Cover Story: What’s next for Atlanta Public Schools?

Chandra Harper-Gallashaw has a pretty good view of Windsor Street from her front patio. Dawn has just broken on the first day of April and the Pittsburgh community activist and mother of four daughters is sitting in her wicker chair, watching parents and bus drivers drop off children outside the white two-story school across the street.

That Atlanta Public Schools facility is now known as Sylvan Hills Middle School following a merger of two schools. Before summer 2013, the Windsor Street school had a different name, Walter Leonard Parks Middle School, ground zero for what’s been called the nation’s largest school cheating scandal. It’s also where Harper-Gallashaw’s daughters have learned math lessons, received homework assignments, made friends, and taken standardized tests.

Thirteen-year-old Chyler Harper, a seventh grader at Sylvan Hills Middle School, used to attend nearby Charles L. Gideons Elementary School, where according to state investigators teachers erased wrong answers before filling in bubbles with correct ones. The atmosphere of cheating has damaged her trust in her teachers. She now thinks twice about whether her work is actually good whenever she’s praised in the classroom.

“Teachers convinced me I was doing some good work,” says Harper before heading off to school. “It hurt me because they lied to me and could’ve just told me the truth so I didn’t feel guilty like I cheated.”

Harper, one of the many students impacted by rampant standardized test manipulation, has worked hard to move past the damage done by former educators. After years of investigation, almost three-dozen indictments, and seven months of courtroom deliberations, Fulton County jurors found 11 former APS educators guilty of racketeering and other charges on April 1. The sight of bailiffs placing teachers in handcuffs and transporting principals to prison offered an image that might provide some closure to a cheating scandal that rocked a once-reputable school system, cast a shadow on the city, and provided a textbook case of high-stakes testing gone wrong.

Yet the final results offer little recourse for many students stripped of a quality education in an attempt for national recognition. Four years after state investigators linked nearly 200 educators to test score inflation, APS officials have tried to look beyond the school system’s darkest moment in hopes of returning to the core mission of providing children with a quality public education. Officials have frequently discussed this goal amid calls for education reform and demands for justice for the students harmed during the seven-year ordeal. The results are mixed.

Last year a new superintendent and school board members began enacting system-wide reforms, overhauling a broken culture, and focusing on children first. About two out of every five APS students are dropouts; the city’s massive gap between rich and poor undermines most parts of the education process; and distrust still lingers among students and parents, and in the greater community. Though APS has a host of new solutions, the problems facing students today largely remain the same as ones that prompted teachers to cheat in the first place.

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Matt Westmoreland began teaching at the New Schools at Carver, a southeast Atlanta high school whose feeder schools included Gideons and Parks, in August 2010, the same month that the state launched its APS investigation.

He remembers one high-school senior, whom he refers to by the initial Q, and whom he helped on a reading assignment after school at Carver Early College, one of several tracks offered at NCS. Q didn’t have trouble comprehending the book Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol’s 1991 account of the disparities within the American education system. He just couldn’t read it.

“I read that book out loud to him,” says Westmoreland, who’s since left the classroom to serve on the city’s board of education. “If you want to talk about irony, it’s reading a book about the inequities of schools to a student who had made it to his last year in high school with significant reading struggles.”

Many educators, touting remarkable classroom turnarounds, glossed over such problems during the 2000s. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 pressured public school districts nationwide to boost academic performance or risk losing federal funding. Testing brought stakes that were not only high, but also in many cases unattainable. The education legislation, though leading to improvements in some of the nation’s 14,000 public school districts, created an environment ripe for cheating, especially in urban schools struggling with societal issues outside the classroom.

Former APS Superintendent Beverly Hall oversaw rapid test score increases that were happening at faster rates than in most other American cities. She earned national acclaim and local praise for the system’s turnaround. Under Hall, later charged for her alleged role as the cheating scandal architect, APS officials pushed educators to perform above federal standards and rewarded teachers who improved test scores. Faced with overwhelming demands, some educators replaced wrong test answers with right ones, read answers out loud to students, and pointed to correct answers during examinations, according to a subsequent state investigation. Whistle-blowing became discouraged through what investigators later described as a “culture of fear and conspiracy of silence” within the school system.

“It really was an organization more about telling a good story about a remarkable school system as opposed to doing the work to create a remarkable school system,” says current Atlanta Board of Education Chair Courtney English, who taught in and studied at APS schools during the 2000s.

In 2008, Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters discovered irregular patterns of test score improvements, eventually forcing former Gov. Sonny Perdue to call for a major investigation. Hall, who denied all wrongdoing, resigned from office in late 2010. In June 2011, state investigators found that 178 educators at 44 elementary and middle schools — more than 60 percent of APS schools at those grade levels — had engaged in systemic cheating. Fulton County District Attorney prosecutors eventually indicted 35 educators on dozens of charges, including racketeering. Twenty-one defendants struck plea deals and two educators, including Hall, died from cancer. Only one of the 12 former APS employees who stood trial walked free following the verdict.

