
But Cotman, Pitts and Davis Williams, who each earn six-figure salaries, want a court to order the hearing promised to them by law.
Attorney Michael King, who is a member of the Clayton County school board and represents one Atlanta teacher named in the investigation, said the executive directors don’t have a case under Georgia fair dismissal law. Administrators generally aren’t entitled to due process rights if their contract is not renewed, he said.
“The nonrenewal will supersede any attempt to terminate a contract,” he said. “Administrators serve at the pleasure of the superintendent.”

Oh, this is really funny. Larry, Moe and Curly here are very familiar with "contract nonrenewal." They used it liberally to terrorize teachers into fudging CRCT scores, among other things. I'm just sorry APS didn't do it last year, when it would have saved them $430,000.

More certificates revoked, more suspensions

10 in cheating scandal to have certificates revoked, 23 to face suspensions | ajc.com
Another 33 educators were disciplined Thursday for their involvement in widespread test-cheating in Atlanta Public Schools, including 10 who will have their teaching certificates permanently revoked by the state.
Sixty-seven more educators still face PSC sanctions, but their cases cannot go forward until Fulton District Attorney releases evidence in his criminal probe of the cheating, said Kelly Henson, the PSC's executive secretary.

No names were released, but then I'm really not interested in further embarrassing teachers coerced or terrorized into cheating. You know who I want to see take their medicine.

Musical Chairs

2012-2013 Administrative and Special Needs Transfer Applications | Talk Up APS

In previous years, APS has made this information extremely difficult to find. I'm pleasantly surprised to find it so prominently placed on their public relations blog, "Talk Up APS".

Still, there is room for improvement: They're not really demonstrating a firm grasp of this newfangled Internet thing. There’s no reason for this announcement to be a PNG graphic instead of text. The beauty of web browsers (the software you're using to read this, whether Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera...) is that each end user has the option to set a default text size and style to fit their readability needs and desires. Distributing this information as a graphic unnecessarily limits those options. I'd like to know why APS made this decision.

Another, more important consequence is that the address they give for APS' General Administrative Transfer information page is not a clickable link even though it looks like one. I don't think I'm guilty of overstatement to say this is inexcusable.

(UPDATE: Okay, maybe I'm wrong on this one. It didn't work from the RSS feed, but it did work from a different computer when I went there from APS home page.)

To say nothing of the possibility that the parents who need this information the most probably don’t own a computer. Indeed, they may not even read English. Is there a version of this in Spanish? Are flyers containing this information being distributed at the schools? (I ask only for my own amusement. I already know the answer. No principal will want to tell parents that they can transfer out, especially not when they just closed 7 schools for being under capacity.)

While I'm in the mood to complain, I'm not seeing any mention of this on APS' main site. Clicking on the "Talk Up APS" banner at the top of the page would take you there, but nothing says so.

I'm also not a big fan of making parents come down to the Taj Mahal, er, I mean, 130 Trinity, to apply for this. It was bad enough in previous years, when parents camped out ringing the old Howard High School building on John Wesley Dobbs Ave. as if they were waiting for Black Friday specials or concert tickets. Year after year hundreds of parents spend the night on the sidewalk, and year after year it takes APS by surprise--or they pretend it does. I guess the law requires them to make the transfer available, but it doesn't require them to make it easy.

But now, parents who drive their own cars have to pay to park for the privilege of camping out on the sidewalk. In the heart of downtown Atlanta, across the street from City Hall and the State Capitol.

C'mon, admit it, Transfer Administrators, you really like seeing all these people grovel for your attention, don't you?

PARENTS, here are some important tips:

If you're not on APS' doorstep when the office opens on the very first day they accept applications for administrative transfers, you're too late. There aren't nearly as many openings as there are students whose parents want them, especially not this year with so many schools closing.

Resign yourself to the likelihood that APS will not make the final decisions on these applications until after the fall semester starts. They're in no hurry; it's nothing to them. They want to see how many children actually show up for class before they determine the number of empty seats available.* Your child will probably have to spend a couple of weeks, perhaps a month, in the school you're fighting so hard to get him out of. 

Now, if every school were covering the same subjects in each grade, in the same order (which they're supposed to be doing), at the same rate, this might not be an issue. But since they're not, and since the school you're trying to transfer into is doing better than the school you're trying to escape from, your child could enter his new school anywhere from several days to a couple of weeks behind.

Good luck.

* This means that the parents who lie about their mailing addresses, and the ones who have their children "stay with their Aunt" in order to be "zoned" into their desired school, might effectively jump into line ahead of you, because they're gaming the system and you're trying to play by the rules.

These ARE the droids we're looking for

APS administrators sue district for millions in hearing dispute | www.wsbtv.com
The lawyer for three Atlanta Public Schools administrators says his clients are suing the district and its superintendent for millions because they didn't get the hearings they were promised.
Attorney George Lawson said he’s been fighting to save the reputation of those administrators for the past ten months. Letters from APS Superintendent Erroll Davis charge Tamara Cotman, Michael Pitts and Sharon Davis Williams with incompetency, insubordination and willful neglect of duties in the 2009 CRCT cheating test scandal.
The letter scheduled a hearing for them and their attorney last year, but the district requested delays twice.
...Now, those administrators have been notified their employment ends June 30.

They're suing APS? They haven't bled enough cash out of the system over the last decade? Big brass ones, that takes.

It's a little late to save their reputations. Everyone who's ever worked at APS knows who they are and how they work. These are three of the four regional assistant superintendents -- School Reform Team Directors, or SRT Directors -- at the heart of the Hall administration's "culture of fear and intimidation." Their guilt is unquestionable. But because they had the sense not to issue threats in writing, and because those who could testify against them have so far remained intimidated into silence, they may yet walk.

Please, Mr Davis, Professional Standards Commission, Mr District Attorney...don't let this happen. We're counting on you.

In case you've forgotten, here's the Bowers/Wilson "Special Investigation into CRCT Cheating at APS" in three parts, as archived by the AJC. Cotman, Pitts and Williams are all dealt with in Volume 3.

Volume 1: Overview, Interviews, School summaries
Volume 2: School summaries, cont.
Volume 3: Conclusions: Why cheating occurred and cover-up allegations

Guilty, guilty, guilty!

LATER: I've just learned that the delay arises from APS waiting for the DA to release evidence before seating these three before a tribunal. I hope they haven't waited too late.

"I can be in the fight for the children AND still expect reasonable pay"

“Fighting for the children while the shrapnel seems only to be killing teacher after teacher.” | Get Schooled [AJC]
Until I can pay for groceries or my light bill with my students’ appreciation or their test scores, school districts across the country must be willing to pay teachers for their services.

