What's next for Atlanta Public Schools?
The school system’s historic cheating trial verdict has closed the books on one of the city’s darkest moments.
CASE CLOSED: On April 1, Fulton County Superior Court jurors found 11 former Atlanta Public Schools educators guilty of racketeering and other lesser charges such as theft by taking, influencing witnesses, false swearing, and false statements. Multiple lawyers have said their clients are planning to appeal the verdict.
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.What's next for Atlanta Public Schools? | Cover Story | Creative Loafing Atlanta: