#publich schools

6:30 am

If you were a public school principal and had been told to achieve very high standardized test scores for your students, would you request that some teachers change student answers to the correct answer? If a teacher, what would you do if so instructed and threatened with dismissal if you refused?

The trial promises to be both bizarre and tragic, with elementary teachers facing the possibility of prison, a major metropolitan school district named as a racketeering “enterprise” and the likelihood that students’ stray pencil marks on bubble-lined testing sheets will be scrutinized like hanging chads.

Jury selection will begin here Monday for 12 former Atlanta Public Schools employees accused of conspiring to alter and boost students’ standardized test scores. The courtroom drama that follows could serve as the climax of a cheating scandal that has reverberated through this city for five years, scorching careers and reputations, reconfiguring the school district’s leadership and raising questions nationally about the role that standardized test results should play in driving education reform.

The pain has been felt particularly keenly among African-Americans, who make up 54 percent of Atlanta’s population. It is largely black educators who have been accused, and largely black students who have been harmed by bogus evaluations of their educational progress.

Even as some Atlantans dreaded the start of the high-profile criminal trial, there was also hope that it may represent the beginning of the end.

“There’s no question that this has not been our finest hour,” said the Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the historic African-American pulpit where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. “It’s a dark chapter, but it’s just that. It’s a chapter.”

A state investigation in 2011 found that 178 principals and teachers in the city school district cheated. They are suspected of changing standardized test scores to make it seem as though their students were meeting ambitious benchmarks for success. Educators in some cases were said to have convened erasure parties to change students’ answers, while the district’s top leaders created a “culture of fear,” investigators said, in which principals were expected to meet unrealistic testing goals or face public humiliation or reassignment.

Since then, dozens of implicated school district employees have either been fired or have resigned or retired from the district. Twenty-one educators have also pleaded guilty to crimes like obstruction and false statements, receiving probation in exchange for a promise to cooperate. They could now serve as witnesses against those who have declared their innocence and who are set to stand trial.

Conspicuously absent, however, will be Beverly L. Hall, the former superintendent whom prosecutors described as the leader of the conspiracy in March 2013, when they announced that a grand jury had returned indictments against her and 34 others.

Dr. Hall is suffering from breast cancer, and Judge Jerry Baxter of Fulton County Superior Court has postponed her trial indefinitely. Her lawyers have argued that Dr. Hall’s attendance at a trial could put her life at risk.

In 2009, Dr. Hall was named the national superintendent of the year. But a series of articles in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had begun raising questions about big jumps in student test scores.

The indictment that came two years later charged Dr. Hall and the others with violation of the state’s Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, which carries a sentence of five to 20 years in prison. Each defendant was also charged with at least one less-serious crime. Dr. Hall, who retired in June 2011, has emphatically proclaimed her innocence.

Some people have rallied behind her. At a court hearing in April, Andrew Young, the former mayor of Atlanta and United Nations ambassador, rose from the audience and asked Judge Baxter to be “merciful” and drop the case against Dr. Hall.

“Let God judge her,” Mr. Young said.

The court will have to grapple with logistical issues as well as moral ones. With a dozen defendants, Judge Baxter at one point suggested moving the trial, which could last six months, to a grocery store. (In fact, it will be held in a downtown courtroom, with an overflow room for observers.)

Though RICO statutes, in the public imagination, are often associated with mobsters, Diane Marie Amann, a law professor at the University of Georgia, said that creative prosecutors have learned to apply RICO to a broad range of organizations suspected of being corrupt.

Ms. Amann said that the use of a RICO statute could benefit the prosecution in the Atlanta case, with the presence of so many defendants in court potentially giving jurors “a visual sense of conspiracy or some kind of criminality.”

It might also make it harder for defense lawyers to isolate the behavior of their clients and distinguish them from the pack, she said.

That, indeed, is a major concern for Gerald Griggs, the lawyer representing Angela Williamson. Ms. Williamson, 48, is a former teacher at Dobbs Elementary School who is facing up to 35 years in prison, suspected of coaching students to answer test questions correctly, then making false statements to investigators.

Ms. Williamson was cleared by a school district tribunal in June 2012. If she is found guilty at trial, Mr. Griggs said, he planned to appeal her case in part on the argument that she should not have been tried along with the other defendants, all former employees: three top administrators, two testing coordinators, one principal, one assistant principal and four other teachers.

“How can you get a fair trial when you’re lumped together with everyone?” Mr. Griggs said.

After Ms. Hall’s retirement, Erroll B. Davis Jr., a former head of a utility company and chancellor of the University System of Georgia, agreed to run the 50,000-student school district on an interim basis. The district has enacted rules subjecting teachers to a continuing ethics certification regimen, and unusual deviations from expected test performance now set off triggers for an automatic audit.

The Atlanta scandal is one of a number that have surfaced around the country in recent years, as standardized testing has become more central to the effort of identifying weaknesses in public schools and in distributing merit pay to teachers.

In Atlanta, teachers in schools with improved scores were offered bonuses, typically of a few hundred dollars, but the state investigation’s authors concluded that the money offered “little incentive” to cheat. More likely, they wrote, it was the pressure to improve scores and the threat that they could be replaced, fired or shamed if they did not. Dr. Hall, while superintendent, earned more than $500,000 in performance bonuses, but her lawyer, Richard H. Deane, has argued that much of the bonus money was tied to meeting objectives that had nothing to do with test results.

Erica Turner, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said that the typical response to such scandals has been to remove the “bad apples,” but that they have not prompted enough discussion about rethinking what she called “a system of accountability that’s based on standardized test scores, and a theory of motivation of teachers that they will respond, or that they only respond to incentives and punishments.”