Here's where I lose every friend I have who's a teacher. I'm not convinced your pay is all that pitiful.

Don't give me that look. I know what you make. I do a teacher's income taxes every year.

Your financial situation sucks, that's true, but the biggest reason for that is all the school and office supplies you have to buy out of your own paycheck. I've seen too many schools where paper is as precious as money, where teachers who intend to give their students customized photocopied worksheets are expected to pay for the paper out of their own pockets. This is disgraceful.

True, you do take your uninterrupted two month vacation every summer (a luxury no other industry has) without receiving paychecks throughout. But the paychecks you do receive are a bit larger than equivalent level private sector employees, and with a bit of basic budgeting (the math you're supposed to be teaching my kids) you can get by. Or you can take a job teaching summer school.

But you do get paid a full year's salary for ten months work. (And you earn every dollar!) If any of you had spent any time in the private sector, you would know that. Every educator I know who has worked in both environments makes more in teaching than they make in the private sector. And when they work up the nerve to say so, the teachers around them close ranks and reply, "Wow, you must have had real $#!+ jobs."

No. Just normal. You have no idea how your teacher salary compares to normal. You've spent your entire life in the education industry and have nothing to compare it to. Some days, you seem aware of this, when you threaten to leave teaching because "you can't afford to stay". And then you get a look at what real jobs pay and you scurry back to school. But the lesson doesn't stick.

But your money is leeched away by the system for which you work. Middle-managers in other fields don't have to pay for their own paper in order to send interoffice memos. (I've worked for companies where I wished they did, just to motivate them to send fewer of them.) Education is structured in such a way that the daily work cannot be completed on the clock. The industry depends on unpaid volunteers or, worse, people who pay to volunteer for the privilege of helping you out. (You call them PTAs or PTSAs.) Or, if you can't get volunteers, you work long into the night without pay -- the true shame of the education industry.

I'd also ask you if you think you're getting a fair return on your investment from the unions you're required (or peer-pressured) to join.

There's plenty here that needs to be fixed. Your base salary isn't one of them. But the peripheral supplies and services you're forced to spend it on? That's something the school system should be providing at no expense to you. I get billed for the paint on your "teacher of the year" parking space. I'd much rather pay for your copy paper.

"I'm not responsible for the teacher"

Principal tells APS tribunal she isn't ‘responsible' for teachers | ajc.com
Principal Selena Dukes Walton testified Monday that she remains "very qualified" to oversee her elementary school because she had been unaware of the massive cheating by teachers on a test to determine how well they were educating students.
..."I am not responsible for something I did not know about," she said. "I'm not responsible for the teacher."

Wait. She should keep her job because she didn't know what was going on? That, I have to say, is new. Even Beverly Hall didn't go that far, preferring to stick to her assertion that it hasn't been proven cheating even happened.

Two other tribunals were scheduled for Tuesday but have been canceled. Lera Middlebrooks, a proctor at Perkerson Elementary School, was accused of cheating by a teacher there. Middlebrooks resigned, school district spokesman Keith Bromery said.

Well, then, somebody got his notes scrambled. According to that infamous Bowers-Wilson report to the governor, Middlebrooks was a Testing Coordinator (not merely a proctor, but a person to whom proctors would have reported) at Dunbar, not Perkerson. I suppose it doesn't matter so long as the APS tribunal keeps their notes straight. It's documented here, which is why it stuck in my mind. (Look for Middlebrooks' name in the Dunbar section, and prepare to be appalled.)

And oh, goody, this article features a scorecard-like update. Keep those coming!

UPDATE: See also Are principals accountable for the cheating on their watch? Should they be fired? | Get Schooled [AJC]

I'm back to my first response to the Hall / Bart Simpson defense of "I didn't do it, nobody saw me, you can't prove anything", which the addition of "I'm not responsible for knowing about it" just intensifies: You're either guilty or incompetent. "Knew, or should have known." Either way, you don't belong in that very cushy principal's chair.

You can't judge me

Teacher questions entire APS tribunal process in hearing - CBS Atlanta 46
Camille Neely was a teacher at Gideons Elementary School accused of getting a hold of secure test documents when she wasn't supposed to and of changing students' answers from wrong to right.
But her attorney, Michael King, said that the fact that the APS tribunal, made up of former educators who will decide whether or not she can keep her job, is selected and paid for by APS means they can't be unbiased.

"Forget this 'jury of my peers' charade! I get to say who my peers are, not you!"

King also argued that APS was blocking his ability to subpoena former APS Superintendent Beverly Hall, and that prosecution barely allowed him time to look at evidence against his client.

"You hear me? Beverly 'knew or should have known' Hall is my peer! Tamara 'tell the GBI to go to hell' Cotman is my peer! You have no right to judge me!"

Yeah, let's see how that works out for you.

It should be entertaining to see just how much time they can waste trying to force APS to find Hall and serve her with a subpoena. Perhaps Hall is eager for the opportunity to abandon her seclusion and put herself under oath to defend Neely, what with her own reputation blowing in the wind. That seems perfectly reasonable, doesn't it?

“We never met an initiative we didn’t like”

A long chat with Erroll Davis about APS and the cheating mess: “Only so many ways to perfume a pig.” | Get Schooled [ajc]
He said that he and his team have found 211 ongoing initiatives under way in APS with no one taking any account of whether the initiatives were doing any good.
APS partnered with all sorts of folks who announced that they had a $2 million grant ready to go if only the district kicked in $500,000 to make it happen, he said.
“We never met an initiative we didn’t like,” he said. APS opened its doors to everyone who claimed, “I am here and I want to help. We had 1,000 points of light, and no outcomes.”

So many commenters seem to think that Davis sounds just like Hall before him. I disagree. Hall claimed everything was going just fine, everything's looking up, the future's so bright etc. Davis has made no secret of the fact that the system was broken when he got it, and he's trying to fix it.

I'm sure there was at least one person at APS "taking account" of each initiative: The one whose wallet was benefitting by it. I'm equally sure that no one was verifying whether the initiatives were doing the children any good. Usually, people who spend that kind of money want to know what they bought: The apparent lack of outrage from these outside agencies says to me that they know what they bought. Many, if not most, of these "initiatives" were little better than money-laundering adventures.

Hall, her deputies and the SRT directors "knew or should have known"! That's where the real story is going to be here.