Hall’s successor, Erroll Davis, quickly stabilized a shell-shocked school system. He sent letters to all 178 employees linked to suspicious test score inflation, asking them to resign or face termination. Video cameras were installed to monitor test storage rooms that only badge-holding employees could access. Authorized officials, typically a school’s principal or senior testing coordinator, now follow strict protocols to distribute tests, collect completed exams, and prevent test score manipulation. Ethics training went from being an afterthought to an annual employee requirement. APS created an anonymous hotline to report unethical behavior.

Now APS educators, whose success or failure once hinged on test score improvements, have a mandate focused on adhering to the rules. Incentive and bonus programs were suspended to discourage cheating. Any major test score improvements, once an unquestioned source of celebration, undergo a mandatory audit to rule out foul play. Principals, testing coordinators, and teachers can now be fired or have their licenses revoked for breaching testing procedures. And educators soon won’t be able to erase answers, as officials want to make testing fully electronic in the coming years.

“Atlanta is in a much better position today,” says Greg Cizek, a University of North Carolina education professor who helped APS investigators analyze test scores and testified during the trial. “Now they realize there’s a temptation to cheat. They’ve done things to prevent people from cheating.”

Atlanta’s cheating hasn’t led to widespread education reforms, despite major calls for a fix to nationwide testing. George Engelhard, professor of educational measurement and policy at the University of Georgia, says the cheating saga prompted some school officials nationwide to revisit their testing policies and better train teachers administering the tests. But the positive and limited impact has been offset by a growing number of tests — evident in the findings of a recent study showing that students on average take 113 standardized tests before graduating high school.

FairTest Public Education Director Bob Schaeffer, whose nonprofit advocates against modern testing measures, says cheating has been documented in 40 different states since 2009, subsequently leading to a growing grassroots movement to opt out of testing. Citing concerns over the nation’s testing, President Barack Obama’s administration has offered No Child Left Behind waivers to states, steering them toward Common Core standards and other policies he supports, through the 2018-2019 school year. Congress is now discussing legislative changes to the way schools are funded through the controversial federal law.

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The APS verdict brought the school system back into the national headlines and reopened some wounds for teachers, parents, and students. A few hours after the trial ended, all nine Atlanta Board of Education officials issued a joint statement declaring the end of a “sad and tragic chapter” for the school system. Fulton District Attorney Paul Howard, criticized by some for devoting too much energy to prosecuting teachers instead of hardened criminals, said he hoped the outcome would force school officials to reexamine how children are taught in the classroom. Multiple lawyers for the 11 convicted ex-educators, each facing decades of prison time, have stated that appeals are likely, which would extend courtroom battles into the foreseeable future.

“Reforms began almost three years ago and additional ones have been created under this new leadership to make sure something like this never happens again,” said the Atlanta Board of Education in a statement on April 1. “Challenges remain, for sure, but we are making progress every day and there is great reason to be optimistic.”

Meria Carstarphen, who last year became APS’ first permanent superintendent since Hall, has emphasized letting go of the past in hopes of focusing on a future that lets children thrive in the classroom. Backed by a nine-person school board with six first-term officials, Carstarphen is tasked with figuring out how to improve the school system’s 59.1 percent high-school graduation rate and substandard Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT) scores — key academic performance indicators. APS lags well behind average on both those performance measures in a state that sits near the bottom of national education rankings. More than two-dozen APS schools could be eligible for Georgia’s proposed “Opportunity School District” plan, which would allow the state to commandeer direct control of those struggling classrooms and potentially shut down schools or convert them into charter schools.

Those disconcerting academic figures initially suggest that APS has largely failed at its mission. But the issue becomes far more complicated when Atlanta’s massive inequality is taken into account. For the second consecutive year, Atlanta has the nation’s widest gap between rich and poor of any major American city. Georgia State University researchers, whom Davis commissioned to study APS’ inequity during the 2012-2013 school year, found that nearly three quarters of students qualify for free or reduced lunches and about a quarter of students live in households below the poverty line. Four percent of APS students — about 2,000 children — are identified as homeless, the report said.

“APS is a tale of two systems,” English says. “Atlanta is a tale of two cities. What’s happening in our school system is a microcosm ... of what’s going on in our city.”

The part of town where students reside continues to determine the level of academic resources at their disposal. In Buckhead, North Atlanta High School, located in one of only two APS clusters with a majority white student population, two years ago opened a stunning $147 million campus, the most expensive project of its kind in Georgia. More than 40 percent of its students come from households with a total income of $100,000 or higher, according to the GSU report. In South Atlanta, about half of students in the NCS cluster, many of whom were directly impacted by the cheating scandal, come from households making $25,000 or less per year. Single parents raise many of those students in a cluster with nearly twice as much vacant housing as the North Atlanta cluster.

