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DeKalb schools chief e-mails memo supporting fallen administrators
Lewis: Educators are ‘good people who made grave mistake’

by Jonathan Cribbs
jonathan@dekalbchamp.com

DeKalb County schools suprtintendent Crawford Lewis sent an e-mail to district employees June 24 saying he was surprised the two elementary school administrators implicated in a test-tampering scandal have been charged criminally. He also asked district employees to support the fallen educators.

“[Former Principal] James Berry and [former Assistant Principal] Doretha Alexander are good people who made a grave mistake,” Lewis wrote about the Atherton Elementary School administrators. “They both acknowledged their involvement and accepted their consequences.”

The e-mail also singled out two parties: the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which published a Sunday report regarding the investigation on June 21.

“I was both concerned and surprised that this investigation was elevated to the front page of Sunday’s AJC newspaper and warranted a probe by the district attorney’s office,” he wrote.
Berry resigned last month, and he and Alexander were also arrested and charged with falsifying state documents, a charge that could get them between two and 10 years in jail.

The school officials were part of a larger state investigation into four Atlanta-area schools suspected of changing answers on the state CRCT test to meet federal school improvement standards.

The probe, performed by the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, looked at the number of times a wrong answer on a math test scorecard was erased and replaced with the correct answer. The CRCT test is given to students in grades one through eight statewide and designed to measure how well students at each grade level have learned the state curriculum.

The governor’s office looked at a summer retest of the exam’s math section in 2008–the first year schools were allowed to use their retest scores to determine whether they would make Adequate Yearly Progress, a federal designation under the No Child Left Behind Act.

Of the four schools named, Atherton Elementary’s tampering appeared to be the most severe. The state looked at 32 students’ tests and determined someone changed wrong answers on a student’s test to the right one an average of 15.19 times, according to the state report. Atlanta’s Deerwood Academy had a 3.44 average number of changes.

No teachers or students were involved in test tampering, deputy superintendent Robert Moseley said.