Now that really hurts

APS lets parents keep kids out of DH Stanton ES | 11alive.com
Monday night the board agreed to adjust the attendance zones in order to transfer the Cook students to a better performing school, Parkside Elementary School in nearby Grant Park, instead of to where the students were going to be transferred, D.H. Stanton ES -- which is a lower-performing school -- in the nearby Peoplestown neighborhood.

Well, gosh, how bad does a school have to be if even Cook parents don't want their children to go there? How insulting can you get?

Parkside is already running close to capacity without the extra Cook students. And the D.H. Stanton parents just won a major victory by mobilizing loudly enough to convince the board to let the school stay open despite Superintendent Davis' recommendation that they close it. If the parents whose children are getting zoned into it are going to say "no, thanks", you can bet D.H. Stanton will be right back on the "recommended to close" list next year -- and next time there will be no last-minute reprieve.

"It wasn't like I was trying to make them change their answers"

Tribunal dismisses teacher who gave students ‘look' when they erred on tests | ajc.com
Throughout teacher Sabrina Luckie’s tribunal hearing Monday, everyone kept talking about the "look."
Luckie, 28, admitted giving her students a look that expressed disappointment when they blackened the wrong ovals on a statewide test. She maintained, though, that she wasn't trying to get her first-graders at Fain Elementary School in Atlanta to change their answers.
...Following the tribunal's ruling, Luckie saw herself as a victim of a redistricting plan that includes closing a number of APS' low-income schools. "I just think they had an agenda of getting rid of the teachers without considering what really happened," she said.
...She said she knew that then-principal Marcus Stallworth had urged teachers to help students find the correct answers using "voice inflections" but that she declined to cheat.

What have I been saying all along? They don't think they've done anything wrong.

I don't want to single out Ms Luckie when there are dozens of teachers at APS who feel the same way. Not all of them were caught in the investigation, because many schools weren't investigated at all: Only the ones with truly outrageous levels of unlikely test score improvement. I wonder how many modest liars are going undetected.

..."It wasn't like I was looking at the children or trying to get their attention to make them change their answers," Luckie said.

Well, then, what is the point of sighing or eye-rolling or "the look" if you don't expect them to change their answers?

How schools develop reputations

Historic sports photos disappear from APS elementary | www.wsbtv.com
An Atlanta substitute teacher is frantically searching for a collection of historic photos.
The folder of photos, which feature iconic African-American sports heroes, disappeared after he gave a presentation to students at a southeast Atlanta elementary school.
"Your pictures come up missing, it's disheartening. I mean, it breaks my heart," said Jackie Brown.

You have to get almost to the end of the article before the school is identified: Dobbs Elementary, on the south side in the Thomasville area. You can't miss it: It's right there on Jonesboro Road, and it looks like a well-appointed prison. In Thomasville, where the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary is located, that means it looks like it belongs.

Brown said he showed the photos to two classes at Dobbs Elementary School last month. After the second class, he placed the folder of 30 photographs back into his briefcase and went to the restroom. He discovered them missing when he arrived home. "There is no way I misplaced them. I showed those photographs 15 minutes before they went to lunch. I had them and now, they're gone," said Brown.

I don't know why they bothered to "investigate" since Brown didn't notice his pictures were missing until he got home. But I do know why he's making such a tearful emotional appeal to get them back: It's really the only chance he has. But it's a slim chance, since the students in the Dobbs / Thomasville area are not known for their compassion.

On the other hand, some folks don't read the news at all

Is the CRCT as stressful for teachers as kids? | Momania: A Blog for Busy Moms [ajc]
I noticed a trend on my Facebook feed this week – many of the teachers are talking about how stressed they are about administering the CRCT.

Really? You noticed that? Have you been reading the news at all? There were 180 teachers on leave after allegations of multi-year organized cheating and falsifying results of the CRCTs. Schools statewide have been doing nothing else for the last two weeks but administering CRCTs. What does it take to get your attention, Mom?

But the cluelessness of the blog author is surpassed by the reader comments, which I should know better than to read on any blog. (Except mine, of course.)

• I wonder how others, who are in high-stress jobs, deal with the fact that we receive no press or sympathy as it relates to our jobs?
• Second blog on CRCT this week. I am just sayin’.
• Something is broken when a friggin’ elementary school test gets THIS much press.
• Does anyone know when the CRCT started?
• I can’t imagine a teacher being concerned about being accused of cheating if they are not cheating. 

So, all accusations are true, then? Can you imaging a teacher being concerned about being threatened with losing her job if she doesn't cheat? Happened every damn day in Atlanta. Probably where you are, too.

And yes, I do know when the CRCT started, and a quick Wiki search would have told you, too. 2000.

Job security at all costs

APS educators criticize reassignment process | ajc.com
Some of the estimated 700 educators who must reapply for jobs following a massive redistricting and restructuring say Atlanta Public Schools is making a mess of the restaffing process, and unfairly leaving veteran educators vulnerable.

Looked at another way: APS teachers expect and demand a level of job security unheard of in any other industry.

The Atlanta Federation of Teachers wants teachers and staff affected by school closings to be given first priority for job openings throughout the district. The group believes teachers should be allowed to name their top three choices, and that performance and seniority should be used in determining new job placements.

The Atlanta Federation of Teachers is a union, so of course they would say that.

A school scheduled to close because it's running at half capacity is doing so because every student who can go somewhere else is going somewhere else. There might be a reason for that. APS wants to be sure they're not rehiring the reason. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Now, given APS' history of heavily politically influenced hiring and promotion practices, I can understand why teachers might be skeptical that APS is actually, sincerely, honestly looking to rehire the good teachers. But I'm not prepared to assume that the teachers in failing schools are completely blameless and deserve priority in re-hiring.

Vanessa Cox lives across from Woodson Elementary, which under the redistricting will split with Grove Park Elementary so each school has three grades. As a result, teachers at both schools must reapply for their jobs.
Cox, who has children and grandchildren attending APS schools, feels it’s wrong to displace teachers, especially those who have been on the job for decades.

Well, if a second-grade teacher follows her kids to another building, is that "displacing" her? Shouldn't that be described as keeping her job?

Again, given APS' history of heavily politically influenced hiring and promotion practices, it is equally wrong to assume that teachers "who have been on the job for decades" are any good at what they do. Nothing personal, Ms Cox, but teachers don't work for Woodson Elementary, they work for APS. If they are any good, they're needed, and they'll have a job in the fall.

Or am I being unrealistically optimistic?

Can something have more than one center?

Principal at center of APS cheating scandal resigns | ajc.com

I suppose what I'm objecting to is the headline, not the story itself. Although, I do have a lingering worry that having resigned, Christopher Waller faces no further sanctions. Certainly there's no sign in this story that the PSC or the DA is moving on his case.