Atlanta’s widespread socioeconomic disparities exacerbate the school system’s challenges outside the classroom. English, who used to teach at B.E.S.T. Academy, remembers how one of his most gifted students stopped paying attention to a social studies lesson on Aztec culture and began acting out. “Aztec culture is not going to help me feed my little sister tonight,” the student told English. Inside the classroom, Harper-Gallashaw says her daughters haven’t always had access to textbooks, computers, or other supplies. Even with books available, Westmoreland recalls numerous children, including Q, who couldn’t comprehend lessons for their grade levels.

Carstarphen, who’s slowly started to address some socioeconomic issues, hopes to expand pre-K educational options, develop a curriculum that broadens what children learn well beyond testing subjects, and empower APS employees. It will take several years, additional resources, and galvanized community support to hire higher quality teachers, make a bloated central office operate more efficiently, and overhaul a corrosive culture that failed to prioritize children’s needs.

To make all of that happen, English says APS must develop a track record of delivering on its promises and remaining transparent about its decisions to win back support.

“We can talk policy all day,” English says. “We can talk about pensions, early education, teacher retention — it’s all obviously important. But we’ve got a deficit of trust that exists and negatively impacts our ability to do this work.”

Paul Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, says that testing reforms are necessary but go only so far toward changing the status quo. What’s the biggest fix? Money. And not just more cash pumped into the overall budget, but steering more dollars away from the central office toward individual classrooms to provide students with adequate resources.

“If you got a district that doesn’t work very well, you can’t get keep beating the horse with testing,” Hill says. “There needs to be an investment, an effort to fix the schools, and make them better.”

During her first year of APS budget talks, Carstarphen has proposed reducing central office overhead by cutting 10 percent of those positions to steer cash back toward classrooms. The tentative plan calls for individual schools to have greater authority over their teachers, money spent on programs, and other choices addressing students’ specific needs.

“The district faces considerable challenges as we restore the organizational integrity of Atlanta Public Schools, employ best practices and position our school district structurally, strategically and financially for the future,” Carstarphen wrote in an official blog post on March 3.

Local consultant and education blogger Bob Stockwell recently wrote that the proposed budget, which could be passed at the school board’s next meeting on April 13, would increase spending in traditional classrooms by $9.7 million.

APS’ changes to its governance model could help officials better tailor curriculum and operations to each individual school. As part of a five-year strategic plan, APS has applied to become a charter system to provide schools with greater flexibility and independence, while still remaining under the board of education’s purview. It would also give community members, parents, and teachers a say in an individual school’s budget process and personnel decisions.

By relinquishing some power to parents and residents, APS isn’t simply asking community stakeholders to chime in on a ceremonial process, it’s hoping they’ll play a meaningful part in shaping the school system’s future. That larger governance model would be complemented by a new cluster system solidifying a formal feeder system determining which schools kids attend from the time they finger paint in kindergarten to when they crunch numbers in high-school calculus.

Both governance plans would not be implemented until at least the 2016-2017 school year. But the process behind the proposed changes has helped boost the community support that’s lacked for a long time. Paul Benson, a parent with two children attending Perkerson Elementary School, says he’s slowly seen some improvements in teacher quality and resources since his oldest son first enrolled in APS in 2013. Though confident in APS’ new direction, he knows it may be a while before his children see the full benefit.

“Change takes time,” he says.

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Students like Chandrema Harper can’t afford to wait. The 17-year-old sophomore at Carver School of the Arts, who previously attended Parks Middle School, fell behind in school partially because of the cheating scandal. She received some additional instruction outside the classroom — APS has offered some after-school lessons, Saturday tutoring, and summer courses — to get her back on track.

“They didn’t offer them much,” Harper-Gallashaw says. “They’re missing the big picture.”

Chandrema wants to join the U.S. Navy and someday travel the world. But her future hinges on receiving her high school diploma. According to Harper-Gallashaw, her daughter has already faced enormous personal struggles, in a neighborhood where drug dealing, prostitution, blight, and a litany of other socioeconomic ills largely go unchecked, on the path to graduation.

Chandrema, a student who once received A’s and B’s, is now struggling to complete high school. At Carver, she says she hasn’t felt fully supported in her academic setting.

Meanwhile, Harper-Gallashaw has seen officials declare a new day for the once-tarnished school system. But from her patio, she still sees the problems that hurt the neighborhood’s children a decade ago. She refers to the cheating scandal as the worst kind of “nightmare,” one that makes her question moving from Detroit to Atlanta in the ’90s. While some residents have moved past the fallout, her family is still impacted by the cheating scandal and the lack of response in the aftermath. Regardless of others’ expressions of optimism, Harper-Gallashaw remains skeptical about whether Chykoya Gallashaw, her 8-year-old daughter, will benefit from the promises of a new administration. Or whether Chykoya will experience more of the same.

This story has been updated to correct an error. The North Atlanta High School cluster has a majority white student population, not North Atlanta High School, according to the GSU report.