A fifth-grade student had the skills of a kindergartner, a former elementary school teacher testified Tuesday in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating trial.
Three former Dobbs Elementary School teachers took the stand in Day 40 of the trial and said they’d had strong suspicions of cheating on the standardized test given to fourth-graders.
Test results for the 2008-2009 school year showed successful, prepared students, all three testified. But when those children reached the fifth grade, they did not have the skills needed. Rather, they performed like second-graders or even, in one case, like a child in kindergarten.
The ex-teachers testified in Fulton County Superior Court that they had told Dobbs’s then-principal Dana Evans of their fears but she did nothing to investigate their concerns.
Evans is one of 12 defendants who stand accused of taking part in an APS conspiracy to inflate test scores.
Former Dobbs teacher Malcolm Brooks, now an assistant principal in Charlotte, N.C., said he didn’t think fourth-graders’ scores on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test were “an accurate reflection of their ability levels.”
Former teacher Sidnye Fells gave the same testimony but defense attorneys attacked her credibility and her motives.
And Arlette Crump, who will continue testifying Wednesday, described surprise that students who seemed ill-prepared for the fifth grade had scored so highly on standardized tests in the fourth grade. Crump said one boy was performing at the level of a kindergartner, and she asked Evans to remove him from her fifth-grade class.
“His letters were reversed. Penmanship was shaky. I was appalled that this child was passed on and sitting in my class, fifth grade,” Crump testified.
But Evans saw no problem, Crump said, and the principal also refused her requests to hold back other students.
“She said it looks bad and ‘it’s something that we’re not doing. It makes the school look bad,’” Crump said.
Earlier in the courtroom Tuesday, defense lawyers attacked Fells by raising the issue of medical leave she took just before she resigned. Defense attorney Robert Rubin noted the charges the school district raised just before Fells signed a settlement agreement that was part of her resignation.
The document accused her of insubordination and incompetency, but most of the charges had to do with events that preceded her medical leave. She had asked her doctors not to include her medical problem in the letters they wrote to the school, saying she was unable to work.
Fells insisted she was neither fired nor forced to quit. Just a few months after her resignation, Fells sued the school district in 2010, claiming harassment and a hostile workplace. She eventually dropped the suit.
“The suit was for wrongful termination but I was not terminated,” Fells testified.
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