But how can Waller possibly be at the center of a scandal that extends beyond the school of which he was the principal? Is he strongarming teachers at other schools into fudging their CRCT results?

Well, possibly, given the "school reform team" structure that makes him a senior principal on a team that includes the principals of the elementary schools that feed into his. I confess I never understood the purpose of the SRT model, other than to make its directors absolute rulers of their fiefdoms.

In 2006, Waller's first year at Parks, the percentage of eighth-graders who passed the math section of the CRCT rose from 24 percent to 86 percent. By 2007, Parks was meeting 100 percent of its goals set by the district.

Makes you wonder how anyone could accept these numbers with absolutely no skepticism. No teacher, no principal, is good enough to go from 24% to 86% to 100% in three successive years. (The correct phrasing should be that "the percentage...appeared to rise" and that Waller "reported that he was meeting 100 percent of its goals." The report, it must be remembered, questions these numbers, and the fact that they are wrong is a key piece of evidence.)

The AJC has been shy about pointing out that the vast majority (though not all) of the cheating was found in SRT 2, under the influence of SRT director (assistant superintendent) Michael Pitts. His name is conspicuous by its absence from this circus thus far, except in the original Bowers / Wilson report in which it is said that he, like superintendent Hall and most of the SRT directors, "knew or should have known" what was going on.

In the Hall-era APS, success is never questioned, however unrealistic -- and whistleblowing is not tolerated, however deserved.

And now it will really get messy

APS testing coordinator accused of organizing cheating | ajc.com
During the first day Friday of what is expected to be a two-day tribunal, former and current teachers at Atlanta's Usher Elementary School pointed a collective finger of blame at Donald Bullock Friday as the mastermind behind test cheating at that school.
At Usher Elementary, Bullock, according to testimony, collected completed tests then gave them back to some teachers so they could change wrong answers to right. Some teachers said Bullock pressured them to cheat. Others said they refused to cooperate.

This is exactly what I feared had to happen. Teachers who were threatened with vaguely-defined, career-ending consequences have to testify, publicly and by name, to the actions of a testing coordinator. Three named teachers share similar stories of a man who made it clear what was expected of them. The coordinator's lawyer says, of course, that his client did nothing wrong.

Were I a wagering man, I would bet money that when his turn to speak comes, he will claim that he, too, was a victim pressured to achieve the numbers on which someone else's bonus depended. That may even be true.

"I was approached and asked if I wanted to make sure that my children did well," Smith said, pausing frequently to compose herself or wipe away tears. "I didn't really answer. And then (Bullock) was there with my tests. He knew a lot about me. He kind of used that as leverage. He said I could be replaced. I was a non-tenured teacher."

...When the cheating scandal broke and APS's Blue Ribbon panel investigators asked teachers about cheating, Smith said she lied to them. "I didn't want to get anyone in trouble," she said. "I thought if I denied everything, it would just go away."

That's going to be a popular refrain.

Maybe someone has been reading this blog: At last, actual numbers! Thanks, AJC!

• Number of final resignations/retirements that have been received since late February: 24 
• Number of tribunal hearings that have been completed: 2 
• Number of letters sent to educators outlining charges and the district’s intent to terminate: 34 
• Number of hearings still scheduled: 21 
• Number of employees who have resigned or retired since receiving charge letters: 11 
• Number of employees recommended for termination but not yet acted upon by the school board: 1 
• Number of employees whose whose resignation is pending: 1 
• Number of employees who declared an intent to retire but not yet made it official: 1 

They also face possible sanctions from the Georgia Professional Standards Commission, the agency that licenses teachers. On Thursday, The PSC recommended 19 revocations of licenses and 48 suspensions. One suspension was for one year, 47 were for two years.

The bullet points total 95 educators. The PSC has revoked or suspended the credentials of 83 educators: I assume the two lists overlap, which leaves 12 unaccounted for. The PSC, APS and the District Attorney each have a role to play here, and action from one doesn't preclude action by either or both of the other two. Nor do I know how this compares with my own scorecard, above.

Still looking for the Dirty Half-Dozen, though. Two of them may be out of reach, but I want to see the heads of the other four roll, at least as publicly as the teachers they terrorized into being unwilling co-conspirators.

See also: Teacher lashes out against accused APS test coordinator | wsbtv.com

These may be the droids we're looking for

67 APS educators accused of cheating barred from classroom | ajc.com
A committee for the Georgia Professional Standards commission, which certified and polices educators, voted to take action against 67 Atlanta educators implicated in a widespread cheating scandal.
The committee recommended 47 teachers for two-year suspensions. One teacher was given a one-year suspension, and 19 educators in leadership positions, such as principals and testing coordinators, were recommended for revocation. The PSC as a whole will vote around noon whether to uphold the action taken by the committee. [ADDENDUM: They did.]

Well, Merry Christmas at long last.

"Educators in leadership positions, such as principals and testing coordinators"? I had no idea a "testing coordinator" was considered a leadership position. I'm guessing some of them might be just as surprised by the designation.

But you know which names I'm looking to see here, and I have no confidence they are among this 67 that the PSC is now willing to address. The big cheeses, Beverly Hall and Kathy Augustine, appear to have escaped retribution, but that leaves the four ex-SRT Directors, Sharon David-Williams, Michael Pitts, Robin Hall and Tamara "Go to Hell" Cotman. They are the ones who sanctioned and sustained the "culture of fear and intimidation" that led to 180 educators being suspended pending hearings. Many of the 180 are, if not exactly innocent, at least victims and unwilling co-conspirators. They don't deserve to have their lives ruined.

Wait a minute.

A revocation [of teaching certification] will make it difficult for an educator to work in another public school in Georgia or another state...

Wait just a damn minute. Make it difficult? I thought you had to have PSC certification to teach in public school. Make it difficult?

From 13 to 7

Atlanta School Board votes to close 7 schools | ajc.com
Originally, 10 schools were slated for closure, but the board decided to close Parks and Kennedy middle schools and Capitol View, White, Cook, East Lake and Herndon elementary schools.

Which is to say, the Stantons (D.H. and F.L.) and Towns got reprieves. If the parents stay active, the wake-up call might have done some good. The overcrowded schools that were in no danger of closing have phenomenally strong parent involvement: The half-capacity schools threatened with closure, well, don't. (Insert crickets here.)

Now, that's a short synopsis for a nine-hour meeting. To be fair, the board did have other business to discuss. There was a little bit of "have security escort this man outside" excitement.

The board did guarantee that everyone who'd signed up to speak would have an opportunity to speak. Unfortunately, the board had no way to screen for people who actually had something to say, and could say it in a way that made sense. Darn that democracy. You can sometimes get the "participation" part, but the "educated" part is trickier. On the other hand, who can the APS blame for that?

It's about race? Really?

Protest over proposed D.H. Stanton Elementary School closing grows heated | 11alive.com
Someone also passed out a flyer that has jaws dropping, even in their own neighborhood.

It's a glossy, professional-looking flyer depicting Superintendent Erroll Davis in a Ku Klux Klan robe. The title reads: "They erased answers. I erase Black schools."

On the flyer, Davis holds a large pencil marked with "No. 00 white schools closed."

The flyer includes pictures of the Atlanta School Board. Davis is African-American, as are seven of the nine school board members.

In small print at the bottom, the flyer says, "Designed by Nathaniel Dryer, Organizer -- Going Against All Odds for our Young People."

Peoplestown residents told 11Alive News Friday morning that the flyer was not created by a parent and they do not support it or agree with its message.

Redistricting is supposed to help solve overcrowding on the north side and empty seats in the south side. It's put some of Atlanta's oldest African-American communities in the crosshairs.

But Davis has said race is not an issue.

Has 11Alive read "Julius Caesar"? Are they trying to sound like Mark Antony? "For Davis is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

Let's see. Atlanta is a majority-black city, with a black mayor and a majority-black city council.

Atlanta Public Schools' board is majority black. The superintendent is black. Senior administrators are majority black. The APS work force is overwhelmingly majority black, principals, teachers and support staff. Certainly the system student body is majority black.

And this guy thinks it makes sense to portray the APS board and superintendent as the KKK?

Assuming that this is an opportunistic publicity stunt (which it almost has to be), what audience is Dryer actually looking for?

I'm tempted to say it's not APS' fault that the schools on the white side of town are at or over capacity, while the schools on the black side of town are running at two-thirds to half or less. In fact, in a manner of speaking, it is APS' fault. Sometime in the Hall administration (if not before), someone decided that APS' primary mission was to keep teachers employed, regardless of merit. The way to do this, they apparently concluded, was to put these inadequate teachers in schools APS had already decided would never be academic showcases, because they were full of project kids, and we all know they're not educable, right?* But the appearance of putting up the effort would save jobs.

If I thought this KKK flyer would direct some attention to this still-unaddressed phenomenon, I'd be all in favor of it.

But as it is, it still makes zero sense to close the schools that are overcrowded. Obviously you close the ones being abandoned by the kids the census says live there, but whose parents are getting them into a different school by any means necessary. (Thanks, Malcolm X.) Some request transfers, knowing that means they have to provide transportation to their alternate choice school. Some lie about their mailing address. Some "send the kids to live with an aunt." Some, I'm convinced, just don't go to school at all, because Mom (they're mostly single-parent households) has decided that no school is still better than that school. (And maybe she's right.)

The only solution that makes sense is to close the schools that the parents are staying away from. It's a shame they can't just call them "schools that suck", or the flow of student movement would be a lot easier to understand.
____

*  You know I don't actually believe this, right? The problem isn't that they can't learn, it's that no one really expects them to. But children always learn. Sometimes what they learn is not what you meant to teach them. With conduct like this what are we teaching them? That Real Society does not care for them, has no place for them, has no use for them.

LATER: Flyer About APS Superintendent Stirs Controversy | CBS Atlanta: "Dryer says he didn’t mean for the flyer to have racial undertones..." I don't know how a black man can throw the KKK into an argument in a way that doesn't have racial undertones. Is he stupid or does he think everyone else is? I'll stick to my first impression: Opportunistic publicity stunt.

Two? Just two?

APS redistricting plan: a tale of two schools | 11alive.com
Parents at Coan Middle School were all smiles on Sunday after Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Erroll Davis removed their school from his final school closing list.
..."I think district leaders are making a mistake," said Kevin Lynch, president of the Peoplestown Association and the father of a two-year-old girl. "We're not pleased about it."
Parents in Peoplestown are new to this fight.
Their neighborhood elementary school, D.H. Stanton, was added to the final closing list on Saturday night without any warning.

Only a reporter who hasn't been following the ongoing Battle of APS Redistricting could conclude that it comes down to "a tale of two schools", making it sound like it's a choice between closing a middle school and an elementary school.

And, about the "without any warning" scare: this is a warning, not a final decision. This is only the list that, barring new information and subsequent changes, the superintendent will present to the board. We're still a long way from a "final closing list." There are still a couple of weeks and a full battery of neighborhood meetings before the superintendent reports to the board, and there's no guarantee that the board will do what the superintendent proposes. (Although, admittedly, odds are they will.)

But the reporter who really thinks this is a "tale of two schools" is invited to talk to the staff and parents of the other twelve schools what were on the original list of 13 recommended to close (Coan was on that list, now apparently "saved"), plus Towns Elementary (which wasn't on that list, but is now recommended to close).

I say "staff and parents" without including "students" purposefully, since some students can be counted on to plead with puppy-dog eyes that "the only school we've ever known" remain open, and others would cheerfully dance on the rubble of a school, with absolutely no care for whether the grown-ups thought it was a Good School, or how much money it cost to keep open.

But I may be expecting too much of staff and parents to hope they'll think of the system's best interests. Certainly the system has not historically shown much interest in thinking of theirs.

Best of a bad situation

APS to close 10 schools under plan for new boundaries | ajc.com
Atlanta Public Schools will close 10 schools and eliminate about 5,500 of 13,000 extra seats under the final redistricting proposal released Saturday by Superintendent Erroll Davis.
The proposal, which goes to the school board for a vote on April 10, reduces the number of elementary and middle schools with less than 450 students from 38 to 17. The plan also organizes schools in a "cluster" format, where groups of elementary schools feed into the same middle and high school.

The "school cluster" idea, where each high school anchors a group of middle and elementary schools that feed into it, seems so obvious that I have to wonder why APS wasn't already doing it. Previously, elementary and middle schools were organized into four "School Reform Teams", and all city high schools were in their own, separate Team. This led to a mess where vertical continuity didn't exist. Even within an individual school, some elementary students moved upward into one middle school, some into another. Madness.

But I realize that reorganization is not what this announcement is about: That decision has already been made, and about time too. This is about closing schools. And really, there are very few surprises in this final recommendation. Most of the schools that are scheduled to close have been named on most of the previous drafts, although there's a little variation in exactly where the new zone boundaries are drawn.

Here are the surprises:

STAYING OPEN:

• Coan Middle
• Humphries Elementary
• Thomasville Heights Elementary
• Whitefoord Elementary

Coan's parents mounted a vocal opposition to closing the school and using the building as a "6th grade academy" extension of Inman. Coan survives, sort of, because the Coan students will temporarily be at the (closed) East Lake Elementary building, because of the domino effect of temporarily closing Jackson High for renovations in 2012-13 and moving the student body to the Coan building. In 2013-14, Jackson and Coan return home.

Whitefoord remains open, and will get a few of the displaced Cook students, whose building will become the Inman 6th grade academy instead of Coan. If you've seen Inman Middle, you know they just don't have any room for nearby expansion. And as we've heard over the past two months, not one Inman parent will willingly send a child anywhere else. We'll see how they feel about their 6th graders being sent to Cook.

Thomasville Heights and Humphries are just plain mystery gifts. They were on every list to close. I've heard speculation, possibly unworthy, that Thomasville remains open because no other school will take their students. The Cook kids's influence will be diluted between Centennial Place, Hope-Hill, Parkside and Whitefoord: There's no similar provision to be made for Thomasville Heights, which appears doomed to be the APS' bad example.

And Humphries remains open, it appears, for the opposite reason: Although smaller than APS would like, they're performing so much better than the other schools in their cluster. Sometimes you just don't dare fix something that doesn't appear to be broken.

CLOSING:

• D.H. Stanton Elementary

D.H. Stanton (don't forget the initials: There's an F.L. Stanton as well) wasn't on any of the previous lists to close, but many of its parents begged Davis to close the building before it collapsed.

See also:
East Atlanta Patch: Davis' Final APS Redistricting Plan: Keep Coan Middle And Whitefoord Elementary Open
APS: Superintendent’s Final Redistricting and Closure Recommendations (PDF)

LATER: Oops, I seem to have neglected a couple of surprises, schools that were on one list all along, now moved to the other with no warning.
STAYING OPEN: Boyd Elementary
CLOSING: Towns Elementary
Given where they both are (northwest Atlanta, near Douglass High), it could be as simple as a flip of the coin between them. Just as it could be that D.H. Stanton must die that Thomasville Heights might live.

It's the ones full of administrators you really have to watch out for

Parents fear impact of empty Atlanta school buildings | ajc.com
Parents and community leaders fear a future of more derelict buildings dragging down struggling neighborhoods as 13 Atlanta schools face closure in a bid to balance enrollment and make better use of funding.
Atlanta Public Schools already has 14 empty school buildings, some of which closed in the 1970s.

Okay, you're right to worry about that. APS doesn't have a great track record for re-purposing vacant buildings. All those crack-heads have to live somewhere.

Let's say we have a school like Cook Elementary School. It's running at about half capacity. Where is everybody? The census says there should be plenty of kids. But Cook is a "lower-performing" school, and APS is obligated to allow any parents who want to transfer their child to a better school to do so. Schools like Neighborhood Charter, Parkside (which only has openings because so many of "their" kids are going to Neighborhood Charter) and Drew Charter (where all the principals' kids go). APS can't make them go to Cook. Every parent who can "vote with his feet" is doing that. Every child who can meet the demands of a higher-performance school is getting and staying away from Cook.

Who's left?

The overwhelming majority of the remaining Cook kids are from single-parent households. Mom would like to move her child to a different school, but in order to do that, she'd need a car. (APS will allow you to transfer, but they won't bus you to an out-of-zone school. If you have to ride the school bus, you have to go where they take you.) So, in effect, the kids who remain at Cook are there because they can't leave. Guess what morale is like.

The school board is faced with an unpleasant decision. They can (1) leave the situation as is, spend money they don't have to maintain a half-full school that nobody wants to go to, a school where enrollment is now so low that it doesn't qualify for most forms of state and federal funding; or they can (2) close the school and re-zone the kids into another school...where the parents, teachers, and students don't want them. Since the school they'll be merged into is almost certainly performing better, they won't want their numbers to be dragged down with this massive influx of low-performing students.

And the Cook neighborhood, going nowhere fast, has another big, empty target for vandals and scavengers. Even if the kids get along in their new school just fine, they still have to come home to the Cook area.

In which option are the children better off?

Multiply this times thirteen schools on the superintendent's current "to be closed" list.

UPDATE: Turns out the Cook kids are being split between Centennial Place, Hope-Hill, Parkside and Whitefoord, so maybe there won't be a large enough concentration of them at any one place to destroy their performance scores.

My calculator is broken

96 accused of cheating still on payroll  | ajc.com
Ninety-six out of almost 180 educators named in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating investigation are still on the payroll, officials said Friday. The district took the first steps to fire three more educators Friday by issuing "charge letters" stating the claims against them. So far, 22 charge letters have been issued.

It's almost like they read this blog, they know I'm putting together a scorecard, and they want to throw me more numbers while not quite making it possible for them to add up. I'm missing something, or I've been rounding the "about"s, "more than"s and "some-odd"s in the wrong directions. I've massaged the scorecard accordingly.

Is there a scorecard?

5 more APS teachers targeted for firing | ajc.com
Atlanta Public Schools is taking steps to fire five teachers implicated in a widespread test-cheating scandal, joining 11 others targeted for termination earlier this month.
After months of delay and millions spent in payroll and legal expenses, the district is trying to get educators accused of cheating off the payroll. APS has sent out a total of 16 "charge letters," notifying teachers of the intent to fire them and explaining the reasons why.
...Of the 11 educators sent charge letters earlier, nine have resigned or retired. One attended a hearing, but lost. One is scheduled for a hearing Friday.

Well, I guess we have to call them educators, since many of them -- the ones who have the most to account for -- aren't teachers.

So let me think. Of "about 180" originally named in July 2011, as of February more than 80 had confessed. I'm not sure how that compares to the numbers in this article, though:

• "About 70 have left the district." Does this mean physically relocated, or just no longer being paid? They didn't wait for a charge letter. It sounds like they've escaped formal censure / consequences from APS, PSC or the courts. That makes me sad. It means that for those who left APS since 2009 who apply for another job, the circumstances of their leaving APS will be suspect. That's unfair to the innocent (if any) and not enough for the unrepentant guilty. On the other hand, we've seen a couple of high-profile "escapees" whose new employers didn't actually make the connection until after they had actually started their new jobs. School system personnel offices must not look very hard at applicants' job histories.
• 9 waited until after they'd actually received a charge letter to resign rather than face a hearing. I guess they dodged the bullet, too. (Or is that a tasteless metaphor to use for schoolteachers these days?)
• 1 "attended a hearing, but lost."
• 1 "is scheduled for a hearing Friday."
• 5 more have just been sent charge letters and face a fight-or-flight decision deadline.
• "About 94" to go.

I'm not feeling very optimistic.

C'mon, "educators." If you don't start naming names, the administrators who are really responsible for this mess are going to walk.

LATER: Three more charge letters have been sent.

That brings to 19 the number of educators the district has taken steps to terminate after months of delay and millions spent in payroll and legal expenses. APS is paying about $1 million a month to some 110 educators accused of cheating who remain on leave, but the system is trying to resolve the cases by the end of the school year.

I'm updating this scorecard. I'm thinking that these 19 are some of the "more than 80" confessors, who in turn comprised part of the "about 110" remaining when we subtract the 70 who ran the fastest from the 180 who were originally accused. This would be so much easier if they'd use hard numbers instead of "more than 80" and "about 180." Is "some 110" an exact number, I wonder, or another weasel guess?

I tell you, I can't wait until they get around to those SRT directors, who have neither confessed nor resigned.

You can't say "Halloween" in school

City avoids placing taboo topics (that kids may actually know about) on public school exams - NYPOST.com
In a bizarre case of political correctness run wild, educrats have banned references to "dinosaurs," "birthdays," "Halloween" and dozens of other topics on city-issued tests.
That’s because they fear such topics "could evoke unpleasant emotions in the students."
Dinosaurs, for example, call to mind evolution, which might upset fundamentalists; birthdays aren’t celebrated by Jehovah’s Witnesses; and Halloween suggests paganism.
Even "dancing" is taboo, because some sects object. But the city did make an exception for ballet.
The forbidden topics were recently spelled out in a request for proposals provided to companies competing to revamp city English, math, science and social-studies tests given several times a year to measure student progress.
...Homes with swimming pools and computers are also unmentionables here — because of economic sensitivities — while computers in the school or in libraries are acceptable.

This is a bit off my self-defined mission, but some things are just too stupid to ignore. Yeah, I know, I'm not supposed to use the word "stupid."

I can't think of any reason that a child should never have heard of dinosaurs because his parents think the earth is only 4,000 years old. Now, I can hear you saying, "It's absurd to think that any child will never hear of dinosaurs merely because they aren't mentioned on a test at school." Why, yes, it is. Then why bother hiding them? Schools, and tests, routinely mention things that the student hasn't personally encountered, or at least hasn't encountered yet. Isn't that sort-of the point of school? To teach 'em something new?

What kind of science are you teaching that you never have occasion to mention dinosaurs?

At what point in a child's development is it acceptable for them to encounter things and ideas that are not put there (or are withheld from them) specifically for their convenience?

If they aren't prepared to cope with things as benign as birthdays and home computers, what the hell will happen to them when (as they inevitably must) they hear about slavery, the holocaust and sex?

If you're determined to avoid things that "evoke unpleasant emotions in the students," then you'd better stop giving tests.

Which cheating teachers?

Senate approves bill to take bonuses away from cheating teachers | ajc.com
Georgia educators who cheat would have to return any bonuses or incentive pay they earned through falsified standardized test scores under a bill passed unanimously Monday by the state Senate.
...Educators from some of the APS schools implicated in the state investigation received about $500,000 in bonuses through the district's payout program, according to records obtained from APS.
The sponsor of HB 692, Rep. Billy Mitchell, D-Stone Mountain, had at the time investigators released their report promised to fight for a law to make cheating educators give the money back. He said the law does not affect employees' due process rights.

I looked it up. Here's what the law does say:

A teacher or other certificated professional personnel's salary increase or bonus that is based in whole or in part on an evaluation which included student assessment results, standardized test scores, or standardized test answers that were falsified by such teacher or professional or known or caused by such teacher or professional to have been falsified shall be automatically forfeited.

What an awful, tortured sentence.

My concern is this: Who has to say that a given teacher cheated in order to trigger the provisions of this bill? The Bowers/Wilson report names 180 teachers. Is the fact that they were named enough? Are they all liable? Is it enough to prove that the results were changed, even if you don't bother to prove which teachers actually changed them? The phrase we see repeatedly throughout the Bowers/Wilson report is that they "knew or should have known". Is that good enough?

If not, where exactly do you draw the line? What about the teachers who resigned rather than face termination? Does that count as an admission of guilt, or is it a get-out-of-jail-free card?

Okay, what about the teachers who didn't resign? How about the ones whom the APS tribunal recommended to be fired? (That's three so far, I believe.) Is that justification enough? They haven't faced the PSC, the Professional Standards Commission, to defend their teacher certifications. What if the PSC doesn't act to censure them? And then they're looking at criminal charges, and there's no guarantee they'll be found guilty in a court of law. Will they still have to give back the money?

And then there are the other 80-100 educators-on-leave who have been collecting their salaries all this time. Since the bill specifically says bonuses, not salaries, I guess they get to keep that no matter what.

Those are the kind of big whopping loopholes that the bill has to address, and it doesn't.

Besides, isn't there already a law that deals with people who profit from fraud? Well, I guess they have to actually be convicted of fraud for that to be relevant. I suppose it could make a certain amount of sense for the code to actually say that it's not OK for teachers to lie, but surely that's already there, somewhere. Isn't it?

HB 692 looks more like a publicity stunt than meaningful legislation. That's not the side of this issue I want to be on. I want the guilty parties -- the real guilty parties, the ones who forced dozens of teachers to choose between committing fraud or losing their jobs -- to pay for what they've done. I don't want the General Assembly to waste time passing loosely-defined, unenforceable laws.

And I especially don't want them closing the barn door after the horses are gone. A good defense attorney, or even a mediocre one, will argue that crooked teachers can't be subjected to the provisions of a law that wasn't in place at the time their actions occurred. Alleged actions, I mean. I'd hate for this bill to be used to justify crooked teachers keeping the money because the law wasn't in place when they stole it.

“Do you think you could get into something undetected?”

Atlanta fires first teacher in cheating scandal | ajc.com
“We were told failure was not an option,” [Damany] Lewis said. “Teaching and learning was the primary focus of the teachers. Results were the primary focus of this district and our administration.”

In the accompanying video, Lewis points out that he and his fellow teachers "had nothing to do with the aura of fear and intimidation." That's probably true. If all of the teachers like him who yielded to pressure from above to cheat had stood their ground and said no -- all of them, publicly -- then the true sources of that pressure might have been dealt with years before.

But of course...

Some time back, I expressed curiosity as to why principals and senior administrators could credibly threaten to fire unwilling teachers if it's so damn much trouble to fire teachers. The answer is simpler than I thought it would be. Administrators can create fabricated personnel records and negative  performance reviews just as easily -- probably easier -- than they could create false CRCT test forms. APS is presently handicapped by having to act openly and honestly. If the current administration were as crooked as the previous, the firing process would go a lot more smoothly.

But then, if the current administration were as crooked as the previous, they wouldn't be trying to fire 180 people in the first place.

Occupy Middle School

APS rezoning: Coan plan no longer part of the plan | Creative Loafing Atlanta
Last weekend, I attended a rally to save Coan Middle School in Edgewood. At least I'm pretty sure that's what it was. The messaging, as PR people like to say, was a little scattershot.

This morning, I saw a news article. At least I'm pretty sure that's what it was intended to be. The research, as we journalism school graduates like to say, was a little sucky.

The little blue box next to the headline said "News", though, so I suppose I have to take their word for it. Didn't interview anybody, didn't identify any organizers, didn't get any names. There was a photo of parents (one presumes) and a kid, all holding placards which appear to have been written by the same hand. The photo is credited, with no apparent irony, to "Eric Celeste's iPhone". Perhaps Eric didn't actually go, himself. That would explain why he wasn't sure what was going on.

You know, if you had walked up to a group of people obviously trying to attract press attention and said "I'm from Creative Loafing [which some people consider to be a news organization], who's in charge here?" you would probably have gotten a nice quotable statement or two. Or at least a name.

Every time a speaker [sigh] addressed the 200-or-so parents and kids in front of the school, he or she would begin a chant as soon as a decent phrase escaped the lips. These included, but were not limited to, the following: "Invest in Coan," "Davis listen," "keep Coan open," "strong schools, strong community," "it's not fair," "Say no to Davis," "our neighborhood, our school," "this is our school," and "invest in the future."

So, adults claiming to be concerned with education have decided that the Occupation is the civic activism model they want to adopt, seeing as how it has worked so well everywhere it has been tried. Any argument longer than four words is Too Hard. I weep for public intercourse in the 21st century.

So, I get that you, clever reporter, understand that APS no longer plans to use the Coan Middle School building as a "6th grade academy" extension of Inman Middle School. And I get, because you linked back to your own previous "reporting", that APS still intends to close Coan Middle School. That's a given: It's running at less than half capacity. Do somebody a favor and figure out why it's running at half capacity.

Or can't your iPhone take that picture without you?

What about the ringleaders?

APS teacher opts to quit rather than be fired | ajc.com

You know, I don't have the heart to haunt every teacher who found herself helpless in the grip of APS "culture of fear and intimidation". I'm honestly not interested in watching their humiliation. Yes, they are guilty of fraud, but they were under duress. Yes, they should pay a price, but they should not see their careers and lives wrecked.

I have no sympathy for the architects of this sad situation, and I have even less now that I know that as we watch individual teachers undergo their Public Walks of Shame, nothing much is happening to many of those who were the source of brutal pressure to cheat or be fired.

Robin Hall, a former principal and area superintendent, works for the Washington-based Council of the Great City Schools as its director of language arts and literacy. Hall joined the organization on Oct. 6 and soon after retired from the school district. 

Former area superintendents Sharon Davis-Williams, Michael Pitts and Tamara ["tell the GBI to go to hell"] Cotman are still on the payroll. They earn six-figure salaries, and according to their attorney, George Lawson, each was issued an intent-to-fire letter months ago, but no hearing has been scheduled. They deny any wrongdoing. 

Former Deputy Superintendent Kathy Augustine left APS and was fired in August as superintendent of a suburban Dallas district because of her alleged involvement in the case. 

Millicent Few, former chief of human resources, was ousted in February from a consulting job in Connecticut after district leaders there learned that she's accused of trying to cover up cheating. Few resigned from APS in July.

You missed one, AJC. Where is ex-superintendent Beverly Hall today? She retired before the lid blew off the CRCT fraud, with "more than $580,000 in bonuses above her annual pay in the 12 years she worked for the district" [ajc]. She's been keeping a low profile since.

At last, movement!

It has been a busy week for APS.

APS firing process could begin next week | ajc.com
Educators accused of cheating in Atlanta Public Schools could be notified as soon as next week of the district's plans to fire them, Superintendent Erroll Davis said Friday.

About damned time.

A state investigation released in July accused 180 Atlanta educators of cheating; about 120 remain on the payroll at a cost of $600,000 a month to the city school district.
The report said cheating took place in 44 schools. More than 80 educators confessed. All of those named in the report were placed on paid administrative leave by the district, although many have chosen to resign or retire as months have passed with almost no action by APS.

Well, why hurry? APS seemed content to continue to pay them while they dithered.

Davis said the district is now ready to move forward because attorneys have access to the evidence needed to build a case against the accused. The Fulton County District Attorney's Office, which is conducting a criminal investigation, has agreed to let the district view evidence.

About damned time.

The district is under pressure to resolve the cases before May 15, the deadline for deciding whether to renew teaching contracts.

You mean you could just do nothing and let the accused educators go? Well, great! What's the problem?

Nonrenewal is tantamount to firing.

Huh? Not in any other industry, it's not.

Firing teachers is an expensive and complicated process that could take months to resolve. Teachers with three or more years of employment can only be fired for eight allowable reasons. The teacher can request a tribunal hearing to decide whether the charges are warranted. The decision can be appealed several times, up to the state Supreme Court.

What a sweetheart deal the educators have. (See previous post, specifically "90 educators have what is commonly termed tenure".)

But wait. If it's so damned difficult to fire a teacher with cause, and "failure to renew contract" is the same thing as "fire", then why were teachers so terrified under the previous regime that the SRT Directors (deputy superintendents), or their lackey principals*, would passively fire them by simply not renewing their contracts? Doesn't tenure (or "what is commonly termed tenure", which makes it sound like this isn't what would be called "tenure" in any other context) protect you from that, too?

Supporters of these protections say teachers need a shield against unwarranted accusations.

"Supporters" = teacher unions, I get that. But if these protections work so darned well against a new broom trying to sweep clean, why weren't these teachers equally well protected from the corruption of the previous administration?

There's an awful lot of story here that hasn't been explained yet.

* "Lackey principals" = principals who threaten to slash a test administrator's tires if they don't falsify CRCT scores. I don't think "lackey" is too strong a word. I'm told that isn't all of them, and I suppose that's probably true, but how can we know?